Clado

What do they actually do

Clado builds a people‑search and enrichment product used for hiring, outreach, and research. Today it consists of Clado Atlas, a team web app for natural‑language people search, and a public API for search, asynchronous “deep research” jobs, and contact enrichment (email/phone/profile) docs Atlas announcement Product Hunt.

Users write plain‑English queries, Clado returns ranked profiles from its index, and teams can optionally enrich results to retrieve verified contact details. Outputs are structured JSON suitable for spreadsheets, CRMs, or pipelines; bulk and async job endpoints support larger workloads search API enrichment.

Pricing is credit‑based at $0.01 per credit. By default, search results cost 1 credit per returned profile (or a fixed 5‑credit non‑AI mode); emails cost 4 credits if found and phones cost 10 credits if found. Clado advertises coverage of 800M+ profiles in its index pricing search endpoint YC page.

Who are their target customer(s)

• Corporate talent / in‑house recruiters: They need to find candidates that match complex criteria without spending hours on manual LinkedIn/Google searches and exports; contact lookups and deduplication are time‑consuming Atlas announcement search API enrichment.
• Outbound sales / SDR teams: They need reliable, current emails and phones for tightly targeted lists; existing sources are often stale or incomplete, forcing manual verification and slowing campaigns pricing get contact information.
• VC / startup talent scouts and recruiting partners: They must surface people with niche signals (papers, OSS, prior exits) quickly; keyword‑based tools miss nonstandard titles or behaviors YC page Atlas site.
• Research teams / competitive intelligence units: They need reproducible, structured lists of people for analysis; manual scraping and curation are slow and inconsistent. Async deep‑research jobs and bulk endpoints address large workloads deep research.
• Data‑ops and labeling vendors building people datasets: They must assemble large, deduplicated, and enriched person records at scale; custom scraping and enrichment pipelines are costly to build and maintain API intro bulk/enrichment.

How would they acquire their first 10, 50, and 100 customers

• First 10: Recruit 10 pilot teams from founder/YC networks (in‑house recruiting, SDRs, VC/talent) and run concierge projects delivering queries and CSV exports using Atlas and the live API so pilots experience real credited usage Atlas announcement docs/pricing.
• First 50: Turn pilot wins into case studies, drive targeted outreach in recruiter/SDR communities, and leverage Product Hunt and founder posts for self‑serve trials with visible credit consumption; convert through short paid concierge upgrades that showcase enrichment and deep‑research outputs Product Hunt enrichment.
• First 100: Publish simple ATS/CRM integration guides, list the API on developer marketplaces, and form 1–2 channel partnerships (recruiting agencies or outreach platforms). Add a light outbound motion to mid‑market teams and package volume credits and bulk/deep‑research SLAs as documented in the API search/deep research pricing.

What is the rough total addressable market

Top-down context:

Published reports suggest recruiting software (~$3B), sales intelligence (~$3.0–3.4B), and data‑enrichment (~$2.5B) together imply a narrow TAM of about $8–9B, with adjacent data‑labeling pushing the broader opportunity higher recruiting sales intelligence data enrichment data labeling.

Bottom-up calculation:

Example: a mid‑market team running 50k search results/month (1 credit each) plus 5k email finds (4 credits) and 1k phone finds (10 credits) would consume ~80k credits/month, or ~$800/month at $0.01/credit (~$9.6k/year) pricing.

Assumptions:

• Default search mode costs 1 credit per returned result; emails are 4 credits if found and phones 10 credits if found pricing.
• Volumes reflect steady mid‑market usage; enrichment counts refer to successful finds (the only time credits are charged).
• Per‑credit price of $0.01 with no volume discounts applied in this example pricing.

Who are some of their notable competitors

• ZoomInfo: Enterprise B2B contact database and enrichment suite with search UI, CRM enrichment, and APIs; strong where teams want deep integrations and intent signals beyond pure research contact/company search Enrich.
• Apollo.io: Searchable contact database combined with sales engagement (sequences, dialer) and APIs/credit model—suited to buyers who want lookup plus outreach in one tool site API pricing.
• Clearbit: Developer‑friendly enrichment and prospector tooling focused on real‑time lead/account attributes and product/CRM integrations rather than long research jobs Enrichment Prospector.
• hireEZ (formerly Hiretual): Recruiter‑first talent sourcing platform with AI search, pipelines, and ATS integrations—direct competition for in‑house talent teams prioritizing candidate discovery.
• Pipl: Identity‑focused person‑search and enrichment API used for verification, investigations, and high‑confidence contact resolution use cases.