Open to AE or GTM Engineering roles | Call me: 727 637 2778 | Follow to find out what the heck Clay.com actually does | Will do a paid post for $1,000,000

Full cycle AE  and GTM Engineer specializing in early stage SaaS companies going from 0 -> Unicorn status.

Worked for companies backed by the biggest names in VC. Base10, Ridge, Susa Ventures, Altos, Alt Capital, Greylock and Microsoft. 

Taking big swings :)

🏍benyamin ‎

I'm joining AirOps as a GTM Engineer.

I gotta say this was a weird one, I had at least 3 people reach out to me separately, maybe more, telling me they were hiring for this role and that I should look into it. Once I did it became very obvious I should seriously consider talking to these folks. 

If you've followed me for a while, you know I've avoided purposefully GTM tech. The market is fickle. Costs are deflationary. And I think seat-based SaaS pricing is going to buckle under the weight of headless tools and agents operating APIs way more efficiently than humans ever would. 

So why break my own rule?

Because AirOps isn't selling more seats or licenses or a fancy workflow, they're solving for how businesses get discovered in a world where brands are found through prompting and not SEO. 

Google built the infrastructure for how we found information for 25 years. It's not dead yet, but when you look at the buyers of the next five years, they will not be relying on the first page of Google anymore. 

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Rufus on Amazon. The way people find answers is fragmenting across general-purpose AI, shopping AI, and proprietary search engines we haven't even seen yet. Most companies have no idea how to show up in those contexts.

AirOps is building the workflows that help them figure it out. And as more AI search vectors emerge, I think we're positioned to capture that market.

People have asked me why I decided to make this move. The reason is simple. if AirOps gets the technology right and grabs enough land early enough, this is a chance to ride one of the biggest technological shifts of the modern era.

Thank you to Eoin Clancy and Lucas Hulleberg for the opportunity. And to all the other team members I haven't met yet who have built something that I will get to grow. 

Travis Tyler accepting a role here had a non-zero effect on my decision. I was mulling over whether to make a move when I heard he started here, and I figured there must be something to it. He's a pretty discerning guy. 😉

AirOps is looking to grow headcount very aggressively this year. If you are looking for a new role with high performing folks - please reach out to me, I will connect you with the right person.

P.S. Sweater not real

No alternative text description for this image

📂 GTM Engineering
  ┃
  ┣ 📂 Prospecting & Enrichment
  ┃ ┣ 📂 Contact Discovery
  ┃ ┣ 📂 Multi-Source Enrichment Chains
  ┃ ┣ 📂 ICP Fit Scoring
  ┃ ┗ 📂 Intent Signal Detection
  ┃
  ┣ 📂 Outbound Engine
  ┃ ┣ 📂 Email Sequencing
  ┃ ┣ 📂 Sender Infrastructure & Warmup
  ┃ ┣ 📂 Persona-Based Copywriting
  ┃ ┗ 📂 Reply Classification
  ┃
  ┣ 📂 CRM Automation
  ┃ ┣ 📂 Salesforce Operations
  ┃ ┣ 📂 HubSpot Sync
  ┃ ┣ 📂 Pipeline Reporting
  ┃ ┗ 📂 Data Hygiene
  ┃
  ┣ 📂 Meeting Intelligence
  ┃ ┣ 📂 Transcript Processing
  ┃ ┣ 📂 MEDDPIC Extraction
  ┃ ┣ 📂 Follow-Up Generation
  ┃ ┗ 📂 Deal Stage Automation
  ┃
  ┣ 📂 Account Research
  ┃ ┣ 📂 Prospect Briefs
  ┃ ┣ 📂 Tech Stack Detection
  ┃ ┣ 📂 Web Scraping & Crawling
  ┃ ┗ 📂 Competitive Analysis
  ┃
  ┣ 📂 AI Visibility
  ┃ ┣ 📂 Answer Engine Optimization
  ┃ ┣ 📂 Structured Data / JSON-LD
  ┃ ┗ 📂 AI-Search Publishing
  ┃
  ┣ 📂 Workflow Orchestration
  ┃ ┣ 📂 Task Management
  ┃ ┣ 📂 Visual Dependency Boards
  ┃ ┣ 📂 EOD Reporting
  ┃ ┗ 📂 Team Dashboards
  ┃
  ┗ 📂 Self-Healing Infrastructure
    ┣ 📂 Auto-Correcting API Docs
    ┣ 📂 Reusable Script Library
    ┣ 📂 Automated Smoke Testing
    ┗ 📂 Persistent Memory

I started putting my GTM work in a GitHub repo. Not code in the traditional sense. Operational logic. API schemas, enrichment routing, slash commands, context files that teach my AI copilot how to do my job.

It started as a practical problem. Everything I'd built at Cyft lived on my local machine. If my SSD died, a huge chunk of how I actually worked would die with it. GitHub was the obvious fix.

But it turned into something bigger. When I accepted my offer at AirOps, I had three weeks before my start date. So I started prepping a brand new repo for the new environment. Currently I'm building the scaffolding for all new and improved raw code and slash commands that I'll be running in Claude Code at Airops

Example of things I'm building: When I was at Cyft I had a growth meeting command that would pull from three APIs and compiles a structured agenda. Salesforce, Email Bison and Typeform to form a holistic picture of our funnel. At AirOps, the tools will be different. The architecture and ideology transfers. 

I think GTM engineers are going to start maintaining repos the way software engineers always have. I think highly technical revops teams are already started to resemble SWE teams more than the revops of 2015. 

If I were interviewing a GTM engineer today, I'd ask if they have a Github I could look at. I wouldn't expect it. But I'd ask. Not because the code matters that much, but because it signals how someone thinks about their work. Systems vs. tasks. Reusable vs. disposable.

Wrote the full breakdown 👇

Toward the tail end of my time at Cyft, I started seeing an existential threat to my work. All of the workflows, Claude Code slash commands, API integ

Open article: GTM Engineers Should Have Github Repos by 🏍benyamin ‎ • 6 min read

if you sell API-based SaaS and you're not optimizing your site for Cursor, Claude Code, and the other coding agents... you're about to get cooked by those who are.

I believe in the future these agents will sign up for services on my behalf, run test queries against real data, and benchmark outputs head to head. The evaluation stage of buying dev tools is about to skip humans entirely. And honestly I trust Claude Code to evaluate many of these outputs much better than I'm able to. 

This is what we're building for at AirOps. AI search isn't just ChatGPT and Perplexity anymore. 

Buying decisions are happening inside coding agents, IDE environments, SaaS-embedded chatbots. 

If your content isn't structured for machines to read and evaluate, you're invisible to an entire buying motion that's growing faster than any of us expected.

There's already more agents on the internet than humans. Soon they won't just be reading and reporting, but making decisions. Real business decisions with real dollar amounts attached to them. This is already happening at small scale. 

I had Claude Code buy some domains for me on Dynadot earlier this week. Now this is a small example, right? But an example nonetheless. I loaded up some money to Dynadot, fed Claude all the domains we currently owned and asked it to make some new ones and then go buy them throug the Dynadot API... That's a microcosm of what's about to start happening at many companies. 

Hope you're getting ready for it :)

how to source candidates from your own linkedin network for $40 and make 5k in commissions
 
if you're a seller with a big linkedin network, you're sitting on a recruiting side hustle. most recruiters charge 15-25% of base salary per placement. that's $20-40K per hire. you can do the same thing with your own connections and a claude subscription.
 
here's what I'm building right now to support AirOps 3x headcount growth this year and hopefully pick up some fat checks :)
 
𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟭: 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗻 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮
 
go to settings, data privacy, get a copy of your data. linkedin gives you a full dump. every connection, their title, company, location. takes about 2 or 3 hours to process. load it into a SQLite database so you can actually query it without spending 9000 tokens on looking for a contact
 
𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟮: 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘁𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝗿𝗼𝗹𝗲𝘀
 
i scraped 31 job descriptions from our Ashby careers page and broke each one into structured criteria. required skills, seniority level, relevant companies, tech stack, years of experience. this becomes your matching rubric.
 
𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟯: 𝘁𝘄𝗼-𝘁𝗶𝗲𝗿 𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴
 
tier 1 is keyword matching. titles, companies, skills. fast and free. filters 10K connections down to a few hundred plausible candidates per role.
 
tier 2 is where it gets good. i use exa to pull enriched linkedin data on tier 1 matches, then feed those profiles into claude code to score against each role. work history, tenure patterns, location, tech stack overlap. things a keyword match misses.
 
𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟰: 𝗲𝗻𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗱𝗿𝗮𝗳𝘁 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵
 
top-scoring candidates get deeper enrichment through leadmagic. the system drafts personalized linkedin DMs based on why that specific person fits. not "i saw your profile" messages. actual context about their career and how it maps to the role.
 
took an hour to build. these people already know you. a warm DM from a real connection converts at a completely different rate than a cold InMail from a recruiter. 
 
the system tells me "Maya is a 47/50 match for Senior AI Engineer because she built RAG pipelines at Notion and has 7 years in ML." i review the context and hit send.

If you're hooked up to your apollo API key you could then use the peoplefinder endpoint to expand on this process if you're having luck with it
 
any seller with 5K+ connections and a $20/month claude subscription is sitting on $2-6K commissions per placement in warm leads they already have.

P.S. screenshot is fake for educational purposes :)

𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗕𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗸-𝗣𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗦𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗠𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗿 𝗔𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗖𝗹𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗱𝗲
 
An SDR I shared some tips with messaged me after starting a new role and said they've been totally blackpilled about the status quo after implementing Claude Code and Cursor workflows for the GTM team at their previous company. 

They can't unsee the efficiency gains, and they can't unsee the insanity of all the manual processes around them.

They'd asked their new manager if they could hook up the Apollo API to Cursor to automate some of their longer-form workflows, specifically around lead list building. They were told no without much explanation.
 
I get why. If somebody with six months of sales experience says "let me hook up the most sensitive part of the GTM stack to an AI tool with a dubious level of security," "Fuck No" is a reasonable first reaction. There are real security concerns. But you're shooting yourself in the foot by hand-waving about security when the mitigations are really quite simple. Fix it, move on, and start utilizing the efficiency gains.
 
If you're relating to this, that frustration is a signal. You're early. And there's still time to save yourself from the impending white collar job collapse. 
 
They went on to ask how to socialize this stuff within their new team. Here's what I told them:
 
The play - treat institutional change like a sales cycle.
 
Don't walk into your manager's office and pitch a revolution. That's how you get a polite "no" and a reputation as the weird one. I learned this the hard way when a past CEO told me, "Ben, you have good ideas, but you don't know how to leverage political capital." He was right.
 
Instead, multithread. Sell bottoms-up. Drop an article in the team Slack. Share something in a meeting. Get two or three peers curious. Let them start asking their own questions.
 
If you do this, your manager starts getting the same questions from multiple people. It's no longer one person asking about weird shit, it's a pattern. It makes its way to the director meeting, and now the conversation is happening at a level where things actually change.
 
If you zoom out, the cost of building software is going to zero. Distribution, security, compliance, customer service, all the enterprise readiness stuff, that's what's becoming the real challenge. The playing field is being leveled. 

A lot of people are being lulled into a false sense of security while their competition gets leaner. Smaller teams are producing the sales output of much larger ones across pipeline management, outbound activity, and post-sales support. They're building a compounding velocity advantage and they are going to use it to destroy you.
 
If you're a sales director, a RevOps leader, and you haven't used Claude Code or Cursor, you need to go familiarize yourself. Google it. It's not hard to find.
 
I write about this stuff regularly. If you need talking points to socialize these ideas, just send them one of my posts :)

James Hanzimanolis

Co-Founder @ Erudite | Content Marketing Agency | GTM Leader | Startup Advisor

Co-founder @ Erudite. We're a content marketing agency with the goal of driving more inbound leads and helping startups and small SaaS build a brand through social media.

Founder

I just got off the phone with the CEO of a popular ZoomInfo competitor.

15 seconds in and this guy hangs up.

Why? Because “content is a waste of their time.”

Gents…

There’s a reason ZoomInfo will always win.

Henry Schuck, in 90 days, has seemed to completely pivot strategies.

Especially with content.

He’s either bought the best ghostwriter money could buy.

Or he’s just a gifted writer.

Either way, it’s funny to see how small-fry CEOs think about growth vs. the GOATS in tech.

Amjad (Replit): POSTS DAILY
Henry (ZoomInfo): POSTS DAILY
Dharmesh (HubSpot): POSTS DAILY

There’s a trend here.

The best CEOs are brand builders. No exceptions.

Content is the #1 game changer in 2026.

Generate 250K-1M impressions per month | Fractional Head of Content for GTM Tech

There’s a rumor that Clay is bumping their pricing. Explorer package is going from $350/mo to $500/mo. If true… then yikes.

They are *also* changing their credit model.

It’ll soon cost credits to export rows and other minor tasks.

(Again, these are just rumors).

If true, they’ll hurt both of their customer types:


Type 1: The GTM engineer
Technical salespeople have been bringing their own API keys (from Icypeas, LeadMagic, OpenAI, DiscoLike, etc.) to minimize credit consumption in Clay.

This new system would force them into credit consumption for actions that shouldn’t warrant credit usage.


Type 2: The non-technical salesperson
Plenty of Clay users use the app solely for data waterfalling. They aren’t building complex workflows or automations.

These users don’t own API keys on other platforms. While their technical experience will be the same, they’ll be heavily overspending (already are) on credits.


I get it.

Clay is awesome. We all love Clay.

However… if these rumors end up being true, it feels like a smack in the face.


If I were learning about GTM orchestration tools for the first time, I’d go with one of the other guys:

- BitScale
- Compelling
- Floqer
- Persana AI 
- Tabula
- Airscale 
- Sync GTM
- (ZI’s new GTM studio)

There are so many to pick from.

And most are more affordable than Clay.

Gen Z is too soft to work in tech.

No, I'm not "micro-managing" you.
I simply want a weekly report.

No, I'm not encouraging "hustle culture."
I just want you to do your job.

No, $60K is not a "low-paying salary."
You're 20 with no experience.

Entire generation is cooked tbh

Johnny is launching an outbound motion for a startup and only has $250 to spend! This might sound impossible, but here are 6 ways to make this work:

Option 1. Dialer + data
Option 2. Email sender + data
Option 3. Social selling
Option 4. All-in-one SEP
Option 5. Free options
Option 6. DIY

Let's get into it.


Option 1. Dialer + data
BitScale announced their $99 plan today. This plan gives you 20K credits per month and is equivalent to Clay's $350 plan.

Trellus (YC W22)'s top plan allows for parallel dialing, power dialing, and integrates nicely with everything. $150/mo.

Total: $250/mo


Option 2. Email sender + data
QuickEnrich is the cheapest email vendor on the market right now. $83 for 132,000 emails or $24 for 36,000 emails.

Instantly let's you send 100,000 emails/mo for $97/mo.

Maildoso's new gmail mailboxes cost $4/mo. Get 5 (at a min).

Total: $141-$200/mo


Option 3. Social selling
Kondo: Superhuman for LinkedIn DMs for LinkedIn DM management: $35/mo
In combination with ReactIn ($29/mo) for outbound campaigns and Floqer for data + insights: $149/mo.

Total: $213


Option 4. All-in-one

FlashLabs is the BEST tool in my arsenal. Hands down. It's a LinkedIn automation tool (comparable to HeyReach), email sender (comparable to Instantly), parallel dialer (comparable to Nooks/Orum), and uses LLMs for image and website generation. Absolutely insane.

Total: $211/mo


5. Free options
Apollo, Wiza, and Lusha all have free plans for data.

And, *if you ask nicely* and are in a jam... there are some vendors that'll give you free licenses for a few months.

2 years ago, I was fired from a role and had absolutely nothing to my name. Luckily good people like Mavlonbek Muratov (Salesfinity) and Neil Gandhi (Paage & Send) gave me free access to help me land back on my feet. Thanks again for that!

Total: $0/mo


6. DIY
You can build dialers, email tools, SEPs, automation tools, etc. that mold to your GTM strategy with Replit, Lovable, Caffeine, and bolt.new.

Total: $25-$250/mo


Honorable mentions
- Aloware
- AskElephant
- Bardeen
- Icypeas
- LeadMagic
- Symbo
- TrueDial
- RogerRoger

And so many more.

You got this, Johnny!

No outbound team should use Salesloft or Outreach.

I'll die on this hill.

They worked great in 2020.
Not in 2026.

My biggest pet peeve in legacy GTM tech is that they've stopped evolving. Once they hit $50M ARR (or whatever the magic number is), they refuse to adapt.

Anyone who's stuck on SL/OR is now using multiple tools in combination (usually a dialer, email sender, integration tech, and more).

So your $125/mo SEP license increases to $750+/mo.

Any for what?

To have a stitched together, Frankenstein tool set that barely works. I can't stomach it.

Here are 12 alternatives worth checking out:
1. Reply
2. Mixmax AI
3. Regie.ai
4. Perlon AI
5. FlashLabs
6. lemlist
7. Outplay
8. SmartReach.io
9. Simpl
10. Klenty
11. Salesforge.ai 🔥
12. Snov.io

I built a prospecting tool inside of Google Sheets.

Here's everything it can do:

➜ Finds a person's LinkedIn profile
➜ Finds company phone number
➜ Finds company website
➜ Finds LinkedIn link
➜ Finds Twitter link
➜ Finds Instagram link
➜ Finds Facebook link
➜ Finds company email
➜ Finds state from phone area code
➜ Checks phone number reputation
➜ Gets company name from LinkedIn
➜ Removes "LLC", "Inc", or "Co"
➜ Cleans phone number
➜ Shows time zone for a state

After some small update, I'm releasing it again.

Comment "DM" if you want access

In the past 6 months, 3 of my ghostwriter friends shut down their agencies and returned to corporate roles (none of which have anything to do with writing).

I've also noticed that landing new clients has been harder lately.

Everyone wants easy, cheap solutions. So they are hooking up OpenClaw and GPT to every part of their business.

LinkedIn, X, blog posts, cold email copy, blah blah.

Some are getting OpenClaw to run Cursor which is being powered by Claude and OpenAI while being passed to other agents to do more 'agentic' work.

Agents + agents + agents + agents + agents = sh*t.

Almost everything I'm seeing lately is true AI slop. AKA: AI outputs that sound like C-3PO.

I'm all for the AI wave. I use Replit, Gamma, GPT, and tons of other AI-powered tools in my day-to-day.

But for the love of god... please don't replace your ghostwriter for a 20-buck subscription.

Won't work.

Unfortunately, this was true (and kinda worse than I thought). There's more to the story. Clay's new pricing: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly 👇

THE GOOD:
- Credit costs are dropping 50%-90% (yippee)
- Consumption is more transparent
- No markup on LLM usage

THE BAD:
- HTTP API integrations only available for growth plan or custom ($495+)
- Support is only available for growth plan or custom ($495+)
- Credit top-ups cost a 30% premium

THE UGLY:
- This has become almost unusable for agencies. Clay is getting tired of users who have found loopholes to minimize credit consumption and are moving upstream.

TLDR
Clay is officially making the pivot from agency focused to enterprise focused.

As someone who cares about GTM orchestration, it's hard for me to get behind this when every alternative is caring for their smaller users.

BitScale dropped their pricing and changed their model. I'm spending $99/mo to run all of my workflows with no hiccups.

(BitScale isn't the only one doing this).

But if that's the case - if these alternatives exist - then why would I choose Clay?

My LinkedIn posts that generate 5,000 impressions today would've generated 50,000 impressions a year ago.

LinkedIn is constantly kiIIing reach for creators. And it's 100% intentional.

The rationale: If we drop everyone's reach, they'll start paying for more impressions.

Smart, right?
Well, the opposite is happening.

Creators are dropping off of the platform.

They've spent years building their brand and following simply for the LinkedIn gods to annihilate their reach.

It's insane.

Erudite has a secret folder of 50 high performing post templates.

Whenever we use a template from this folder for a client, they generate 50K+ impressions on their post (with an average of ~117K).

It's worked for the past 18 months.

This changed in early January.

These templated posts, which rake in over 100,000 impressions, are now doing 10K-20K instead.

Which isn't bad.

But man, it sucks compared to last year.

Becoming a LinkedIn thought leader (cringe term, I know) is harder than ever.

Two years ago, things were different.

Only a handful of LinkedIn users were building brand through content.

It wasn't hard to stand out as long as you had an opinion.

Things are harder now.

Everyone has access to an LLM that can write for them. GPT, Claude, Grok.

And if you feed it enough info to chew on, it'll spit out an *okay* piece of content.

Now everyone on here is a thought leader... or at least they are trying to be.

Here's a tip: Your posts shouldn't be generic. They should be something that only YOU could say.

[SOME EXAMPLES]
❌ "Here are 5 tips for cold calling"
✅ "I cold called a VP of Marketing on Thursday who hung up on me. So I called him back until he answered."

❌ "Here's how to land a role in tech sales"
✅ "When I was 21, I landed my first sales role at a tech company in NYC. The job had 382 applicants. In order to stand out, I"...

Please take this advice.

Because, for the love of god, I cannot tolerate my LinkedIn feed anymore.

Somethin's gotta change.

Growing your brand through silly meme content might get some likes and giggles, but it won't land you new business or give your audience something to remember.

The last thing you want is to be 'the meme guy.'

Anyone can be a meme guy.

Very few people are worth remembering on here.

11.3 million impressions on X in 90 days. 100% organic.

(Here’s how you can do the same)

Before I start… there’s something you should know.

Yes. Your prospects use X. Half the business won at Erudite comes from X.

It’s different than LinkedIn. You don’t get penalized for posting more. Reposts actually drive engagement. It’s a machine.

Here we go.

1. Find 10-15 people in your niche to befriend
2. 15-30 thoughtful comments per day
3. Quote reposts are key for growth
4. Use lead magnets like crazy
5. Only post about 2-3 topics
6. Share opposing views
7. Post 3x per day (min)

And if you want to see my step-by-step process, comment “X GROWTH” and I’ll send you my playbook.

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James Hanzimanolis

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James Hanzimanolis

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