blog-aug-7

This post is for our fellow engineers doing sales!

I used to think enrichment was for big companies. Then we set a goal: find 10 pre‑sales customers before launching Val Town for Teams. My day became dashboards, Google, and DMs. We even piped new users from Clerk into Discord and did the “scroll a long feed of emails and hope you recognize someone” routine. It didn’t scale.

Clearbit used to be the obvious answer, but post‑Twilio acquisition, it wasn’t really an option for new customers. Clay was great, but we wanted to use it like an API so anyone on our team could use it programatically. We asked on X, the CEO replied, and that nudged us to build an API proxy ourselves.

We turned Clay into an API / SDK on Val Town: Clay API Proxy.

Your val calls clay() with an email or GitHub username. We verify your identity, generate a request id, and forward the payload to Clay with that id. Clay enriches and POSTs the result back using the same id. While your request is open, we poll for it. When it returns, we give you the JSON back as if it's a normal request/response.

Enriching emails with Clay is now as simple as

import { clay } from "https://esm.town/v/charmaine/clay-proxy/sdk.ts";

const result = await clay({
  email: "charmainekmlee@gmail.com",
  source: "user_signup"
});

We then started piping this new enriched data directly into our Discord (TODO: example here). We were no longer wasting time combing through dashboards. We were able to invest time into interacting with our ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) users as soon as they sign up.

This is a big part of how we found our first 10 pre-sales customers.

• We see who joined today and whether they look like our ICP
• Anyone can start a thread, tag the right person, or notify everyone else that they've already reached out
• Warm intros were easy to track
• The basics get answered intuitively without dashboards: how many new users joined, are we attracting ICP, who owns follow‑ups.

Once you have this data, there's lots you can do.

Here are some examples:

• For fellow devtool companies, we reach out with an auto‑generated Val that runs their SDK so the first touch includes a working demo.

• Get Townie to build people custom demos etc. based on their profile - Patrick Spychalski has a great example post with a similar workflow.