We replaced Clay for lead enrichment

Hey there,

Matteo here from Kinetyca.

I wanted to share something interesting we’ve built recently.

It’s system built on Claude that can help us quick campaigns that need to go live.

When a client sends us a lead list. We send it back fully enriched with emails and LinkedIn URLs in under 5 minutes.

Here's how we got there.

01THE PROBLEM WITH CLAY FOR THIS

Clay is a great tool. We still use it. But for lead enrichment specifically, it has a friction problem.

Every table you build in Clay expects inputs in a specific format. The right column names, the right fields, the right structure. If your CSV comes from Apollo, it looks one way. If it comes from a client, it looks another. If you scraped it yourself, it looks completely different.

That means before you can even start enriching emails, you are formatting. Cleaning columns. Adding missing fields. Building conditional logic so Clay can read the data correctly.

We lost hours doing this. For clients who needed results fast, it was a real bottleneck.

So we rebuilt the workflow entirely inside Claude.

02THE SYSTEM WE BUILT

We call it the Enrich Leads skill. Here is exactly how it runs.

Step 1: Source the leads

Drop a CSV or just tell Claude who you want to find. No CSV? The system pulls from our Supabase database first, then Blitz API, then Exa. In that order.

Step 2: Handle formatting automatically

Claude reads whatever structure you give it. Three different sources with three different column layouts. It does not matter. No manual cleanup required.

Step 3: Validate existing emails

If an email already exists in the list, we validate it first with Debounce before doing anything else.

Step 4: Find missing emails

No valid email found? We run FindEmail, with LeadMagick as a fallback.

Step 5: Final catchall validation

Every found email gets a final check with BounceBan before the list is ready to use.

Step 6: Output and store

Claude creates the enriched CSV and stores it automatically in the client's GitHub repo. Ready to share in seconds.

The whole thing runs in seconds. For thousands of rows.

03ONE THING TO GET RIGHT BEFORE YOU BUILD THIS

Store your API keys in the .env file inside the Claude folder. Not in the chat.

We learned this the hard way. Keys shared through the chat can get exposed, and Claude can burn through credits in ways you do not expect when the structure is not set up correctly. We lost real money figuring this out so you do not have to.

Start small. Test the system at low volume. Build your confidence in the structure before you scale.

04WHAT THIS MAKES POSSIBLE

Enrich Leads is one skill inside a larger macro we call Run Campaign. It feeds directly into copy creation, campaign setup in Smartlead, and launch. One input. The whole system runs.

We will cover Run Campaign in a future issue.

Until then, if you have questions on how we set this up for clients, book a call with us directly.