Mapping the market, and where to start

I'm restarting something I did for a few weeks last year: a short standup, most days, on one thing I'm actually working on. A workflow, a process, a tool, a win, or something I broke. Day one is market mapping. I redo this for WarmUp over and over, because every time I do it, it gets a little better.

Here's the part most people skip. Before I go to work, I go back into our CRM. Who took meetings with us? What industry were they in? What made them raise their hand, and how did they describe the pain in their own words? There's what you think your ICP is, and then there's what the data in your CRM says. They are not always the same thing, and it is worth the time to find out before you start building lists.

Then I build the audience. I started in Clay, and these days I mostly run it from Claude Code or Codex through Clay's command line instead of logging in. If you like working in the app, you can ask for a good prompt and paste it into Clay's natural-language builder.

After that it is three or four passes to clean it up, cheapest check first. The one I get asked about is the sales and marketing leader check. Apollo's basic people search, run as a step in Freckle, answers it without spending credits. It is slower, and an empty answer is not a no, but it tells you who is home before you pay to learn anything else. Size and revenue bands come from Clay Search, which draws a search quota and not credits.

Only then do I pay. A research agent reads the company's own site and says what they sell and who buys it. From there each company gets a segment, and then a tier.

Because I'm not in the tools' screens as much now, I'm going to share a diagram with every episode. Fair warning: this first one is a little hard to read. And I went past five minutes on day one, because of course I did.