Introduction

Clay cracked SaaS growth by turning hackathons into customer joy machines. The result: 5x expansions and viral content.

What problem does it solve?

Most SaaS companies fail to help customers unlock full product value. Onboarding covers basics, but customers often plateau at "just scratching the surface." Clay solves this by making customer success hands-on, collaborative, and outcome-driven.

Quick Summary

Clay realized that true growth doesn’t come just from new features or flashy ads - it comes when customers deeply adopt and expand usage. Instead of settling for docs and calls, Clay built a system where teams spend a full day in "hackathons," walking away with real, working AI workflows.

This approach does three things at once: it helps customers get much more value from the product, it generates viral marketing content from authentic customer wins, and it drives rapid product discovery by putting engineers face-to-face with customer needs. Running 20-30 hackathons each quarter, Clay has created a self-fueling loop: happy customers share their wins, new prospects come inbound, and new features get validated faster.

The real genius is timing. Hackathons are aimed at customers who already use the tool but haven’t unlocked its full power yet. By showing them the bigger transformation possible, Clay moves them from casual users to evangelists, often expanding accounts by 5x.

Key Takeaways

• Customer success can be a growth engine, not just a support function.
• Viral marketing comes from real, emotional customer wins - not polished ads.
• Hackathons create faster feedback loops for product discovery.
• Expansion revenue and renewals grow when customers feel proud of their success.
• The playbook blends onboarding, marketing, and product into one powerful system.

What to do

• Identify customers stuck at the "scratching the surface" stage and design a program to push them further.
• Capture real-time customer success moments (video > text) and share them widely.
• Involve engineers directly in customer sessions for instant product feedback.
• Turn events into content machines: record, package, and post the authentic wins.
• Treat customer success as marketing and product discovery, not just support.

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