Why I left sales at 40 to be a Creator in Residence

How much GTM Engineers get paid, Why Creator-Led GTM is the future, and how to build a personal AI in minutes.

Alex Lindahl | GTM Engineering

Aug 14, 2026

Finally, I retired from software sales after 16+ years.

I’m 40 years old and pivoting to be a full time creator.

There were only a couple GTM Engineers when I joined Clay almost 2.5 years ago.

And less than 30 employees at the company.

Luckily, the role caught on and there’s close to 1,000 GTM Engineer job openings. The market agrees GTM Engineering is the new way to Go-To-Market.

I believe a similar story will emerge with my new role. It’s a bet similar to the one I took when I dropped the Account Executive title for a made up title no one had heard before or understood.

There’s only 28 people (that I can find) who have the exact title today.

Let me reintroduce myself as a Creator in Residence at Clay.

Most creator roles focus on managing external creators. This role is all in-house and I’ll be working alongside Bhaumik Patel, our other Creator in Residence.

Bhaumik helped launch the first code academy, was the 1st employee at Maven, and has worked with who’s who in the creator space including Lenny’s Newsletter to build courses. Given him a follow. He’s starting to release content and has been cooking!

Follow Bhaumik Patel on LinkedIn

A few reasons I’m excited about being a Creator in Residence:

Jake Block, Head of Studio at Clay, built HubSpot Media and we’re gonna make Clay Media even bigger
I plan to share a ton of what I’m learning on this journey
Creator-led is the future of GTM
My hypothesis is many hot companies will adopt this role
There might be more GTM Engineering use cases on the marketing side vs. sales

On a more personal level, I hope to be a role model for my kids to have the confidence to try new paths, build an unconventional career, and make changes along the way to find the things that give them energy.

P.s. thank you to my wonderful wife, Tori, who has not only been supportive, but has provided encouragement to make the change!

The future of GTM is Creator-led

The creator economy could approach half-a-trillion dollars by 2027
- Goldman Sachs

Buyers no longer trust the channels vendors control. They trust the people they follow. 75% of B2B marketers have already shifted budget toward creators and thought leaders to cut through AI-generated noise [Edelman-LinkedIn 2025 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report], and 83% now call their influencer programs effective [Sprout Social, cited via Contentgrip].

Creators are not cheaper than ads. That’s because the provide something much more valuable: a credible voice. Creator content is more raw, unfiltered, and leans more towards sharing personal views instead of corporate polish (that we all know is designed to sell you something). Personality and views into those creators’ lives also help to make that person and content more relatable.

Creator voices can do more to convince a stranger than an ad could ever do.

This is why distribution through trusted individuals now outperforms distribution through owned brand channels.

The creator-led operating model is not new, it’s just gaining more traction within GTM.

The category winners over the next few years won’t be the ones with the largest ad budgets. It’ll be those who work with networks of creators who their market trust. These networks can be internal and external. Your exec team is one network, and yes, you can activate them as creatives, too.

The executive LinkedIn posting program crushed in the 1st quarter and generated:

6M impressions in 3 months on LinkedIn
80,000+ new LinkedIn followers

What am I focused on this quarter?

What will I be doing as a Creator in Residence this quarter?

2 assigned missions:

Launch GTM Engineering benchmark reports, but do it in a way that drives activation (not only the email capture)
Activate Reddit as a more meaningful acquisition channel

+ continuing to build the compounding flywheel:

Launch and grow my YouTube channel on GTM Engineering & AI, examples:
1. Rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer
2. How to build a Personal AI (2nd Brain)
Continue growing The GTM Engineering Newsletter (what you’re reading)
Continue growing a LinkedIn Audience where I post 3-5x/week.
Grow & engage with the Reddit sub r/gtmengineering
Create a flywheel of all content to repurpose on all channels

1. Launching GTM Engineering Benchmarks

To give you a teaser, these a couple examples of what’s cooking:

Speed to lead (we tested close to 7,000 B2B forms with agents)
GTM Engineer compensation report
CRM decay index
GTM tech stack of the fastest growing companies

Example of the speed to lead analysis:

Clay will be used to source data, analyze it, and serve as another way to showcase new capabilities such as Clay CLI, MCP, and Workflows. Think: ‘behind the build’ and I’ll share everything with you. Some you’ll be able to copy as templates.

These will also incorporate creative activation methods:

Input company name → generate signals report → generate agent prompt → flow into product to activate agent based on custom report findings.

2. Activate Reddit & grow the community

The first objective here is to do a better job modding and providing some community guidelines to reduce slop.

The second objective is drive more value for the community. This will be in the form of weekly or bi-weekly AMAs with GTM operators, leaders, and founders.

The community has been (as AI would say) quietly growing into one of the key places to hang out on the web for GTM Engineering content. Check out where we are today below.

r/gtmengineering

Sneak peek: GTM Engineer Compensation Report

I’ve been analyzing 30,000+ open job roles for various GTM positions.

Customers frequently ask:

When should I hire a GTM Engineer?
What should I pay them?
What should I look for?

I started to dive into #1 and when companies start to hire a GTM Engineer. Hundreds of customer conversations led me to believe that companies are hiring GTMEs as early as pre-seed.

Here’s 3 insights as a preview of what’s coming:

Companies of all sizes & stages are hiring GTM Engineers

There’s a fairly equal spread of open GTM Engineering roles at all company levels. I’d be confident to conclude the earlier the better since GTM systems compound over time. The one question I’d still have is whether the pre-seed/seed and Series A companies have any revenue. Should companies hire pre-revenue or post-revenue. My thinking is that it doesn’t matter and if you hire a generalist, then that GTME can assist with a wide range of projects.