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🚀 The Philosophy, Traditions & Leadership Behind Winning Culture. A follow up in interview with Dom Pym, co-founder & ex-CEO at Up.
🤝 Building Sales Teams, Scaling Startups & Personal Branding. An interview with Scott Leese, Fractional CRO & GTM Advisor.
🍟 The Future Of Technology Belongs To One Man, Jensen Huang. Co-Founder, President & CEO of Nvidia. The man holding all the chips.

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Firstly, apologies for the fact we had no Sunday send this week. This post was actually scheduled for Sunday but we had an issue with out account that took over 24 hours to resolve, so here we are—sending today.

I’m back in Australia now for the second time in four years right now, and I must admit Melbourne is a pretty wonderful city. Great coffee, good vibes, relatively happy people. Excited to catch up with some friends and family over the next weeks.

Anyway, today’s post is one I am pretty excited about. One of the more impressive companies you’ll come across. Hopefully you can pick up a thing or two through the story. Without further ado—here is the story of Attio’s zero to one.

ZERO TO ONE 🌱

If CRM + The Future Had A Baby: Attio’s Zero To One

One thing that stifles innovation, is the power of the big, old, rusted on incumbents of the world. In today’s case, the CRM juggernauts of old have cast such a long shadow, that the relationship management space has been left in the 1990’s.

The industry as of today, consists of nothing more than poor UI, and an experience that your grandfather’s generation would be proud of. You do have another choice, and that is an under-funded, poorly designed, second or third string CRM, often built with so much opinionation / opinionated-ness (lost my thesaurus) getting value feels more like drawing bloody from a stone.

So there is opportunity—but who would fund an entrant into the most ‘owned’ space in all of technology. Salesforce literally coined the term Software-As-A-Service. Well, Nicolas Sharp, and Alexander Christie were keen to find out.

Today we dive into the zero to one story of one of my favourite products on the planet, my CRM I use for this newsletter, that’s Attio. Not only are these two bonafide British bad boys ready to take on this market—they plan to build the future of it. And I for one, think they can do it. Let’s rip in.

Fundstack, the CRM for a very small market

When I say ‘upside,’ I am not only talking about your exit multiple. I am talking about your ability to do good business in a general sense. We wrote recently about PostHog, and one key takeaway from their CEO James was that building the harder thing is often easier because it “excited customers, attracted top talent, and made fundraising easier.” This same story rang true for the Attio team.

The perfect pivot & product positioning

So the pivot was in. My buddy Jaryd wrote about Attio recently, and he likened the pivot to taking on the larger opportunity akin to Star Wars’ Rebel Alliance taking on The Empire. And it is somewhat like that. But why the challenge? What is the wedge that Attio thinks it has to get its foot in the door and actually challenge the category definers that already dominate the category?

The answer is one word: flexibility. They wanted to build a product they wish they had in the market themselves. A product, Nick would say, that was “super flexible, like Notion, like Airtable, and actually allowed them to build their kind of dream revenue engine inside of the product.” I personally pledged my allegiance to the church of Notion long ago. So I stand with Nick here.

And I use Attio, so I get it. But I also wanted to understand what that really meant to him and the team. So when we spoke, I asked what a flexible CRM really means.

They do this by having a flexible data model that you can mould like play doh to suit every need inside of today’s GTM team. Another friend of the newsletter, Tom from Strategy Breakdowns, broke it down like this.

“A product that fits your business. Not the other way around.” And in their recent $33M fundraising announcement, Nick would go on to extrapolate on this. “This funding will vastly accelerate our vision of CRM in the AI era, which is built on three pillars: a system of record, a system of context, and a system of action.”

A system of record using an AI-driven data model, matching any business or data model with custom objects, lightning fast.

A system of context, automatically ingesting and understanding every piece of data—from video calls, to meeting, to documents—and presenting it back to you in the most relevant way possible.

And finally, a system of action, leveraging proactive AI agents to anticipate needs, automate complex tasks, and initiate processes across your whole stack without manual effort. That sound like my kind of future CRM.

AVO LOOK AT THESE 🥑

Founders, investors & leaders in tech, that read Open Source CEO outperform their competition. These are our best tools. Business is hard. We want to build the tools we wish we had.

Early Go-To-Market

Today Attio’s GTM looks pretty typical. They are leveraging multiple channels, brand and performance marketing is getting more dialed in, and they are slowly learning to flex their guerrilla marketing / strategic PR arm. This was highlighted most recently by their incredible Times Square campaign, in which they partnered with 50 GTM leaders for the launch of their manifesto.

But they didn’t start out in the bright lights of The Big Apple. I asked Nicolas where their communications began, and which channel drove early pipeline, and the answer was building in public.

“We were building in public on Twitter. We used to share a lot of code snippets, bits of design, thoughts about things we were doing, and we were very active in the builder community and it’s a really nice community to be in. Everyone is keen to test early products.”

Building in public meant they were able to win a lot of early adopters that would “be a patient and forgiving tester for you,” Nick said. At this stage Attio weren’t charging, and in doing so, were able to treat the early cohorts as big user tests that created wonderfully short feedback loops for the team. “Some of these early companies would give us a bit of feedback and say, ‘hey, it's a really important feature for me.’ And we’d ship it that day or the next for them.”

Next was the big question—would someone actually pay for this thing? It wasn’t until usage and retention was incredibly high that the team decided they would turn on revenue. It wasn’t until these early adopters showed they were happy to pay and stick around that team team felt they were ready to launch Attio to the market.

Once they did launch, they moved to SEO and paid search, with mixed results. “SEO didn’t work out as we’d hoped. We tried creating landing pages targeting various use cases, but we were up against giants, and it was difficult to compete,” Alex Vale, who was an early employee at Attio told me.

Paid search however, did work well in the early stages, helping build pipeline of high-intent, qualified leads. Next was social, and then owned audience—podcasts and newsletters.

Alex would sum up the early GTM like this: “The growth channels worked in stages: word of mouth from VCs, spreading to startups, building in public on social media, paid search, and eventually, organic social and broader word-of-mouth growth.”

Pivoting packaging and pricing

One of the things that Nick and the team found very impactful while in their zero to one stage was testing and iterating on their pricing model. They started freemium, moved to free with trial and have now landed on the ‘reverse trial’ approach. And in doing so have more than doubled their conversion rate.

Other companies in tech have found success with the ‘reverse trial’ model. This is part of a broader trend where companies aim to maximise their perceived value right from the start. For example, giants like Adobe and Autodesk have implemented similar strategies. They offer temporary access to their full suite of tools, which means users get more value. Hopefully, said users become reliant on the advanced features, and become power users.

It also plays into the psychological principle of loss aversion. Users are more motivated to keep the tools they've become accustomed to during the trial. AWS and Notion, have also adopted variations of this model. This pricing strategy means companies not only increase their conversion, but also build a user base that is more engaged. And potentially more loyal.

How Attio thinks about testing

Today around 75% of Attio’s sign ups come through organic traffic, which is unreal. That means your product works and people are telling their friends. But the other 25% comes from a number of different paid strategies they have running. Something Nick said made me want to dig deeper:

When Nick told me this, I wanted to get really specific on what that looked like. So, I asked what percentage of your marketing spend goes to testing vs. proven channels? Here is the full transcript, inclusive of likes, buts, umms and kind ofs.

Nicolas Sharp: "Alice knows a more precise number, probably. What percentage do you think?"

Alice Chen: "I mean, it’s kind of hard to pinpoint a percentage because, actually, I think we only started doubling down on this effort earlier this year. So I think this year has been a lot of experimentation and failures, but with some real successes too. I wouldn’t say a specific percentage, so I’m going to stick with 50/50 for now, or maybe more. Let’s just say 60/40."

Nicolas Sharp: "Yeah, yeah, I think 60/40 sounds about right."

Bill Kerr: "Yep, ok, ok. Knowing that some portion of the 40% is actually going to be working, but it’s just not working at scale and mature, basically."

Nicolas Sharp: "Exactly. But that 40% is when we’re still learning about this channel."

Bill Kerr: "Yeah. So would it actually look like—and not to put words in your mouth—but would it look like 60/20/20? So, like, 60% is what's working, 40% is testing, and half of that might work, and half of that might not work."

Nicolas Sharp: "And that’s exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, exactly."

So, if you caught all that, what Nick and Alice, who works in marketing at Attio, said they spend 60% of their campaign budgets on what they know to be working. One of the things I know they love is content marketing—like this, this and this for example—and the rest of their budget goes to testing, of which half of that will work.

The budget for testing being 40%, knowing that only 20% will end up being in the ‘failed collateral damage’ pile. The rest will be shiny new channels they can polish in the future.

Beautiful design and ‘Unboxing’

One of the things I was really wowed by when I first set up my initial Attio account was what I could only refer to as the ‘unboxing.’ You know the typical unboxing, right? YouTubers opening up their new PS5 and sharing it with their audience. I have no idea why people love that stuff, but they do. But if you are a product builder—any product, physical, digital, metaphysical product—then this experience is super important to you. This is your chance to delight your customer.

Upon the ‘unboxing’ of a new product, most people (no studies to back this up) will end up with one of two emotions: pleasure, or a deep, sorrowful underwhelm. This is what scholars would call ‘buyers remorse.’

Much and more has been written about the unboxing experience with physical goods. One example that comes to mind is the Apple unboxing. Pulling that overly suctioned top layer from your new Macbook box is better than a slice of pepperoni pizza for some of our tech-obsessed, Jobsian, uber-nerds reading this. Attio knows the power of this.

And I know it too. There have been two moments in the last handful of years that I have logged into a platform or tool and quite literally had a moment of awe. Shoutout to ProfitWell, for doing this a few years ago, and bigger shout out to Attio. Their time-to-value score is off the charts. This is their flow:

When I say enriched though, I mean enriched. A few minutes after setting up my Attio account this is what I saw. My reaction was quite literally: ‘But, how?” The reality is, it wasn’t by chance.

"It was actually very deliberate. So when we were first kind of starting the build of Attio, we had these kind of four key principles, and one of them was time to value, and we kind of evolved that to time to value less than three minutes,” co-founder and CTO, Alex, told me. The other Alex, Alex Vale, also told me this was Attio’s “magic moment.” It’s time to shine if you will.

The funny thing is, this was one of Attio’s first features. They knew this was their chance to make a lasting impact. Expect in the early days their idea was ahead of their execution, so they needed lots of different onboarding steps to keep the user busy while their system caught up. Now it happens in seconds. It’s unreal.

Nick on the best thing they ever did

Why I use Attio

I use Attio for one reason. I like it more than other CRMs. I am a sucker for a beautiful product, and I agree with the whole ‘flexibility works’ thing. Don’t tell our other CRM partner we use at Athyna, but I have had multiple conversations with our General Manager about migrating our whole system across.

Attio isn’t as robust in a lot of ways as the incumbents right now, but I don’t expect it to be. It’s in its infancy. And I am pretty excited to see what it will look like in the coming years, considering the frequency at which they ship features. There was a day when I thought that you needed to have one of the ‘forever CRMs’ to take yourself seriously as a company, but that day has passed. I could see Attio and I living happily ever after together.

Extra reading

And that’s it! You can also follow Nicolas and Alex on LinkedIn and learn more about Attio on their website.

HIRING ZONE 👀 

Today we are highlighting AI talent available through, Athyna. If you are looking for the best bespoke tech talent, these stars are ready to work with you—today! Reach out here if we can make an introduction to these talents and get $1,000 discount on behalf of us.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

If you’re into the cultural side of tech, you’ll want to check out this piece by Working Theorys; Taste Is Eating Silicon Valley. It’s all about how, in today’s tech world, having a keen sense of style and design is just as crucial as the technology itself.

It's not just about what your product can do anymore, but how it makes people feel and fits into their lifestyles. I think it’s a creative look at how Silicon Valley has transitioned from being a tech powerhouse to a trendsetter in taste and cultural influence.

COMMUNITY VIBES 🏡 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Attio—powerful, flexible and data-driven, the exact CRM your business needs.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳