Key Takeaways:
More traffic doesn't necessarily mean better marketing.
Measure content by the opportunities and qualified demand it creates, not just how many people land on a page.Let AI run the engine; let humans create the fuel.
Automate the systems that help marketing function, while preserving human judgment and voice where trust, creativity, and differentiation matter.Build distribution early—and start SEO before you need the results.
Don't wait until growth stalls to build channels and content that take months to mature.“AI-powered” is a category, not a compelling reason to buy.
Differentiate through the specific work you remove, the experience you create, and the customer you serve—not just the technology you use.When features are easy to copy, distribution and execution become strategic advantages.
Sustainable advantage increasingly depends on how effectively you reach the market and how quickly your team can turn strategy into action.
Welcome to The Setlist podcast. Today I'm speaking with Chris Eberhardt. Chris leads marketing at Clarify, the autonomous CRM, and has spent time at companies like Reforge, HubSpot, and Formlabs. When he's not working, he's consuming an alarming amount of Frank's RedHot sauce, snowboarding, or wrestling with his dog Rufus. Enjoy!
How Clarify's marketing strategy evolved
Erica: I'm excited about this conversation because of Clarify's trajectory, and because you've been there from the start. When you first joined, you knew you were building toward investor funding. You raised in June 2025. How has marketing changed from the beginning, through that transition, to where you are now?
Chris: Early on, we were confident that founder brand would be a big part of our marketing strategy. At first, that meant LinkedIn across all the founders and the occasional blog. We've kept LinkedIn going, and we've expanded into our podcast, The First Pitch, and Patrick's weekly Substack, Founder Therapy. Founder brand has proven effective, so we've scaled it into a real media engine.
We've started to distinguish between content made for human consumption and content made for machine consumption. Our media engine is content made by humans for humans. The other side is our SEO and answer engine optimization strategy, and that has changed substantially.
When we first started, we had a hypothesis: if we created a lot of AI-generated blog posts at scale around certain topics, there might be an arbitrage opportunity to capture search traffic quickly. In combination with the work you were doing at Animals, that worked fairly well at first. We had a big spike in traffic.
But as Google released algorithm updates, traffic to those AI-generated posts declined. By about November of last year, we were seeing really poor-quality traffic from them. Matt Hodges and I decided to delete every AI-generated blog post on the website. That meant thousands of posts.
Our traffic numbers took a huge hit. Optically, it was difficult for the marketing team to defend that decision. But since then, we've returned to SEO fundamentals: human-written posts, about ten to fifteen a month rather than hundreds or thousands, based on topic and keyword research. We've seen a promising climb back from rock bottom, and the quality of the traffic is much higher. Now, around 40% of our inbound lead volume comes from organic search, which wasn't the case before.
So our content strategy has two sides: the human-focused media engine and SEO/AEO. Two other things have changed. We've developed a much better system for deciding where to use AI and where to use humans. And the market is far more competitive. When we launched last June, we were one of about three AI CRMs. Now we're probably one of fifteen.
We're still betting big on content, but that bet has changed shape. We've matured in how we use AI.
Erica: I love that you went from predominantly AI-generated blog content, deleted it, and returned to human-generated content. There was a period when it seemed like AI would be the answer to everything and help us scale, but you're finding that the human piece matters. When you pulled those blogs, were the founder-led newsletter and podcast already happening?
Chris: We started the newsletter around the same time. I think the first issue of Founder Therapy went out in November, and we'd deleted the blog posts in late October or early November. The podcast came later, around May or June of this year.
Erica: Without that Substack newsletter, do you think it would have taken longer to rebuild traffic?
Chris: I'm not sure it directly affected our traffic recovery. But it would have been harder to prove that content initiatives were effective in general. If we hadn't seen results from LinkedIn and the newsletter, it would have been difficult to remain optimistic about content as a bet.
That consistent LinkedIn and newsletter presence created enough opportunities for Patrick and the company that it bought us time to rebuild the other side of content. It helped maintain confidence in the strategy, even if it didn't directly restore search traffic.
What AI does best—and what humans should own
Erica: You're being intentional about what's AI-generated versus human-created. How are you distinguishing those, and why?
Chris: We have a great GTM engineer, Michael Bartimer. We think about marketing in two categories, using Emily Kramer's engine-and-fuel framework. The engine is the systematic side, and the fuel is the creative side.
We use AI heavily for the engine. For example, we use Claude Code to manage much of our Google Ads and LinkedIn ads presence. It monitors budgets, adds negative keywords, and suggests new campaigns. It helps keep an eye on things and adjust the levers when we don't have time to do it manually.
We also use AI for reporting. Every week, a Claude routine pulls reports and updates Notion documents so everyone works from the same data without spending the morning compiling it.
We use it for website development and management. Our site is hosted on Sanity. Previously, creating a new Sanity page might have required a developer or someone comfortable with code. Now we use Conductor to build or update pages, which lets marketers manage the site more directly.
We also use AI in systematic go-to-market processes: when someone visits the website, we can identify the visitor, qualify them against our ideal customer profile, and run outreach. These repeatable processes are where we've leaned into AI.
On the fuel side, we use humans almost exclusively. Our executive brand—the newsletter, podcast, and LinkedIn—is human-written. We might use AI to summarize a transcript, but not to create the core material. After trying AI-generated SEO content, we're committed to human writers and strategists for SEO and AEO, too.
Design is also human-led: landing pages and social assets. Maybe the tools will get better, or maybe I'm just bad at using them for design, but we stick with people. We also work with LinkedIn and Substack creators to spread the word about Clarify. So the engine is very AI-heavy; the fuel is mostly human.
Erica: The fuel side has a direct connection to another person. You're being mindful of relationships and trust. The engine side is more technical and largely internal, so it's an easier place to automate.
Chris: Exactly.
What to build first if you're starting from scratch
Erica: Clarify is still a startup. How big is your marketing team now?
Chris: Only two of us full-time. We also work with some great contractors and agencies on different parts of the work.
Erica: If you were restarting Clarify from scratch today, what's the first system you'd put in place? Someone listening to everything you just described might think, There's a lot to do.
Chris: I'd still make founder brand my first bet. The important caveat is whether your audience is actually on LinkedIn. People hear how effective founder-led marketing can be, start posting, and maybe get traction, but it doesn't produce opportunities for the business. Not every company's audience is on LinkedIn.
You can extend founder brand to wherever your audience is. You could do behind-the-scenes YouTube videos about building the company, like The Browser Company. You could use X or Facebook if that's where the audience spends time.
The great thing about founder brand is that it generally doesn't cost much money. If you're bootstrapped and need distribution, it's a good system to stand up early.
The second thing I'd start early is SEO fundamentals. Have an opinion on the topics you want to rank for or be mentioned for. SEO is a lot like investing money: time is your best asset. The longer you wait, the longer it'll take to see results. Even if you can only do the basics, start early.
So I'd establish a founder-brand strategy on the channels that make sense, and then start chipping away at SEO and AEO, even if the results won't be immediate.
Erica: That's exactly what I'd do, too.
How Clarify's messaging and positioning changed
Erica: Content creation is also about messaging. Over the last couple of years, I've watched Clarify's story evolve. When I first encountered Clarify, it was a “joyful AI-native CRM.” Then it became “the autonomous CRM that helps you sell more.” Now it's “the autonomous CRM for fast-moving go-to-market teams.” How did you know it was time to change the messaging?
Chris: Over the past year or year and a half, we've learned that AI-native is more of a category you belong to than a reason someone buys your product. It's a category, not really a positioning strategy.
If you looked at other CRM homepages—Attio, Day.ai, HubSpot, Salesforce, Lightfield—you saw versions of “AI CRM” or “AI-native CRM” everywhere. We needed a wedge within that crowded category. We wanted to explain what people would actually feel using Clarify.
At first, we used joyful. I still think some people feel that when they use it. But what we really want to communicate is that when you log into Clarify, work has already been done for you. It proactively handles tasks that used to take sellers hours every week: updating deal summaries, downloading call transcripts, extracting action items, drafting outbound emails, and finding good-fit leads.
So we moved away from using “AI-native” as our positioning because people already understand the category. We needed to express what sets the experience apart.
The latest version—“for fast-moving go-to-market teams”—reflects another evolution. At the beginning, Clarify was heavily geared toward the solo founder. That's still our number-one user persona and our largest source of inbound leads by far. But we've also seen venture capital firms and Series B and Series C companies start using the product at scale. We're trying to communicate that the tool can serve go-to-market teams of different sizes.
Erica: When everyone was using the phrase “AI-native,” was there some pressure to keep up with competitors—to look good to the other companies in the space? What I see in the latest messaging is that you've shifted away from what competitors are saying and toward who actually uses Clarify and what they need.
Chris: That's right. You have to be careful with website positioning. One trap is trying to keep up your image relative to competitors and making sure you're seen as part of the same forward-looking class.
Another trap is positioning for investors. You land on a company's homepage and the language sounds like it's straight out of a pitch deck: what the company wants to become in five or ten years, rather than what someone visiting the website can buy today.
We wanted to strike a balance. We do want to be perceived as a startup pushing the boundaries of technology, especially in the autonomous, agentic era. But we also need the site to speak to the buyer rather than to a hypothetical Series A or Series B pitch deck. Part of it is trying to zag when others zig; the bigger part is talking to our buyers in the clearest way.
Erica: That's such a common pitfall when companies are raising money. Suddenly they feel like they have two audiences: the people the product is built for and the people who might invest. That can make the messaging messy. Investors ultimately want to see that you're reaching people who will buy the product. Your website should primarily speak to the end user, not to the person you're trying to raise capital from.
Chris: Absolutely. There's a case for a website being a little future-looking and helping sell the dream of what the product can become. But if you go too high-level, visitors can no longer tell what the product actually does.
You want to inspire someone about the future while staying rooted in what the product can do on the day they sign up. If you sell someone a vision and the product turns out to be six or eight months behind what they expected, you create a moment of disappointment that's hard to recover from. People start to distrust the brand. It's a difficult but important balance, and I think “autonomous CRM” has worked well for us as we keep building toward that promise.
Competing in a crowded AI market
Erica: You mentioned that Clarify went from one of a handful of companies in the category to many more competitors. How does that feel?
Chris: It's as exciting as it is stressful. Every new competitor validates that it's a big opportunity and a real problem. For a long time, people had just a couple of CRM choices. New technology means more people can tackle that problem, and it's exciting to be in a category so many people want to enter.
But as a marketer, it's challenging. CRM was already one of the most expensive and competitive spaces in SaaS. More entrants make paid ads less efficient and make it harder to position yourself in a way that genuinely stands out. So it's both validating and difficult.
Erica: Have you seen anyone copy Clarify or try to ride your coattails? I think a lot of founders would worry about that.
Chris: I wouldn't say anyone has copied us directly. But the vision is similar across many companies. The hardest—and most exciting—thing about AI is that a feature that might once have differentiated you for a year can now differentiate you for a couple of weeks. People can build so much faster.
There have been moments when we've released something and a competitor launched its version weeks later. The speed and expectations around product development are completely different now. You have to find other ways to differentiate, and distribution is one of those ways.
What startup work really demands
Erica: Final question: What's something people need to understand about working at a startup—something that surprised you when you joined Clarify or that you were a little naive about?
Chris: The biggest thing is learning to unblock yourself.
At larger companies like HubSpot or Formlabs, you have a lot of resources. If you need an email sent, an ad launched, or a web page changed, there's usually someone or a team available to help. You have world-class designers, developers, and large marketing budgets. As long as you're working within your scope, you often have the support to move forward.
At a startup, you're building your own roadmap, but you have far fewer resources to execute it. I was surprised by how much self-starting is required. There aren't lots of stakeholders who can bail you out, and you can't hide behind numbers.
You have to expect that when you hit a blocker, you're probably the one who has to get past it. I had to learn to plan and scope my work so I wouldn't become my own worst enemy, and when I did hit a blocker, to take responsibility for pushing through it. That's what I mean by unblocking yourself.
Erica: It takes a certain personality to thrive in that environment. What you just said will either deter people from startup work or make them more excited about it. It's fast and demanding. At a larger company, the blocker can be the pace: all the checkpoints and people involved can slow progress, make you revisit decisions, and make it harder to test or launch things quickly.
Thanks, Chris. It was awesome seeing you, as always, and thanks for being on the podcast.
Chris: This was great, Erica. I'm excited to see the episode, and I love the name of the podcast. Great chatting.
Erica: Thanks. See you later.
Chris: Bye!
