What pulls me isn't the outreach. It's the engine underneath it.
The data, the plumbing, the automations that decide who gets reached, when, and why. I build that machine, and I can run the outreach it powers.
I've always lived in the systems behind go-to-market. When AI started rewriting them overnight, I decided to build with it, not around it.
Engineers don't usually end up in sales. I did, ~3.5 years in sales and key account management across B2B's least glamorous corners: oil & gas, precision auto-ancillary, heavy industry. The whole time, one itch nagged: too much of the engine ran on manual effort. I kept reaching for the system beneath the account.
Early 2026, AI stopped being background noise. A few weeks of digging led somewhere unsettling: every role is about to be rewritten. So I bet on where sales meets engineering: GTM engineering. Taught myself the stack in order (prompting, Clay, Make, HubSpot, n8n) and shipped six self-taught projects.
Tinkering took me far, then it didn't. So I went into the Clay Bootcamp: structured training, peers, real grounding in GTM ops and systems. It clarified my edge: I can run the outreach, but I reach for the engine first (the data, routing, and automations underneath it).
Every project plotted from Feb'26 onward, and the line is still climbing. Click any milestone to check out the build behind it.
Most of these I taught myself: off Google, AI, and the need to figure things out before anyone showed me how. The Clay Bootcamp sharpened the most recent ones. The thread through all of them is the same: the unglamorous infrastructure that makes go-to-market move.
A CRM-agnostic accountability layer that watches every lead from assignment to first human touch, fires a Slack alert the instant an SLA breaches, and scores response speed by rep, segment, and hour. It's business-hours aware, and it never fakes its own compliance number.
Detects an inbound reply, enriches the sender, classifies intent, routes to the right model, and lands an approve-ready draft in the SDR's inbox in under 90 seconds, getting smarter with every approval.
Three task-matched LLMs repair messy CRM data (classifying replies, scoring urgency, summarising notes), then a live dashboard and a weekly Slack digest tell the team which campaigns to double down on.
A quarterly n8n workflow that pulls closed-deal data, splits it into cohorts, scores how far your ICP has drifted across every dimension, and drops a narrated PDF verdict (one number, act-now or stay-the-course) into Slack.
An agent that sources US industrial distributors, disqualifies self-serve portals, gates spend behind an early ICP score, and drops verified, outreach-ready leads into Slack: 26 from 74 processed, zero manual research.
Mar 2026A technographic engine that detects which prospects run a competitor's CRM, scores their switch-ability 0–10, and routes hot targets into a ready-to-send displacement play.
Mar 2026A bi-directional detection loop that watches your CRM for champions who change jobs: flags the move, drafts a warm re-entry, and alerts the rep before the window closes.
Feb 2026An n8n-orchestrated engine that turns a company name into a research-backed sales brief in 60 seconds: intent-scored, summarised by an LLM, and pushed to Slack and the CRM.
Feb 2026A closed-loop pipeline wiring HubSpot ↔ Make ↔ Clay with custom webhooks: a new contact triggers live news research and an AI opener that syncs straight back to the record.
Feb 2026A signal-first prospecting engine that detects a company's buying window (recent funding, fast hiring), scores intent 0–10, and writes an opener tied to the actual trigger.
Feb 2026A Clay pipeline that turns raw LinkedIn URLs into scored, personalised, CRM-ready contacts, built on a Find → Enrich → Transform → Export framework.
There are more tools out there than anyone could master, each with its own strengths and trade-offs. Fluency in any single one was never the point. In a space where a sharper tool ships every other week, what matters is range: staying tool-agnostic, knowing your way around whatever the job calls for instead of marrying a stack. These are the ones I've actually had my hands on.
Clay
n8n
Make
OpenAI
Groq
Firecrawl
Deepline
Exa
Apollo
BetterContact
Prospeo
BlitzAPI
Apify
OpenRouteService
HubSpot
Attio
Gmail
Smartlead
Slack
Claude Code
Supabase
Airtable
Google Sheets