Thread by @zmh

ok Twitter, we built the 𝖕𝖊𝖗𝖘𝖔𝖓𝖆𝖑 𝖈𝖗𝖒 we’ve always wanted and would love your thoughts

To explain why, we wrote a post about the world’s richest family and 200,000 index cards

clay.earth/why

Sign up for the waiting list and then come back for the thread ⤵️

As @achariam and I started thinking about the personal CRM, we heard loud and clear: literally 0 people in the world want to use a CRM.

All the features you expect from one (funnels! follow-up reminders! ~metadata~! workflows!) are all WAY too cold, transactional, and unfeeling

So we talked to a lot of people. Like, a lot. And probably half the people we talked to have one or more notes they use to remember things about people they meet.

In fact, the people who do are some of our favorite people!

Some, like @exleyja, have a separate note per meeting.

Others, like @khemaridh, built their own system in a spreadsheet and write about how meaningful it is to their interactions with others:

radreads.co/i-couldnt-find…

After trying specialized apps for this — Contactually, Fullcontact, Cloze, etc. — most have ended up sporadically using Excel or Airtable in some capacity, but spreadsheets are the general purpose do-everything-badly version of this.

Nobody is happy with their current system.

Introducing Clay! You can think of Clay as a cross between a notes app and Instapaper/Pocket, but focused on remembering people and things about them. We wanted it to feel lightweight and magical.

clay.earth

Here’s how it works:
1. Sign up and connect your calendar. We pull people you've met over the past few years and create a little note card on them. (No email access! And we get rid of certain people you don't want in here - system addresses, best friends, etc.)

2. In that note card, we automatically pull a bunch of info on that person — their bio, links to their social handles, and things they've expressed an interest about on Twitter or LinkedIn. That way, there's 0 work for you to do when you sign up. No manual tagging or sorting!

3. We let you write notes about people and remind you after calendar meetings to add anything to clay that you might want to remember about a person later (did they mention their kid’s name? A favorite food? People they're looking to hire?)

And then, the best part:

We built the *best* search on top of *both* the bio info and your notes.

Not only do you get results instantly, we do the hard work of standardizing your notes automagically.

It's hard to describe without seeing it, so watch the intro video on the site: clay.earth

So searching for “technical” shows people you've noted are technical, but also anyone who has CSS, JavaScript, machine learning, etc. in their LinkedIn

Searching for places like "Japan" shows notes that mention Tokyo or a Japanese company, even if they don't say Japan explicitly

What doesn't this have? A complex tagging system, funnels, rigid follow up reminders, categories, labels. There's no inbox. Not even an overall number.

You don't need them, promise! Just jot thoughts down during or after meetings and we’ll take care of the rest.

We want this to be something you're proud to use and have on your homescreen 🙌🏽

So sign up for the waitlist and @ me with thoughts or questions.

ugh I meant @JohnExley obviously