Clay Is Joining Automattic

by kstrauser • 1 year ago

6 8 1 year ago

Oh, neat! I just had an email exchange with these folks.

I asked them to take down a copy of my former LinkedIn profile that they scraped while I still had one.

Despite them complying, it really left a weirdly bad taste in my mouth, so I wish them the absolute fucking worst of luck with all of their future endeavours.

kstrauser5• 1 year ago

Yikes. I wouldn’t like that either. My guess is that’s probably because one of your LinkedIn contacts added you to their Clay account, but who can tell.

How did you find out your information was in there.

pavel_lishin3• 1 year ago

My guess is that’s probably because one of your LinkedIn contacts added you to their Clay account

Possibly. But I deleted my LinkedIn account... I want to say at least two years ago, maybe more? I don't know how long Clay has been around.

And I found out by Googling my name.

kstrauser5• 1 year ago

Clay is a “personal CRM”, meant for tracking your own personal contacts, not necessarily your entire enterprise’s customer list. It’s basically your address book but on steroids. I love the idea of such things where you could set reminders like “text your old college buddy if you haven’t heard from him in 6 months”. Whenever the topic comes up, people inevitably ask “can’t you just remember that on your own?” No. No, I can’t. There’s an entire to-do list industry for people who need reminders for all sorts of things.

Automattic is the Wordpress gang. Now they’ve acquired Clay.

My personal take: I like the idea of Clay and I’d installed it and played with it to see if it’d be valuable to me. However, its value is lower than the negative value of dealing with Automattic, and I’ve deleted my account now.

pavel_lishin3• 1 year ago

I'm right there with you - I like this idea, but see my other comment about why I will absolutely not be using Clay for this.

Honestly, it's the sort of thing 95% of whose value I can get by setting up a spreadsheet, or a recurring task in my todo app. (Which I've already done.)

kstrauser5• 1 year ago

That’s what I’ve done: made repeating tasks in OmniFocus to handle it. It’s a little janky, and I can imagine a bunch of ways a trusted CRM could help with that, like seeing from my phone and message all logs that I’ve talked to them or texted them recently and marking it “done” automatically. Or maybe letting me create an “old friends” tag or group that managed all the reminders for me automatically. Maybe even local AI’s summary of our last chat in a contact’s notes.

But those are just nice-to-haves. Given that I do not trust Automattic to the level I’d need for those features, I’ll just keep slogging away in my to-do manager.

kstrauser5• 1 year ago

TechCrunch says more at https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/12/automattic-acquires-relati...

For Clay, the long-term plan at Automattic includes integrating with Beeper, and ultimately becoming an identity layer for a variety of different tools.

Clay Is Joining Automattic

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