In today's episode, I chat with Danilo, founder at Viralnetix, about why he's deliberately steering away from the oversaturated B2B SaaS and IT services space and into niches most agencies won't touch—insurtech, CPG brands, and others where two-plus years of domain experience becomes the actual differentiator rather than just another Clay workflow.
He walks through two campaigns in detail: an insurtech ABM play targeting roughly 600 European insurance companies where the team built a full signal-tracking system around leadership changes, new offices, and board movements, then sent automated emails the moment a gap appeared—and where, against conventional wisdom, longer emails outperformed short ones because that's just how insurance people want to be talked to; and a US protein brand campaign where a single SDR was spending his entire day manually building Google Maps lists and sending 20 emails, forgetting to follow up whenever a deal came in, and losing pipeline in both directions—until Viralnetix rebuilt the whole thing in Clay and Instantly, mapped every juice bar and chiropractor in the US, and got him to 2,000 emails a day with his only job now being to call back the positive replies. Danilo's origin story is one of the more entertaining ones I've heard on this show—charging his parents 10% commission on cash at age six, grinding through dropshipping and affiliate marketing failures at 14, building Instagram pages to 100k followers and selling them, launching the first version of Viralnetix as an influencer management company at 19, realizing they were sending manual PDFs for two to three hours per email with nothing to show for it, joining Jeremy at TC9, becoming a partner, burning out hard enough to spend two full months lying on the grass doing nothing, and coming back to restart Viralnetix with Jana. His prediction: Clay tables as a skill will get automated, but the experts who understand the underlying logic will get faster and better because of AI rather than redundant—and Claude Code is already worth watching as an alternative for qualifying records at a scale and cost Clay can't match. His advice: if you're non-technical, go deep on Clay and email infrastructure first; if you're technical, go straight to Claude Code; either way, do it manually by hand first so you actually understand why automating it matters.
Enjoy 🙂
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0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards
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0:28) What Viralnetix Does: Growth Partner, Not Just a Lead Gen Agency
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1:05) Niching Into Insurtech and CPG to Escape Agency Saturation
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3:27) InsurTech Campaign: ABM on 600 European Companies, Signal Tracking, Long Emails That Actually Worked
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6:42) CPG Campaign: US Protein Brand, 20 Emails a Day to 2,000 a Day, SDR Now Just Closes
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9:01) The Real Competition Isn't Other Agencies—It's the Manual SDR
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12:20) Danilo's Journey: 10% Commission at Age Six to Burning Out as a Partner at TC9
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16:37) Restarting Viralnetix After Two Months of Doing Absolutely Nothing
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17:17) Predictions: Clay Tables Will Get Automated, Experts Will Survive, Claude Code Is Coming
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20:01) Advice: Learn Clay End-to-End First, Then Upgrade to Claude Code If You Want to Go Deeper
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What is The GTM Engineer Podcast?
GTMEs didn't think they would evolve this way. They just kept automating things until it became their whole job. Now the tooling is moving faster than anyone can keep up with, there's no real playbook, and half the advice online is either too vague or written by someone who hasn't actually done it. This podcast is for you if you're in the middle of figuring it out - real workflows, numbers, and mistakes from expert GTMEs at startups, mid-market, and enterprise. If you're wiring up Clay, rethinking your outbound stack, or trying to make AI actually useful in your pipeline, welcome to the The GTM Engineer Podcast.