He walked me through his workflow — how he scrapes, enriches, and personalizes at scale. But when we got to the tooling part, he paused and said:
“I love Clay, but I’m paying over $300/month just to use custom APIs. It feels crazy.”
That stuck with me.
As someone who’s been building tools for solo founders, that kind of friction hits a nerve. When a great workflow becomes too expensive or limiting, it kills momentum.
So I started experimenting. Nothing fancy, just trying to see if I could replicate the functionality he actually needed, without all the fluff.
Now there’s a scrappy little version up and running. It’s definitely not Clay. But it solves that one pain point, using your own APIs, easily.
If you’re into cold outreach and deal with this kind of stuff, happy to share access and hear what you think.