2025-08-19 – Beton weekly update
First ever weekly update: who we are, current state of product + launch prep!
Hi,
It’s Vlad, founder of Beton. It’s an open source Clay.com alternative.
Thanks for reading – it’s my first ever weekly update on this product. It’s also the first company update I’m doing publicly in my life.
Feels exciting and scary at the same time.
I’ll set some expectations on content of these emails, then explain what I’m building and talk a bit more about what’s going on.
Expectations
For now, this will be the main channel for all public communication for Beton:
feature updates
hires
GTM progress
how we use Beton internally
funding
I’ll write with a weekly cadence. This can branch out into different types of content, but for now I’m focusing on keeping writing at least something regularly.
Company/product pitch
We see that B2B sales are ever harder. AI adoption leads to spam, which Gmail and MS365 fight. To cut through the noise, you need precision in your pitch.
Prep takes either a lot of money or time — which is, in the end, money.
Beton helps 1-2 person sales teams to get lead data 2x cheaper with convenience of spreadsheet interface.
It can be used in cloud or self-hosted with an MIT licence. You can bring your own keys or use Beton-hosted ones, regardless of deployment type.
Why this idea & me
I’ve spent last 9 years in and around ridetech — building crowdsourced delivery in 2 multinational scaleups and APIs for weather forecasts, KYC and B2B maps.
Whenever I tried building something of my own, I ran into the need to do B2B sales.
At one point I started using Clay. The product is amazing, but I just couldn’t afford it.
I never figured out why there’s no open source alternative for it (though Firecrawl has moved into this space).
I am a constant user of commercial open source tools. Posthog, Metabase, Redash, Activepieces, Cal.com, Clickhouse, Supabase are my weapons of choice in their categories.
I also nerd out on pricing and monetization and open source is an amazing case of pricing innovation.
I wrote a whole series of posts on this and an essay on building OSS GTM tools with amazing Danny Chepenko (ex-VC and exited founder, now building Extruct.AI).
I also find the company name pun hilarious as concrete is pretty similar to clay in use cases. There will be more. Sorry not sorry.
All of this led me to start building.
Current state
We’ve almost laid out the foundation for Beton and are putting the last touches before open sourcing it before end of September 2025.
First version has:
Apollo.io, Findymail, LeadData and OpenAI integrations
CSV import/export
passing data of any column to enrichment columns with @mentions
We’re preparing to open source the repository. This means:
adding header for navigation between tabs
turning on signups via Google and Github
adding T&C to the website
deploying live version to the cloud
boring every Github user I know with asks for stars (apologies in advance)
Beton already provides lead data for beta version customers. Let me know if you want a demo.
Ask
I’m looking for 2 kinds of people at the moment:
founders of B2B sales agencies/B2B SaaS founders who do cold outreach by themselves — happy to cut your costs on lead enrichment
engineers who want to work on open source SaaS — vibecoding is fun and I’m looking for a technical co-founder to take most of this fun away from me
If you are one — I’m all ears. If you know one — please, forward this email to them :)
You can reach me through v@getbeton.ai or by replying to this email.
Back to work now!