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

⚙️ SaaS Enthusiast | 🤝 Student of sales since 2007 | 🤖 AI Explorer

If your best salesperson had unlimited time to research every account, who would they pick, what would they want to know and say? 

The systems I build bake this into code and accelerate processes that took weeks compressed into minutes. 

I support their wins by building bespoke and deeply customized revenue systems for companies that have clear PMF and repeatable sales processes. 

—-
16+ years of international, multi-domain, multi-functional experience at Apple and B2B scale-ups. Lead of Clay Club in NYC. 

Fun fact 🌋: I’ve been inside an active volcano.

Andreas Wernicke

You can do THAT in Clay? Kicking off Clay Club NY with a banger event: Chris Viglietta, Clay's resident GTM acrobat, will lead us through a fun, imaginative and creative evening. 

If you think Clay is an enrichment tool, this night will change that. 
If you think Clay is for spray-and-pray outbound, this night will change that too.

What we are showing: The art of the possible. An empty canvas for your GTM motion. What do you actually want to build? 

With Clay, you can probably do it.

Chris will run live growth hacking sessions where problems get solved in real time. Expect memes, music, and demos that make you rethink what a GTM tool can be.

Join us: Tuesday, January 27 at 5:30 pm in Clay's HQ near Union Square in Manhattan. 

We're already at 180 registrations. Best way to get in? Give us your most interesting problem to solve live: 

"What's your (business) problem? But for real, what issue is your company facing that AI and some creativity might be able to solve?" 

Put it here, and definitely put it in the Luma registration. Go wild! 

This event will be fun, playful and show some cool applications of AI in GTM. 

Throughout 2026, Clay Club New York will also cover Context Engineering, RevOps <-> Clay, Agentic Coding and more. You know, the real fun stuff! :) 

Matthew Silberman and I are proud to host the skeptical, the curious, the GTM wizards and everyone in between - Save your spot, we're already oversubscribed!

Open article: Clay Club NY at Clay HQ: The Art of the Possible · Luma by luma.com

Clay Club NY at Clay HQ: The Art of the Possible · Luma

The cost of GTM / data execution is now zero, which means jumping to execution-mode without >sound< foundations scales fuzziness. 

The siren-call of one-shot promting a GTM system is music to everyone's ear. Any GTM operator should have some strong rope to tie themselves to the mast and do deliberate, intentional slow-thinking for sound, well structured, retrievable and adaptable foundational context. 

With AI, any technical challenge can be mastered but mastering the right one is the new differentiator, imo. 

Leif nails this in his post - worth a read.

Building what I call “canonical context” is going to be a breakout skill and job requirement for AI operators / enablement in 2026.

What is it and why does it matter?

Word is out that sound context is the only safe ticket out of Slopville, USA (pop. 89 bajillion tokens)

“Sound” meaning curated, managed, continuously refined.

Done right, this evolving knowledge layer is a happy marriage of human taste and the speed and power of LLMs. 

Take either the taste or speed out of the equation and the marriage gets rocky fast, divorce papers get served, someone loses a house, irreconcilable differences, etc.

Everyone knows that LLMs need rich context to do anything well. But I still sense a widespread assumption that “if only LLMs could see our sales decks, PDFs, and battlecards from 2019, we’d finally be able to do useful things with AI.”

Right instinct, but shaky in practice. 

The context of yesteryear will have ideas worth preserving, but that content was built for a stable meta, not a dynamic one. It was made under pre-LLM assumptions, pre-LLM constraints.

Context built without AI in mind won't be chunked or segmented right.

It won't be tailor-made for your AI-native use case.

It won't be optimized for retrieval, discoverability, or synthesis.

Worst of all IMO is that it will lack iterative plasticity—i.e. the ability to rapidly spawn new context from foundational context.

The more stuff I build w/ AI, the more I realize it’s not only an agentic thing or workflow that must be created but the *underlying context itself.* 

I.e. the actual use case-specific source material I want the AI to tap every time something runs. 

Canonical context—that clean bedrock of authoritative, org-specific knowledge—is what allows you to act on these needs quickly as models change and new use cases surface.

Think of it less as a knowledge base than an operating surface…meant for a world where use cases tend to be fluid, emergent, and hyper-specific.

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