Most SaaS companies follow a familiar growth formula: hire a sales team, pour money into ads, spin up a demand gen engine, and hope the pipeline doesn’t dry up. Clay chose a different path and built an ecosystem instead. Certifications, local community chapters, live workshops, a talent marketplace, and a full-fledged university. For a long time, it wasn’t clear from the outside that any of this was paying off. Today, Clay ranks among the fastest-growing GTM platforms globally, with nearly 370 employees, 84 community chapters worldwide, and a brand that extends far beyond the traditional SaaS crowd. On a recent episode of Move the Needle, Yash Tekriwal, Head of Ecosystem Growth at Clay, unpacked exactly how they did it: the six distinct subgroups within their ecosystem, a certification program that looks nothing like typical credentialing, and why Clay deliberately tracks two categories of data: hard financial metrics and what they call “the feeling.” This is their playbook. If you want to measure the metrics that truly matter for your ecosystem motion — pipeline influenced, retention by champion presence, expansion by cohort — Databox lets you build that visibility quickly, without waiting on an analyst. Try it free. Why Most Companies Never Build an Ecosystem Most SaaS companies avoid ecosystem-led growth because they lack conviction. Ecosystems are slow to get off the ground, difficult to attribute, and nearly impossible to justify in a boardroom where pipeline is the only metric that counts. Yash was candid about this tension at Clay. “Almost everything that we do is both incredibly important to the financial metrics…