The Attio Deep Dive: How it Builds Product, Does PLG, and is Challenging Salesforce
The Attio Deep Dive: How it Builds Product, Does PLG, and is Challenging Salesforce
The scoop on how the hottest new CRM Challenger builds product, its PLG motion screen-by-screen, and the insides of its GTM motion
“We’re going to end up on Salesforce anyways.”
It’s a truth as old as time for sales and sales ops professionals.
But when I was working as a VP of Product at Apollo.io, our data told a different story. SMBs were definitely not just using Salesforce.
Instead, they were using any number of challenger incumbents: Hubspot, Pipedrive, and, the newest kid on the block, Attio.
So, I’ve been really interested in Attio for quite some time.
A Unique Product Culture
I was especially interested in them because they have a very unique product culture.
You see, for the longest time they didn’t have PMs. Attio just hired its first PM three months ago.
You read that right: the CRM challenger that’s been making waves all over social media has been operating with ‘product engineers’ for the last 7 years.
So I always wanted to dive in to learn more.
Finally, I have.
Today’s Post
Words: 7,081 | Est. Reading Time: 32 mins
I’ve interviewed both of Attio’s Co-Founders, its head of growth, a senior product engineer, marketing specialist, and 9 paying users of the product. (Yep, 14 interviews.)
If you’re a PM, product leader, investor, or in the sales tech space, this piece will have insights for you:
The Story of Attio
How Attio Builds Product
Attio’s Product and GTM Motion
On the Other Content…
There’s been a lot written about Attio in newsletters, from my friends: Jaryd Hermann, Michael Houck, Kyle Poyar, Tom Alder, and more.
To differentiate from those already excellent pieces, I’ve focused in on content that you can’t find anywhere else, like how they build product and insider insights into their GTM.
If you only have 1 minute…
Here are some of the key lessons we will cover today:
1. Attio's product and engineering culture is a glimpse into the future.
With practices like:
Hiring "product engineers" instead of siloed developers
Empowering autonomous product teams
And hiring a PM once it had 4 squads
Attio has played the product scaling playbook perfectly.
Startups should take note of this model as they scale their own teams.
2. PLG + great design are a beautiful combination.
Attio is part of a group of rapidly growing PLG + design companies like Linear, Notion, Superhuman, ARC browser, and Dovetail.
Attio feels almost like a game, with fast time to value plus remaining fun to use as a daily-use software:
Incredible e-mail inbox analysis on start
Looks like Notion, edits like Figma
Custom objects all the way down
3. Pricing and packaging should evolve with the user journey.
Attio's used pricing and packaging as a strategic lever throughout its journey, most recently adopting the reverse trial.
As a result, it’s been able to increase free to paid conversion as it grows.
4. Product and GTM must be in lockstep to maximize growth.
Attio's sales team doesn't just focus on closing deals, they’re incentivized to help users build a strong foundation in the product.
This alignment between product and go-to-market helps them convert initial traction into sustainable growth.
1. The Story of Attio
Chapter 1 - From Verticalized to Generalized
A personal problem
Like many entrepreneurs, Nicolas Sharp's journey began with a painful personal experience.
As an investor at London-based VC firm Passion Capital in the mid-2010s, he was tasked with revamping the deal flow management process. It required finding a CRM solution and integrating it with the firm's existing systems and workflows.
The experience was, in a word, terrible.
Nicolas quickly became disillusioned with the options on the market. As anyone who has tried a CRM before knows, they have:
Clunky interfaces
Rigid data models
Painful integrations
Countless hidden costs
He thought, "There has to be a better way." And like many founders before him, he resolved to build it himself.
In April 2017, Nicolas started Fundstack, a vertical CRM catering specifically to the needs of venture capital and private equity investors.
Its promise was a simpler solution tailored to the industry's nuances.
Before long, Nicolas was able to convince Alexander Christie to join the nascent company as its first engineer and eventual co-founder.
Together, the pair managed to find solid early traction. Fundstack's focused, narrow approach resonated. Early customers signed on for high annual contract values.
The pivot
As Fundstack grew, cracks started to show in the verticalized model.
VCs bombarded the small team with a barrage of bespoke feature requests, pulling the product in multiple directions at once. There was clearly no one-size-fits-all solution, even within a single industry. (Remember this detail for later.)
Six months in, Nicolas and Alex were working harder than ever before. But something didn't feel right. While tinkering away on Fundstack, they couldn't escape a nagging thought: "What if we dreamed bigger?"
One day, they sat down together in a cafe and reflected.
We realized that if we're going to put all of this work into something, knowing it's not the best version of what it could be, what's the point? We asked ourselves: hypothetically, if we pivoted to build something much more ambitious, what would it look like?
—Nicolas Sharp, Co-Founder and CEO
The duo pulled out a notebook and sketched out a vision for a flexible, modern CRM - one that could bend to any company's unique needs. A product they would call "Attio."
Committing in full
There was just one catch.
To build Attio's ideal version, foundational architecture would need major investment up-front. This was no minimum viable product. If successful, the approach could produce a step-change improvement over incumbents. If it didn't pan out, the company would have nothing to show for years of work.
It was a high-risk, high-reward bet. One that would take three long years to play out. But Nicolas and Alex decided to try.
At first, Nicolas and Alex split time between Attio and Fundstack, keeping the lights on for the first product while pouring their passion into the second.
But once they had a viable prototype for Attio, they knew it was time to rip the band-aid off. Nicolas and Alex shut down Fundstack and painstakingly migrated customers over one by one. There was no going back.
Chapter 2 - Building in Stealth for 3 Years
Foregoing the MVP
While the Attio co-founders had conviction in their contrarian product approach, they knew it would be a long road.
They were inspired by companies like Airtable and Figma who had also foregone the conventional "MVP-first" model. Instead, these businesses made significant investments to launch with robust, full-featured products. Figma, for example, was started in 2012 but didn't launch publicly until 2015.
We started Attio from a blank canvas perspective. We wanted to build something extremely flexible, similar to Notion or Airtable. That took intense engineering. We wouldn't be able to go with the typical 'build an MVP and iterate' route.
—Nicolas Sharp, Co-Founder and CEO
So Nicolas and Alex got comfortable with the idea of an extended product development cycle.
Indeed, that’s why no Salesforce of Hubspot challenger had actually appeared before them.
"We accepted that we'd have to put a lot of groundwork into getting the foundations of the product right. Over time they were much larger than expected, but that was okay. In the end, it's how we'd support our product vision," said Nicolas.
Still Staying Narrow—In Their Own Way
That's not to say Attio was building in a vacuum. From the very beginning, Nicolas was deliberate about identifying the company's ideal customer profile (ICP) and recruiting a small group of design partners as early adopters.
"Even though we're building a horizontal tool, we're very particular in our messaging and who we try to reach," Nicolas explained. "Founders and builders at early-stage startups are perfect for Attio."
Closing those initial design customers was an uphill battle. The Attio team had to persuade organizations to take a leap of faith on a raw, untested product. But Nicolas and Alex were willing to put in the hours to earn their trust.
As an early stage startup, you don't always have a lot of leverage. But you can work harder and go the extra mile. We did unscalable things like free data consulting and custom migration processes for those first users.
—Nicolas Sharp, Co-Founder and CEO
The learnings gained from this tight customer feedback loop more than justified the heavy lift. And gradually, the product started to take shape.
Early Access
By April 2020, Attio had grown to a lean team of 12. They were ready to start gradually onboarding more customers via an early access program.
"The surface area of the product was small at that point, but the things it did, it did well," recalled Nicolas. "We used feedback from early customers to cover gaps, often spending days hacking together custom solutions. Then we'd incorporate those learnings into the core product."
Word of Attio started to get around. The waitlist ballooned to several thousand people eager to get their hands on the product. By February 2021, momentum was building:
23.1 million custom property values in the product
34 million emails processed
111 million contacts enriched
....all while still in private beta.
Attio was onto something. But the real test was yet to come: would customers actually pay?
Chapter 3 - Raising Money and Growing
Seed Fundraise
Even in closed beta, with usage constrained to a small group of early adopters, Attio's initial traction turned heads. In November 2021, the company raised a $7.7M seed round led by Point Nine Capital, Balderton Capital, and Headline.
At the time of the fundraise, Attio already had 120 paying customers on the books, including recognizable names like Coca-Cola, Supercell, and Upfront Ventures. Annual recurring revenue had surpassed $1M.
I was curious how the Attio team approached those crucial first deals that de-risked the business. In a market full of free CRM options, how did they persuade customers to open their wallets?
When you're in closed beta, your product is not being used by a ton of people. There is always this existential question: will people actually pay for it? You have to ask yourself - are we providing enough value?
—Nicolas Sharp, Co-Founder and CEO
To pressure test their pricing, Attio started with a very simple model at a relatively high price point compared to alternatives. Lo and behold, people paid for it.
Cutting the Price in Half
"That was great validation," recalled Nicolas. "But we quickly learned that while some would pay the high price, we were losing a lot of customers because it was too expensive."
Nicolas and the team realized that for Attio to reach its full potential, it needed to be more competitively priced. They wanted it to be a tool that everyone in an organization adopted, not a siloed dataset.
CRM is a product that you want people to really get embedded into their company. Its real value comes from the number of team members using it. You don't want it to just be used by a few power users.
—Nicolas Sharp, Co-Founder and CEO
Based on this insight, Attio quickly cut their price in half. The results were telling - a significant boost to close rates and deal velocity.
Layering on PLG
Still, something was missing. Attio had proven people would pay, and even expanded their addressable market with more competitive pricing. But the ultimate goal was to spark exponential growth. How could they accelerate user acquisition even further?
The answer lied in a Product-Led Growth model.
The team focused on crafting an exceptional product experience for early customers—one that would "wow" users and create natural word-of-mouth virality.
Behind the scenes, Attio was pouring an immense amount of engineering talent into areas that legacy CRMs had neglected for years: UI/UX, speed, flexibility, and third-party integrations.
We realized early on that data freshness was a killer feature. The moment someone links their email and calendar, we need to surface insights immediately. So we invested heavily in infrastructure to make imports lightning fast.
—Alexander Christie, Co-Founder and CTO
As Attio continued to polish the product in private beta, all key indicators were pointing in the right direction. Activation rates were trending up and more users were self-onboarding. There was a steady drumbeat of inbound interest from people eager to adopt the product.
After over 5 years of building, Attio was finally ready for the spotlight.
Chapter 4 - Launching Publicly
Confidence to Go GA
In stealth, Nicolas and Alex built the initial version of Attio they had sketched out on that notebook years before. The product was resonating with early customers. The business fundamentals were starting to line up.
By the end of 2022, Attio began offering a 14-day free trial and multiple plans, including a free option and a self-serve model.
On the back of that, Attio passed $1 million in annual recurring revenue.
They just needed one more indicator to build the confidence to go public: DAU to MAU ratio. Eventually, that, too, was high enough. They knew users loved the product.
The time had come to swing the doors open, and let the world in. But the co-founders knew that a CRM would never be "done." As a critical system housing customer data, there would always be an infinite wishlist of improvements.
It was uncomfortable. You've poured everything into the product. Releasing something so high stakes to the public after years of work will always be uncomfortable. We got OK with the fact that it would never be as good as we wanted it to be.
—Nicolas Sharp, Co-Founder and CEO
In March 2023, Attio officially launched out of beta, capping off a staggering 5+ year journey.
Launch
That same month, the company also announced a $23.5M Series A financing led by Redpoint Ventures to pour fuel on the fire.
Attio had timed the funding news perfectly to drum up buzz for launch day. And it worked. The day after the announcement, Attio hit #1 on Product Hunt.
They continued the growth of the product by posting “even the smallest stuff” on X and keeping their indie hacker base apprised of their progress.
Attio Today
Today, Attio is a Series A company that is scaling fast.
The company has amassed thousands of paying customers across 100+ countries with just 45 employees.
So, really, it’s still a skeleton crew taking on Goliath. Will David emerge victorious?
Let’s go deeper on how Attio builds product, goes to market, and uses PLG to find out.
2. How Attio Builds Product
Attio is one of the most fascinating product cultures I’ve come across, and I’m convinced it’s a key part of its success.
The way the company is building a product is like a glimpse into the future of product development.
We’ll touch on: the role of engineers and PMs, their use of Linear and Productboard, Attio’s architecture, and more never be revealed info…
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