Product & Growth at Bardeen.ai ($15M Series A from HubSpot, Insight, & 468Cap) I share automations you can use for work & life

3 reasons you should read my LinkedIn profile & connect:

1. I enjoy helping others 
2. I love to collaborate and discussing fresh ideas around GTM, AI, and CLAY!
3. I’ve helped 500+ businesses implement AI, nocode, and Clay.

I consider myself a lifelong student and SHARE what I learn.

If you've made it this far. Connect with me here and say hello. 
I love to chat all things tech, social media, fitness, or AI. 
If Twitter is more your thing tweet me at: @chrisviglietta

Chris Viglietta

Yesterday's AI GTM Workshop at Clay wasn't what I expected

It was BETTER - here are some insights I gathered from teaching:

1. Improvisation - the wifi went down for 45 min before we started. Normally, people might panic in this situation BUT this created an opportunity for us to openly talk about what each person THOUGHT they wanted to build during the workshop. HOWEVER, their ideas transformed as we asked more questions. This is a beautiful result of being curious, empathetic, and inquisitive. 

2. Every artist has a medium. We deeply believe this at Clay. So, we brought in a sketch artist (Saki- she's amazing!) to recreate each student's favorite photos and bring THEM into her artistic process. The result? People were beaming with joy when they say the finished art. Every artist has a medium. Saki has sketching. Now they (the students) have Clay.

3. Beginners prefer to be GIVEN 1-2 workflows to build. This is contrary to Intermediates who already know what they want to build but just need a little gut check before starting. Next time, we'll let beginners choose from a set of pre-determined usecases (ex: inbound, outbound, crm, etc...)

4. Don't let students "chase the rabbit". Clay is powerful, but with great power comes great responsibility. Just because you CAN do (almost) anything doesn't mean you should - especially given time constraints. During open build, it makes sense to checkin with students every 10 min to ensure they're not going down rabbit holes and coming back empty-handed.

This is only the beginning.

AI GTM Workshops are coming back to SF and NYC next month (in Feb).

Thank you to EVERYBODY that came to learn, build, & create art (literally!) 🎨🖌️

Lindsey Newman, David Ronen, Brandon Ward, Alex Diaz-Casos, MS, MRED Margy Shomaker, Hakeem Oloritun, Lili Cook, Arthur Julio Nelson Matthew Iles, Sungmoon Lim, Kelvin Sims Katherine Shiff, Emily Limoncelli Carolyn Philip, Dan Sunchu, Joseph Rosenfield 

SPECIAL shoutout to our AMAZING Claymates that helped make it all possible! Katherine Dao Sarah Xu Sayli Godse Natalie Ho, Luda Zhao

Things in 2025 I'm taking into 2026. 

🎵Music I fell in love with in 2025
1. Buena Vista Social Club
2. Bad Bunny salsa 
3. Hamilton 
4. In the Heights


📦 Products I felt were worth the buy
1. Espresso Machine + Coffee Grinder (making coffee is relaxing)
2. Piano (trying to learn 1 song this year)
3. Longboard Surfboard (9.6ft rides smooooth in Malibu)
4. Salsa private lessons (not a product, but worth every $1)
5. Tennis lessons (same thing)
6. Truck - less mess when surfing
8. Physical books (tactile things bring me joy)
9. Whiteboard 
10. Pocket notebooks (i found ones that I enjoy carrying and using to write ideas)
11. Big A$$ calendar by Jesse Itzler
12. Nintendo Switch (I flew a lot this year and it was nostalgic to play Pokemon!)


🧰 Tools I really adopted this year
1. Clay (crazy to reflect on my journey)
2. Wispr Flow (feels like magic!)
3. Claude (reusing projects for convos around life)
4. Lovable (vibe-coded quite a few apps at work and personal)
5. Raycast AI (leveling up my productivity when I use a computer)
6. HotKey (doubling down on using keyboard shortcuts)
7. beehiiv (powers my newsletter)
8. Riverside (started filming B2B interviews with GTM leaders)


📕Best Books I got a lot out of
1. Navalmanack (reread it again)
2. Feel Good Productivity 
3. The Inner Game of Tennis
4. Poison at Breakfast
5. All about Love
6. Barbarian Days
7. Storyworthy


🎰Bets I would take again
1. Invest in community (spent thousands to travel with my core group and created mems)
2. Launch a newsletter (2k, so much to do here)
3. Build in public, permissionlessley 
4. Creating a video series - filming V4V changed my life
5. Work at Clay (I got no's for 5 months, but eventually, it all worked out)
6. Be a friend to have friends (always show up for my friends)


🧠Habits I'll continue
1. Going for a walk first thing in the morning (feel happier)
2. Making a slow coffee in the morning 60-90 min after waking up (no crash)
3. no coffee after 1pm (sleep is terrible)
3. Reading before bed instead of Netflix (i feel more rested)
4. Weekly therapy sessions
5. Working out (Weightlifting 4x, Pilates 1-2x, Tennis 1-2x, Salsa 2x)
6. Use the Big Ass Calendar (it forced me to proactively plan a year of adventure)
7. Contrast Therapy (dry sauna with friends feels amazing for my body and soul)
8. Matcha Mornings with core group to just hang and chat once per week
9. Weekend Hikes (walking in nature feels so good)
10. Going for mid-day walks to change up my location (feels more creative and days are less blurred)

This year's themes for me are creating, thriving, and exploring. Last year was focused on community and expansiveness. Last year, I fractured my L1 vertabrae after getting violently thrown off a horse - was bedridden for 3 months. I'm motivated to feel strong, athletic, and explosive again. Bright side - 7 solo skydive jumps!

✏️ Tell me your best products, habits, music so my 2026 list is even better

s/o 🐰 Jen Igartua for the inspo to write this post

from fixing pipes in new york
to fixing go-to-market systems.

i’m a go-to-market engineer at revpartners, and the first GTME hire on the team.

“go-to-market engineer” means different things to different teams. the simplest way i can explain what i do is this: 

i meet teams where they are. sometimes i’m fixing systems that exist but don’t really work anymore. other times, i’m helping teams build their first outbound motion from scratch. the work is about creating systems people understand, trust, and can actually grow with.

a lot of what i do gets built live and shared here:
clay builds, GTM experiments, scoring logic, and the unglamorous ops decisions no one puts on slides.

tool-wise, i’m always expanding the surface area. clay is core, but i spend time across most of the ai-driven GTM tools in the ecosystem. pressure-testing where they actually add leverage. 

always testing where automation helps and where humans still matter.

on the execution side, i’m deep in all bound workflows across heyreach, instantly, and smartlead.

the goal isn’t perfection.
it’s curiosity, iteration, and learning out loud.

outside of GTM, i’m always learning. lately that’s meant getting more hands-on with ai tools like cursor and claude code

if you’re curious what GTM engineers actually do day to day, and want to see it documented in real time. follow along or connect here.

Shawn ️

After interviewing a GTM engineer this week, it was obvious
the real differentiator isn’t tools or prompts...

It’s business logic.

In the interview, we walked through a real Clay build.

There was no “right” answer.
just tradeoffs.

When to use formulas vs AI
When signals are for alignment vs personalization
When enrichment is worth the cost and when it’s not
When B2B instincts break down in B2C-style problems

The strongest moments weren’t technical flexes.

They were moments like:

“I’m not fully happy with this yet.”

“This worked, but I’d rethink it at scale.”

“I changed my mind a few times here.”

The role evolves weekly, sometimes daily.

tools change.
models change.
constraints change.

What doesn’t change is the need to:

Reason before you build
Understand cost, scale, and intent
Adapt workflows to the business, not the other way around

The winners won’t be the ones with the fanciest tables.
They’ll be the ones who can think, adapt, and keep iterating without ego.

That’s the job.

Everything else is just an implementation detail.

follow ✌. Shawn 🧙‍♂️ the gtme alchemist...
building workflows, sharing lessons

Shawn  Tenam ⚡️

SDR ➡️ GTM Engineer | I build the revenue systems your sales team actually use. “SDRs make the best GTM engineers”

Just found out I almost burned thousands of credits on tech stack enrichment.

Clay has like 100+ data providers. most of us default to whatever we used first. but the credit policies vary wildly... 

This one screenshot from support just saved me big time.

Check your provider docs before you run that next big table.

Sumble x Clay ftw!! ✌

***Update: Correction here, thanks Stefan 🦁 Kollenberg. Both Sumble and HG Insights do not charge per technology found. Only difference is credit cost. 6 for Sumbl, 8 for HG. I’d still start with Sumble.

249k impressions in 365 days. by influencer standards this is participation trophy territory but hear me out.

august 2022 i created this account to hit 500 connections. that was the entire strategy. look credible enough to network my way into an SDR role.

wasn’t trying to build an audience. wasn’t trying to go viral. just needed to meet people who could help me break in.

then i started actually building clay tables. and i started sharing what i was learning.

turns out when you’re solving real GTM problems every day, you have things worth saying.

here’s the part that still trips me out….

consuming other builders’ posts. commenting with real thoughts. asking questions. sharing what worked and what didn’t. 

building in public alongside people solving the same problems.


that work takes time. takes energy. you could use AI to auto-comment and auto-engage but that doesn’t teach you anything.

the learning only happens when you actually do the work. when you read someone’s clay breakdown and think

wait, that’s smarter than how i’m doing it when you comment and they reply and suddenly you’re texting about CRM architecture at 11pm.
the 

that’s the metric that actually changed my career.

the views just came along for the ride. 

the 493% growth is cool. the impressions are whatever.

Shawn ⚡️  follow for more”mid” content in 2026. maybe we hit a million. maybe we don’t. either way i’ll be building. ✌🏼

Your target account’s competitors are a free strategy doc. almost no one reads it.

If you want to understand an account,
Don’t ask what they want.
Look at where they’re exposed.

gtm plays i use every day, part 11

competitive intelligence 🧠

This play pulls real competitive pressure straight from search data.

🔧 Start with target accounts in Clay
🔗 Attach company domains
📊 Pull Semrush web analytics
🥊 Pull competitors and their analytics too
🧠 Claygents analyze gaps, momentum, and weaknesses
🧠 Outputs surface alpha signals, not copy

That’s the loop.

No generic personalization.
No “saw you’re growing.”
No surface-level insights.

Just prove you did the work.

These signals let you lead with value:

-calling out where competitors are outranking them
-showing where spend is masking weak organic presence
-highlighting missed demand they’re leaving on the table
-framing conversations around real market pressure

When you enrich competitors, too,
You stop pitching features and start speaking in market reality.

That’s when prospects lean in.
That changes the entire conversation.

—
Shawn ⚡  the gtme alchemist! 🧙‍♂️... follow for more gtm plays i use every day.

After enough account deep dives and live conversations, one thing became obvious...

We overvalue signals and undervalue understanding...

If you want to understand an account
don’t ask what they want.

Look at what they publish, and what they avoid

gtm plays I use every day, part 12

markdown research 🕵 
this play is simple. dont skip it

Instead of spinning up a new research agent every time, pull full-site markdowns and treat them like a shared source of truth

Here’s the loop:

🔧 Start with target accounts in Clay
🔗 Attach company domains
📄 Pull full-site markdowns with Firecrawl
🥊 Pull competitor markdowns too
🏃‍♂️‍➡️ Run multiple content agents against the same markdown
🧠 Analyze positioning gaps, narrative pressure, and blind spots

no snippets
no surface summaries
no fake personalization

markdown is not for summaries.  
markdown is for context engineering

This is where it gets unfair

AI gives you coverage
Humans give you judgment

The absolute legends are doing both!!

They scale analysis across markdown
Then slow down and actually read it for top-tier accounts

When you do that, you stop asking what they want
and start pointing at where they are exposed

-tone shifts
-outdated positioning
-lazy claims
-overused language

That’s the stuff that never shows up in a crm
never makes it into a scoring model
but changes the entire conversation

Your target account is already telling you the truth
You just have to read it

Shawn ⚡ the gtme alchemist 🧙‍♂️
Follow for more gtm plays I use every day

funny thing about sharing real builds

you don’t need a landing page
you don’t need a funnel
you don’t even need to pitch

you just document what you’re actually working on
this DM came from a post where I said

 “these prompts are outdated”
not to gatekeep

but because the work keeps moving
build publicly

stay honest about what’s current
let the right conversations come to you

-shawn ⚡ the gtme achemist, unfinished by design
Follow and watch it evolve

alpha signals don't have to be expensive. some are just ignored.

your competitors' linkedin followers are not vanity metrics. 
they're pre-qualified market intent hiding in plain sight.

someone follows a competitor, they've already opted into the category. they already understand the problem you solve. they're being educated by someone else's messaging.

that's not a cold list. that's a warm one you didn't build.

gtm plays i use every day, part 12 ⚡

here's how i run this play:

➡️ source: scrape competitor followers (link in comments for exact tool) 
➡️ dedupe: push into Clay, use hubspot lookup on company object to filter by lifecycle stage 
➡️ enrich: clay for firmographics + tech stack alignment 
➡️ score: icp_fit + competitor_engaged + no_existing_opp 
➡️ push: hubspot company property (dropdown or source name) to track competitor follower origin

pro tip: clay pro plan lets you run that hubspot lookup directly in the table. no export/import dance. 

filter happens before you burn enrichment credits.

and depending on market conditions, same list tells different stories. competitor got acquired? displacement opportunity. 
competitor slowed down content? their audience is underserved. 
competitor shut down? those followers need somewhere to go.

this isn't always a full outbound signal. sometimes it's one layer in a larger scoring model. but stacked correctly, it compounds.

shawn, the gtme alchemist 🧙‍♂️ follow for more plays i actually use

p.s. built a whole gtm system today but can't fix a typo in my video intro. nanobanana did me dirty. 😒 

veed is being difficult. if you have a video editor that actually lets you edit comment please.

taplio

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