New here? Hi, I’m Alex, Creator in Residence at Clay.
Join 8,800+ GTM operators from OpenAI, Reddit, a16z, Figma and many more. I share what I’m building inside Clay & how to use AI in GTM.
In this post:
HubSpot layoffs
How to use Grok Bot & Clay
How to build an encyclopedia of use cases
Self-learning hook generator
Tailored agendas for event attendees
Don’t forget to try this 👇
HubSpot laid off 7% of its workforce this week. 660 people in total.
CEO, Yamini Rangan, said it was “not driven by AI-related efficiencies” and “not simply a cost-cutting exercise.
Maybe not driven by AI efficiencies. But its still driven by AI.
What’s interesting is how they’re changing org operations to be more competitive in the AI era. There’s 3 reasons:
Organize around customer outcomes - instead of Hubs & features they will now organize product teams around outcomes.
Build a flatter organization with fewer layers - to make decisions faster with less management overhead.
Create agile teams with clear ownership - to reduce fragmented ownership to execute faster and with more clarify.
Flatter orgs are a necessity now.
A new Harvard Business School/INSEAD study of over 2,900 Y Combinator startups reveals something most AI coverage misses: the companies being built around AI aren’t just smaller—they're architected around a fundamentally different principle. Instead of using AI to make existing workflows faster, they embed AI directly into their products, moving knowledge work that used to require internal teams into what customers interact with directly. The result: organizations that operate with 25% fewer people, flatter hierarchies, and comparable valuations to non-AI peers—because the productive work happens in the product, not in the organization. - Forbes: AI-Native Firms Are Flatter, Leaner, And More Valuable: Threat Or Opportunity?
I wonder if these leaner employee ratios stay the same as these companies scale. Or, do they get pulled back to the mean?
To those that were laid off - I feel ya. It’s happened to me and it sucks. If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know.
Grok Bot for Clay (and content engines)
I used build Clay Tables manually by clicking around the UI.
Now its crazy to look back at the Table-era when we have Clay CLI. What an inefficient way to launch a new GTM play compared to now. The future is Workflows and you should be building with them, not on Tables.
The best part: have Grok Bot build your workflows with natural language.
Set up the Clay plugin by following the steps in https://github.com/clay-run/agent-plugins
Grok Bot builds the workflows; Clay supplies the data and infrastructure to run them.
Encyclopedia of your use cases
Grok Bot is hunting new use cases as you read this. It runs every week to hunt and add new ones. There’s over 700 in the Notion database now. It pulls from:
Slack
Notion
YouTube
X
LinkedIn
And other places around the web (ex. list of newsletters I subscribe to)
Follow the newsletter on X - I’ll be dropping 1 per day.
They’re tagged by persona, GTM motion, complexity to setup, credit usage, and provides links to the source with summaries.
Every marketer should do this. Then let your team query the data via Grok Bot.
Use case → building steps
My next Bot turns these into reusable pieces of content. For example, I shared how we provide Sculpt (Clay’s conference) attendees with suggested agendas that are tailored to their objectives, persona, and other context we have on them.
and gives me the steps on how to build it to share with you:
Start from who’s actually attending. The ticket list tied to account and owner.
Pull the signals you already own: product usage, call snippets, public posts that show what they care about right now. We have all of this saved in Audiences. (You can have 600 fields to store a wide range of customer data collected over time). Then you can query it.
Setup a Clay Agent that has the full conference agenda. For each person, have it draft a short agenda: which talks and roundtables fit their motion, not the whole conference.
Run a cross-account pass: who else attending shares a similar problem space, and should they meet?
Send the Data from Clay to a content management system to generate the webpages.
Put it behind a private link the owner can edit, redraft, and publish.
Notify the account owner so they can send it to the customer.
Ship it before the event
What to watch for
Wrong LinkedIn identity or a board title instead of the day job will poison the draft — let owners overwrite before publish. Same-domain companies can get conflated; keep plans per account. Don’t invent peer intros that the signals don’t support.
Steal this
Don’t send the conference PDF. Send a private plan: what to attend, who to meet, and why from signals you already have.
Hook generator (gets smarter & coaches me)
The Bot generates hooks based on psychology, emotional triggers, and a growing list of hooks from performant posts.
Stats for the LinkedIn posts are brought in via Ordinal. We use Ordinal for social posting and it has an MCP to connect to Grok Bot.
Grok Bot generates hooks
I use a hook and post
Grok Bot pulls how the posts did via Ordinal
Analysis is saved to Grok Bot Memory
Memory and examples are used for the next set hooks
Then get feedback & generate charts.
Example Grok Bot feedback:
Example Grok Bot report:
Newsletter aggregator
You can now get a Grok Bot email address or give it one via AgentMail. (Agents will need everything humans do to interact with the real world: email, credit cards, phone numbers, ID, etc.). I’m pissed I don’t have access to the Grok Bot email yet. But this is how you do it:
Use either one to subscribe to newsletters. (Grok Bot had about a 50% success rate signing up for them. Sometimes it gets caught in anti-bot traps.)
Grok Bot now has access to the incoming newsletters. Have it generate a weekly ‘to hits” or “top ideas for X” briefing.
Viral post database
The other killer update is Grok Bot’s native integration to X to search, read, and monitor. Have it search for posts that meet a certain criteria, have it pull those posts, analyze them, generalize the hook & why it matters, and the upload it to Notion or Google Sheets. I’m dropping the full prompt for this on the AI Run Club newsletter.
Hungry for more Grok Bot GTM use cases?
Follow me and check out this post:
Yes, I just started on X. No, I'm not proud I’m just at 150 followers. BUT it is growing.
Skill of the week
Grab the Score Accounts with Jev Skill on the Clay Marketplace.
Redline Growth is of Clay’s top partners. Shy Rahnama (follow him on LinkedIn) is also building some cool ways of keeping humans in the loop. More on that to come…
