Suspicious of Shortcuts

At Clique, most of our potential customers were in SF and we were in NYC. Traditional marketing felt too slow. So I wrote a scraper for Luma, pulled data on SF events, enriched it with company information, and built automated outreach to organizers and attendees.

Two days of work. More qualified leads than three months of proper marketing. And I didn't trust it. I kept wanting to layer traditional marketing back on top. Not because it would improve results. Because something that simple producing that much felt wrong.

I think most people have a sense of how much effort is supposed to produce how much value. You see enough examples of “three months of work → X leads” and you build a feel for the ratio. When something breaks that ratio by 10x, the instinct isn't excitement. It's suspicion. I kept looking for reasons why the scraper was a fluke instead of just building more scrapers.

I was also treating engineering and go-to-market as separate jobs. Build the product, then figure out how to sell it. Most technical founders think this way and it falls apart the second you actually question it. The scraper worked because it was just engineering pointed at customer acquisition. APIs, data pipelines, automation. The wall between the two was one I made up.

Clay coined the term GTM engineering back in 2023. Ramp and Rippling were doing it before it had a name. I wasn't discovering anything. I was catching up. But knowing the concept existed didn't help because the problem was never that I lacked the skills or the framework. I had both from day one. The problem was that I had this stubborn conviction that serious results required serious sustained effort, and anything that came easier than that must be a shortcut.

We eventually built scrapers for multiple platforms, lead enrichment pipelines that ran automatically, custom demo environments we could provision instantly. Two people moving faster than teams ten times our size. All obvious in retrospect. I just had to get out of my own way first.