A Spotlight on Attio

How a commitment to craft helped Attio gain thousands of customers

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If you work in Startupland™, you are probably familiar with the success story of Notion.

In 2016, the tiny startup Notion launched into the already crowded “document editor” market with a simple premise: “What if we made a note-taking tool that was _actually_ great?” What if it was super-fast? Easy to use? Beautiful? The result has been outstanding: hundreds of millions of happy users and a $10 billion+ valuation.

What did Notion get right? There are many many things (probably many books worth of case studies you could write about their approach) but at least one insight stands out: they bet on the idea that the new generation of users—people like you reading this email—want a consumer-grade user experience from their business software.

That’s right—users today want to interact with amazing products. Period. They want software that is both simple and powerful. Beautiful aesthetically and super fast and dynamic. This list of adjectives can go on and on but you get the point. Users want and expect amazing quality from the products they use.

This change in user expectations extends far beyond document editing—you have probably heard of other success stories pursuing a similar “make the business product at a consumer-grade level” approach: Linear (project management), Superhuman (email), and The Browser Company (browsers).

Here’s the thing: building something truly amazing is easier said than done. Beyond needing independent thinking, it’s just not enough to _want_ to make something great. You actually have to go out and prove it. You have to make the thing, and then people have to really love it.

Well how do you do that?

Trying to answer that question is why we got in touch with the team at Attio. Every business uses some sort of CRM, and there are 1000s of options on the market. Salesforce is a $300 billion company!

So why, then, are thousands of customers currently raving about what Attio has built?

• “Attio is the first CRM that feels truly modern. It’s powerful, flexible, and fast to build with. There’s nothing like it on the market.” - Sahil Mansuri, CEO & Co-founder of Bravado

• “What’s been so impactful about Attio is how AI is seamlessly woven into the platform, making it easy to experiment with and build out new functionalities which genuinely enrich our existing processes.” Axel Junestrand, Legora

We are not going to answer that question in this essay — but you can read a bit about it here, here, and in their recent $33m fundraise announcement — but we are going to try to understand: what are the ingredients that have led to this outcome?

What is it like to work at Attio?

What is the culture of the company? What are they uniquely doing to achieve these outcomes? And perhaps boldly, what can we learn about reinventing wheels?

[Quick thank you to the Attio team for sharing this behind-the-scenes information and supporting next play!]

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When you think about the last _amazing_ experience you had with a piece of software, what was it like?

Did it have a beautiful interface? An aesthetic brand? Super-fast load times? All of the above and more?

Well, when you start thinking about the types of people responsible for creating those amazing experiences—the people behind the scenes—you’ll probably find overlapping characteristics with the founders of Attio: Nicolas Sharp and Alexander Christie.

• “I have been working in startups my whole life and Nick is the first founder I have met that is both technical and creative. It's quite incredible what that unlocks for a leader.”

• “Alex has the rare ability to quickly understand a problem, then instantly present the correct solution — and he's right (most of) the time. We try to mirror that skill in how we build at Attio: efficiently and to a high standard.”

Nicolas and Alex share a key characteristic: they are able to think very long-term while, in the short-term, upholding relentlessly high standards. The Attio culture is designed to amplify those traits across the team.

One way Attio enables this is by hiring people who are personally driven to build a great product—they want to “build the best CRM in the world.”

To achieve that, they hire people who are not afraid to challenge the status quo and pursue a much higher standard of excellence and quality—the status quo is explicitly not good enough.

• “Don't assume that you've done this before. Attio is unlike anywhere I've ever worked, surrounded with a bunch of incredibly talented people. Expect to be working alongside anyone and everyone - regardless of title ... because we all have a desire to craft the best product.”

• “You need to have a passion to make a product as good as it can possibly be. If you're satisfied with "good enough", Attio is not for you.”

They look for people who are resilient in pursuing the truth (while remaining kind and curious).

• “Be detail oriented. Every pixel is scrutinised. Every user-journey is painstakingly crafted. Our meetings are hotbeds of ideas and debate. We build.”

• “Requires a strong ability to call out mediocrity and the desire to continually push for excellence across all fronts.”

They expect this commitment to truth-seeking to apply horizontally—meaning you should be the type of person that pursues the truth in all environments.

This applies to everything from product development (e.g. should we really build this feature?) to understanding internal processes (e.g. but why are we doing this thing?)

• “People at Attio are curious, think deeply and aren't afraid to question long-held assumptions.”

• “I have learned an incredible amount at Attio, but new joiners will struggle here if they expect knowledge to be presented in cleanly structured guides. Learning here comes from research, conversation and osmosis from smart colleagues. We have a lot of opportunities to work on interesting things but you'll struggle if you're not happy to jump right in.”

How do you build something great?

It is easy to talk about making something great (luckily for us—it is also easy to write about it!). But how do you actually do it? How, for example, should you build an engineering team that is capable of making something great?

Attio’s take on this is fairly straightforward, as it boils down to approximately the following formula: hire people with great judgement, empower them with context, and never compromise on detail.

A common mistake startups make is they copy some giant company’s “best practices.” They inject all of this process and planning into their culture—which completely ruins the experience. Attio seems resistant to this virus. They focus on implementing only what makes sense and actually helps people do their jobs.

• "We work without much process. You'll be expected to take complete areas of ownership and execute on them independently. Do not expect to pick up your pre-allocated kanban ticket for the day. Do expect to own your features end-to-end."

• “When it comes to execution, we try to focus on momentum and tangible deliverables over ticket tracking and we're relatively low-process across the company. Typically, the daily standup is the only meeting in my calendar. That said, we lean heavily on ad-hoc huddles to work through problems where required.”

Another mistake startups often make is they create lots of separation between their customers and the people building the product. Attio does the opposite: every engineer, at every level of seniority, directly collaborates with customers (as well as horizontally with other teammates in the organization).

• “Despite being an engineer, I remain very well connected to customers. We work on a very technical product and so there's often collaboration between engineering and sales/support on specific product details. I'm quite happy to do this as it's not only satisfying to solve problems for the customer, but it means that I'm well informed when it comes to making product decisions for new features.”

These close feedback loops help engineers accurately simulate the customer’s needs. This helps the team prioritize high-impact work.

• “If your title is 'product engineer' the product part is not merely lip service. As a product engineer, you'll need to master both of these skillsets. To give a concrete example, we built a new CSV importer last year. We certainly sweated the UI details, but we also had to answer very specific questions at the intersection of technical implementation and product behavior. "On a long-running import job, how do we surface errors?". "What is the user's model of how a spreadsheet will be imported? Do they expect it to run row-by-row, top-to-bottom or is executing out of order acceptable?". "What are the possible date formats a user might submit and how do we ensure we parse them correctly?". We had hundreds of questions like this.”

Being close to the details allows you to achieve what others would deem impossible: “move very quickly AND create something very high-quality.”

• “We don't see quality as a trade-off with speed. Rather, we see an intimate relationship between doing things well and doing them fast. If you write your code well, you don't waste time on bugs; if you write a good response for a customer on a support ticket, they get to the solution faster.”

Doing this consistently, feature after feature, is how you build a culture of excellence.

• "I often get the satisfying experience of explaining a project to someone outside of Attio and telling them that we achieved it in half the time with 5x fewer people than they expected."

• “We have an annual Christmas tradition of spinning up the product from the year before. Every year, we gasp at just how much we've been able to build.”

Everyone we spoke with at Attio—every engineer, salesperson, marketer—mentioned a care for details.

• "Much of Attio's growth is powered by having a product that feels well-built and people love to talk about”

• "From every feature to every page we build, it's being treated with the utmost care."

• "Build with love is one of the values that many of us resonate with the most.”

Caring for details is not the sort of thing you can fake. If you do not care about details, and do not want to work hard, then Attio is probably not a good fit for you.

• "Anyone who is looking for a 9-5. People who are not detail-obsessed. People who don't want to take on a challenge"

• “We don't want anyone coming here to ride the wave of a startup journey. There's still so much hard work to put in to make us successful."

• "Committing to a high bar across everything you do is a tiring act if you don't truly believe it's necessary, if somebody is happy with 'it'll do,' then they'll struggle to find the internal motivation to go the extra mile — and that's what's expected."

Detail obsession is especially powerful when you pair craft with long-term ambition. Attio is very explicitly not trying to be just another SaaS startup. They want to make something generational.

• “The upside for Attio is unfathomably large. It's really difficult to think of a business that shouldn't one day be using Attio. There are only a handful of places in the world where you can work somewhere with the same team size to upside ratio as Attio.”

• "This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to grow with a bunch of driven (and fun) people at an extremely fast-growing startup. You will be challenged, and you will learn more than you can imagine."

Attio is hiring in nearly every department: engineering, marketing, design, operations, sales, and support. They have an office in London and also many remote roles. You can see all of their open positions here.

And if you’re looking to see more from next play, you can head over here where you’ll find lots of under-the-radar content and opportunities.