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To what extent is Clearbit's platform productizing the use cases that companies have discovered during their use of the company's API over time?

Matt Sornson

Co-founder at Clearbit

I've used it on a few pitch decks, and that’s how we talk about the company at large. But we built APIs in the beginning for developers. We turned it to product people and growth people, and we were incredibly lucky in the people that found us and wanted that, at that moment, were the cutting edge of go-to-market marketing rev-ops. They built some incredible things. Every single product we've built has been inspired by watching people use the primitives that we previously built. It wasn't a conscious decision, but about two years in, we realized the type of business we were building, which honestly looks a lot like AWS in some ways, where you start with primitives, you see what value people get on top of those primitives, and you build your way out. 

We started with the data points of the data APIs, the primitive, and it became integrations, and then it became extensions. We built extensions for sales and CS, they're Chrome extensions. It was like, ‘How do we lead this data into more people's hands?’ And then the platform is like, ‘How do we help the companies that can't build it themselves get it everywhere they need it?’ And what that means is how do we make it one place where they can do all their configuration for sales automation, marketing automation, advertising automation, advertising audiences, and build things like Guillaume's Reveal loop as a product.

Find this answer in Matt Sornson, co-founder & ex-CEO at Clearbit, on vertically integrated data and workflow tools in sales and marketing
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