From Startup to CRM Challenger: How Attio Disrupted the Industry and Won Big Clients
How do you take on a $250B company like Salesforce? It starts with 2 guys on their laptops.
This is the story of Attio:
There’s many reasons Salesforce is down 25% from ATH, but challengers like Attio are one of them.
Their growth journey has lessons for any startup or PM:
1️. Start with a personal problem
Nicolas Sharp was running BizDev for VC Passion Capital back in the mid-2010s.
Things were good, except his CRM. What he encountered was:
- Clunky interfaces straight out of 1999
- Integrations to pull your hair out
- Countless hidden costs
So he set out build a verticalized CRM for VCs. And he managed to snag Alexander Christie as first engineer. The duo were a power pair, and Fundstack was taking off.
2️. Pivot based on what the market is telling you
Customers were paying them, but also asking for all sorts of features. Nick & Alex realized:
“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?”
So the duo decided to pivot to a full-fledged, not verticalized, CRM solution. But that’s not the easiest thing to do…
3️. Be willing to build the product you need to, not the quick solution
Building a full CRM would take a lot of time. They wouldn’t be able to follow the Y Combinator religion of shipping fast. Instead, they took a page out of the long incubation period for Notion and Figma.
If you count Fundstack, they spent a full 5 years building before going public access in 2022.
The strategy worked. The company was able to raise a $23.5M series A from Redpoint in 2023 and snag customers like Coca-Cola and Replit.
4️. Have founders lead product until you have co-founders + 2 product teams
Their product is great but it wasn’t built by PMs. Until 4 months ago, they hadn’t even hired a PM. Instead, they’ve pursued a product engineering strategy, where engineers all have mini-PMs inside them.
Nevertheless, they really hit all the PLG notes — from activation and expansion to monetization and go-to-market — in true form.
And with their design, they’ve moved themselves into the design-led challenger category, alongside the Notions, Linears, and Dovetails of the world.
The Attio model has learnings for aspiring startups everywhere.
To learn more, including how they build product and their PLG motion screen by screen, check out my deep dive.
