Ty Hughey

Brand & Web @clay

[Ty Hughey @Tycreated]

Playing with some of the @variantui explore options

See how the rotation was made in Jitter: https://t.co/qRKh3I1RZW

[Ty Hughey @Tycreated]

@lorenzodossi 🫡

[Ryo Lu @ryolu_]

convergence to the mean

when everyone looks at everyone else to decide what to make, we eventually stop making anything of our own.

we copy what works. borrow the language, the aesthetic, the features. we call it learning from the market, following best practices, staying competitive. together, everything starts to feel familiar. polished, interchangeable. nothing wrong. nothing alive.

the mean isn’t necessarily bad. it’s where everything lands when we remove the reasons for it to be different.

numbers are easier to compare than feelings, so we make things that produce numbers. we study what gets attention, then shape ourselves around it. eventually the feedback stops informing the work and starts authoring it. we’re no longer asking what we want to say. we’re asking what will be rewarded for saying.

ai makes this loop frictionless. it can draw from more references than we could see in a lifetime. but access to every perspective isn’t the same as having one. it hasn’t lived a particular life that makes one detail unbearable and another beautiful. when we ask it to choose for us without bringing any intention of our own, we get something plausible, easy to approve.

then we ship it, measure it, copy it, and feed it back into the next round. a tidal wave of mid.

this changes not just the work, but the people making it.

we describe ourselves in categories platforms can distribute and markets understand. designer. founder. creator. pick a niche. build a brand. be consistent. the parts that don’t fit become inconvenient, even when those contradictions might produce our most interesting work. we become easier to classify and harder to tell apart.

i think we need to approach making things more like artists.

an artist develops a perspective through the work. making, noticing, choosing, failing, returning. learning what matters even when nobody else cares. craft gives that perspective a form precise enough for someone else to experience.

the life outside the work matters too. the places you’ve lived, the people you’ve loved, the things you’re embarrassed to care about. these aren’t distractions from having something to say. they’re how you come to have something to say.

we understand this with music, paintings, photographs, movies. we expect a person to be present in the choices. we want to experience something we wouldn’t have encountered without them.

software can do this too.

a piece of software expresses beliefs about how life should feel. what deserves your attention. what you should be free to change. whether a task should feel like paperwork or play. even a small interaction can carry someone’s care, humor, or curiosity.

but we rarely talk about software as a medium. we talk about it as an industry. markets to capture, workflows to optimize, competitors to catch up with. we add a feature because someone else has it, without asking whether it belongs. products accumulate the same parts and lose what made them worth choosing.

underneath the branding, it’s all the same thing.

artists learn from others too. the question is whether you’re absorbing those influences into a point of view, or using them to avoid developing one.

what are you trying to let someone feel, understand, or do? why this particular shape? what have you noticed that the existing tools don’t seem to notice?

those questions don’t have answers you can borrow from a competitor’s roadmap.

if we can make almost anything, deciding what deserves to exist becomes more important, not less. speed gives us more chances to exercise judgment. it doesn’t remove the responsibility.

i don’t want a world where every person becomes a more efficient distributor of the same ideas. i want people to use these tools to go further into what they actually care about. to make things specific enough that we can feel someone behind them.

what is the point of everyone being able to make something, if we all end up making the same thing?

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

"I design teams like terrorist organizations."

90 minutes of unfiltered product advice from @petersellis

We discuss:
🔸 What it's really like to manage @nikitabier
🔸 Why growth almost always comes from the core
🔸 Why great taste is knowing when to stop
🔸 Why the median PM is so bad
🔸 Designing teams like terrorist organizations

Listen now 👇
https://t.co/22KA5peTdY

[Jakub Krehel @jakubkrehel]

I added an example to every item in the Interface Cheat Sheet so it’s easier to understand each point.

The cheat sheet is a mix of best practices and some of my personal preferences that I like using to make stuff feel better on the web.

https://t.co/sivx8o29nD

[Clay @clay]

from skeptic to bullish -- when one of the godfathers SaaS say's you're the cheapest you've ever been at $7B, you remind him its $7.1B and make a hype video.

haha all in good fun -- thanks for the shoutout @twentyminutevc and @jasonlk! Seems we see the same vision for the future of GTM!

[floguo @floguo]

today’s designers, creators, builders, etc often overemphasize execution and underemphasize concepting

the cost of exception is tending towards zero. just because we can vibe code doesn’t make us useful. but hey! there’s more to life than utility

WHY are we building things? a reflection of our unique perspective and opinions? or cheap imitations of something cool we saw someone else do?

all is vanity, all is toil

all we have left is our curiosity, joy, spirit, agency, and resilience

there is no other moat

imitation is the highest form of flattery! it’s a great way to learn. but we must progress from simple imitation to thoughtful creation if we to do this for a profession

the future will belong to those who embody their own spirits

[Varun Anand @vxanand]

Today we're announcing our Series D: $115M raised, led by @Wellington_mgmt, at a $7.1B valuation.

Fundraises are good moments to reflect on our journey so far. Act 1 was aggregating the best data. Act 2 was building the GTM infrastructure (audiences, workflows, agents) to run any campaign on top of that data. Now we are entering Act 3: creating the self-learning revenue engine to grow every business.

@Clay will predict the next best action for your business and help you take it. Sometimes, that might be a tweak to a subject line or ad copy. Other times, it might be a suggestion to change your marketing strategy, train your sellers differently, or even build a different product based on lost deal patterns.

[Kareem Amin @kareemamin]

Today we're announcing our Series D: $115M raised, led by @Wellington_mgmt, at a $7.1B valuation.

Our mission is to grow every company to its full potential.

To do that, we need to do 3 things ⬇️

[Clay @clay]

@Clay just raised a $115M Series D at a $7.1B valuation.

Now, more than 17,000 teams build on Clay, including Anthropic, SpaceXAI, Google, OpenAI, Stripe, Visa, UPS — and 80% of the Forbes AI50.

@nytimes just broke the news, but the story goes far beyond the raise. AI is unleashing the biggest wave of company creation in history. Clay’s goal is to be the engine they use to grow.

Clay is a self-learning revenue engine that figures out the best GTM play for your company, then runs it.

We started as the company with the best data about other companies. Then we became the infrastructure to run campaigns across email, ads, and landing pages.

Now we’re building agents that learn from every campaign, predict the next best action, and get better each time they run.

Software engineers use coding agents to write code. GTM engineers now use growth agents to autonomously grow their companies.

In 2023, we introduced GTME as a new role for people creating revenue systems with data, automation, and AI. Two years later, thousands of GTMEs are growing the world's best companies. They are gathering in nearly 100 Clay Clubs around the world, from Bangalore to Boston and Lahore to Lisbon.

That’s why we’re proud to launch a $1M scholarship fund, helping more people enter the profession.

@Wellington_Mgmt led our Series D, with participation from @sequoia, @stepstonegroup, @a16z Perennial, @MeritechCapital, DST Global, @CapitalG, @BoxGroup, @boldstartvc, @BloombergBeta, and @EvolutionEquity.

A gracious thank you goes out to our customers, community, partners, team, and every GTM engineer shaping this with us.

We are going to unveil the future of Agentic GTM at SCULPT on October 8.

Stay tuned to see how to use AI to grow every company.

🖤🩵❤️💛

[Ty Hughey @Tycreated]

@dhillondiaryy @222place Coolest pool hall in sf. The exterior will trick you, literally a hidden gem

[Ty Hughey @Tycreated]

@clay_gtm How'd you fit the gopro on the paper airplane

[Ty Hughey @Tycreated]

@mnowakdesign Awesome. Been on my list of tools to checkout

[Ty Hughey @Tycreated]

@tranmautritam @benjaminnathan @senyil @baothiento @NateWatkin @yuichirohonda_ @zzzzshawn @arynadesigns @gustavwf @deeplakhani @emili_iv @lucas__crespo @basit_designs @daniel__designs @greeenyang @CJfromJBW Thanks man 🫡

[elizabeth lin 🦄✨ @lalizlabeth]

we're hosting something special with the clay design team during config week this year!

🥟 designers who dim sum: june 23, 6–8pm

lmk if you'll be around and might be interested in attending. expressing interest doesn't guarantee a spot, but we'll try our best 💕

[Ty Hughey @Tycreated]

@lalizlabeth YESSSS

[Ty Hughey @Tycreated]

@raymmar Yes!! What neighborhoods are you looking at in sf?

[Ty Hughey @Tycreated]

Working on some of the screens from last week in jitter. Steal anything in the project if you want :)

Jitter project 👉 https://t.co/VoFBdlgRMT

[Ty Hughey @Tycreated]

@emilyrtt1 @clay Thanks Emily!!

[Ty Hughey @Tycreated]

New news 🎉 I joined @clay

I’ll be on the brand team, working across the website experience. More soon!

[Ty Hughey @Tycreated]

@alikashifmr @clay Thanks Alli!! 🙏