Clay has company (again)

Hey friends, a year ago "we built it in Clay" was a flex on a sales call.

Now Clay alternatives are popping up almost every day, and one of them didn't bother hiding it and launched as "headless Clay."

Cheap data is great, right up until you still have to figure out who's worth emailing.

In today’s Circuit:

🛠️ Operator Tip of the Week
📖 Everyone wants Clay's lunch
📡 Engagement is the most underused intent signal
💰 What a LinkedIn ads demo really costs
📡 Across The Wire
🧪 Worth trying this week

Pull last month's credit usage from your enrichment tool and divide it by the number of rows that ended up in a sequence with a verified email. That's your cost per useful row.

Cost per lookup hides every failed match, duplicate and contact who left six months ago, so the real number is usually a lot higher, and it's the one to compare tools on.

Clay alternatives are popping up almost every day now. Firecrawl launched what it calls "headless Clay for agents": 250M+ people and 26M+ companies, 1,000 free credits a month, running inside ChatGPT or Claude, and by their own claim 88% cheaper than Clay at scale.

Loopster, from the HeyReach team, launched Clay-style tables with its own contact database and a waterfall over 50+ vendors at cost. It’s positioned as a Clay alternative (if you’re not running enterprise-grade RevOps), aimed at agencies and lean GTM teams.

Most of these pull from the same providers underneath, which is why prices keep dropping. There's a twist in it for Clay too. It created the GTM engineer, and that person now has the lowest switching cost of anyone, because the same steps can be rebuilt with Claude Code and a few skill files.

So finding an email is heading toward free. What stays expensive is deciding who's worth contacting this week, and checking that the data is still true, since people change jobs and a match that looks fine can belong to someone who left in the spring.

Before switching anything, build a test list of 50 contacts where you already know the right answer. Run it through the new tool and count verified emails, correct current jobs and cost per correct row. Then check your renewal date, because that's when switching costs nothing extra.

There's a play going around this week: scrape everyone who likes or comments on your competitors' LinkedIn ads, filter to your ICP and reach out. The idea goes well beyond ads. Every public reaction to a competitor or to your category is a timing signal: comments on a competitor's posts, engagement with the big creators in your niche, sign-ups for a competitor's webinar, replies under an industry thread.

Why it beats bought intent: third-party intent data is sold to everyone in your category, so your competitors see the same accounts at the same time, and it usually only names a company. A comment on a post names the person, is public, costs close to nothing and shows interest from the last few days.

Where it goes wrong: a big share of engagers on any post are the poster's colleagues, partners, other vendors and job seekers. Filter hard on title, company size and region before anyone gets an email. Use a scraper with its own sessions or a separate account, never your main LinkedIn login. And in the EU, check your legal basis before emailing people you found this way.

How to use it without being creepy: write about the topic they engaged with and leave the engagement itself out of it. "Saw you liked Competitor X's post" ends the conversation. An email about the problem that post was about, with a useful offer, reads like good timing.

Kiin Labs, a LinkedIn ads agency, published one of the better benchmarks we've seen on this. They looked at 155 LinkedIn ad accounts over a year and measured cost per demo lead, meaning someone filled in a form asking for a demo, call, audit, trial or quote. The median account paid $350. The top 10% paid $71, the bottom 10% paid $1,233, and US-only accounts came in at $520. Content leads like a guide download cost a median $164.

The biggest lever they found was placement. A demo form sent in a LinkedIn message got completed 42% of the time, against 3.9% in the feed, which made inbox placements 57% cheaper per lead for cold audiences.

The number to watch is cost per held demo. A form fill is a request, and some of those people won't show up or won't qualify. As an illustration, if 70% show and half of those qualify, a $350 demo lead becomes roughly $1,000 per qualified meeting. Your own show and qualification rates decide the real figure, and that's the number to compare against outbound, events or anything else.

The smarter use of ads: run LinkedIn ads at the same accounts your outbound team is emailing, so your founder has shown up in their feed a few times before the first email lands. It's a cheaper way to use the channel than buying demo requests one form at a time.

- Kiin Labs' full LinkedIn cost-per-demo benchmark, with the methodology and the US cut. Read here

- Anita Kirkovska on how AI-native companies are rebuilding their GTM stack, from websites to enrichment to workflows living in skill files. Read here

- Firecrawl's launch post with the free tier and the Clay comparison. Read here

- Cody Schneider's competitor-ad play in his own words (also a promo for his tool). Read here

- Build your 50-contact known-answer list and keep it, so any new data tool can be tested in under an hour.

- Pick one competitor, open their last five LinkedIn posts and count how many commenters fit your ICP. That tells you in ten minutes whether engagement signals are worth setting up.

- Work out your real cost per held meeting for your main channel: spend divided by meetings that actually happened and qualified.

That's it for this week. If you work out your cost per held meeting, reply and tell us the number. We read every reply.