I'm Richard. I build GTM systems, and I got here the hard way.

My name is Richard. I spent fifteen years in customer support — gaming, SaaS, high-pressure environments where you learn to solve problems fast or things break. I was good at it. But about eight months ago I left my job with a simple goal: upskill, and figure out what came next.

I started where most technical people start — tinkering. I messed around with Claude Code, built things, shipped Achilleus, a security monitoring tool for digital agencies. Then came the part nobody warns you about: building something is the easy part. Marketing it is another discipline entirely. I had a product and no idea how to get it in front of people.

That's how I found Clay. And through Clay, GTM engineering.

I'd stumbled into a field I didn't know existed. GTM engineering as a formal role is only a few years old, but it sits exactly at the intersection of where I'd spent my career — technical enough to build, customer-facing enough to understand what actually matters. And the more I got exposed to the community, to what the best practitioners were actually building, the more I felt something I can only describe as genuine obsession.

So I enrolled in the Clay bootcamp. It wasn't cheap, and I had real doubts. I was starting from zero — not the comfortable kind of zero where you at least know the vocabulary, but the kind where you open a tool and genuinely don't understand what you're looking at. My instinct was to obsess over ROI. Would this pay off? How quickly? What if it didn't?

My mentor reframed it with the simplest advice I got during the entire program: be proactive, and build something every day. Not study. Not consume. Build.

It sounds obvious in hindsight. Most good advice does. But there's a difference between knowing something intellectually and actually doing it — shipping a workflow, breaking it, fixing it, shipping it again. Somewhere in that loop, the ROI question became irrelevant. Because I started to realise the real return wasn't a client or a job offer. It was a shift in how I saw myself.

I went from “I don't understand anything” to “I know how to do this.”

That transition doesn't happen by reading documentation. It happens when someone won't let you stay comfortable, when you're surrounded by people operating at the level you're trying to reach, and when the only way forward is to actually build the thing.

A funny footnote: the Claude Code skills I'd written off as a detour turned out to be genuinely useful in GTM. The field rewards people who can move across the stack, and it turns out the tech person who pivoted into GTM is exactly the profile the market is looking for.

The bootcamp was expensive. I'd make the same choice again without hesitating. Not because everything went smoothly — it didn't — but because the combination of mentorship, structure, and daily accountability compressed what could have taken years into months.

I'm not done learning. But I'm no longer lost, and that's worth more than any degree.