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Hiten Shah
Co-Founder and CEO at Nira
Hiten Shah is a serial software entrepreneur and co-founder of Nira, a company that aims to keep sensitive documentation safe from unauthorized access by integrating smart identity management tools. Shah began his career in the early 2000s and has since launched multiple successful software companies, among them Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics. Prior to launching Nira, Shah co-founded Quick Sprout. Shah's drive and expertise in software development and entrepreneurship have propelled him to be at the forefront of fast-growing software companies. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley, and attended high school at Brea Olinda and La Mirada.
Highlights
When you work with AI, the output is never random. It’s a mirror held up to how clearly you think.
Every response is a reflection of your own edges and blind spots. The model doesn’t create ideas. It digs through your words to find the one you meant. What you see on screen is your own reasoning, rendered in pixels.
The first time I realized this, I was testing a design prompt. The layout it produced looked competent but lifeless. I rewrote the prompt a few times, added adjectives, and even name-dropped styles I liked. Each result came back different, but none of them felt right. They were all accurate reflections of my words and incomplete reflections of my intent. That’s when it hit me. The model wasn’t missing imagination. I was missing articulation.
Working with AI shows how much of our thinking hides between the lines. In conversation, other people fill in those gaps for us. They infer tone, context, intention. Machines don’t. They give you exactly what you say, stripped of every human assumption. It’s unnerving at first, but it’s also clarifying. The gaps in your output are really gaps in your direction.
Once you notice the pattern, prompting feels less like control and more like composition. You don’t tell it what to do. You trace the perimeter where meaning can form. When your intent is vague, AI compensates with templates. When your intent is sharp, it composes. The difference feels like creativity, but it’s just comprehension.
I started thinking of prompts as compressed creative briefs. Each one defines the edges of a world the machine can build inside. The more complete the brief, the more coherent the world. That changes what it means to design.
The real challenge is in learning how to think clearly enough to describe what you mean.
AI takes over the mechanical parts of design such as the grids, the layouts, and the repetition, so your judgment has more room to work.
What’s left is the part that’s hardest to automate: Taste.
We ran 180 AI web design prompts to see what actually works. Everyone says these tools can design full websites in minutes. I wanted to see if that was true.
Across Base 44, Bolt, Figma Make, and Lovable, we tested every variation we could think of. We changed how much detail we gave, how structured the prompt was, and how much branding we included. What we learned was simple. AI can generate clean layouts, but it can’t design in the way a person can. It needs direction. It needs a system to follow.
The best results came from prompts that had order and structure. When we asked for layout first, then styling, then interactions, the designs started to make sense. When we asked for everything at once, they fell apart.
AI-generated prompts often beat the ones we wrote ourselves. They were more complete. They included the small details that people forget to mention, like spacing rules, hierarchy, and interaction logic. We started letting AI write the first draft of each prompt, then used judgment to refine it. The output quality jumped immediately.
Brand identity made the biggest difference. When we gave AI our colors, fonts, tone, and a few reference screenshots, it produced results that felt specific. Without that context, every tool drifted into the same generic templates.
What mattered most wasn’t the platform but the process. The same rule held everywhere. Vague prompts produced average results. Structured prompts produced usable prototypes.
AI design only gets good when your thinking does. The clearer the intent, the stronger the result.
Tools change. The skill that lasts is articulation.
AI takes over the mechanical parts of design such as the grids, the layouts and the repetition, so your judgment has more room to work.
If you treat it like a shortcut, you’ll get templates. If you treat it like a collaborator, it will make you faster.
The full results, along with examples and screenshots, are here: https://t.co/lki9G3tOwX…
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Clay works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Clay offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
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- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Clay is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Clay is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Clay as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Clay offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Clay takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Clay encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Clay work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Clay is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Clay is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Clay is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Clay offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Clay offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Clay for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Clay accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Clay offers extensive integration capabilities. Clay introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Clay supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Clay also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
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Clay is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Clay stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Clay excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Clay is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Clay offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Clay is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Clay's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Clay has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Clay is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Clay beneficial.
Clay offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Clay offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Clay's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Clay offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Clay focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Clay also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Clay offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
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Clay is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Clay helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Clay's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Clay has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Clay a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Clay's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Clay's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Clay has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Clay's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Clay as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Clay eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.
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