Fundstack had lots of happy customers. Revenue was growing fast. By all measures, it was going well, but we felt it wasn’t ambitious enough. No matter what you’re building as a startup, you work damn hard.

We basically had this moment of realization: if we're gonna put all of this work into something knowing that this isn't the best version of what it could be, what’s the point?

So me and Alex sat down in a cafe and thought: hypothetically, if we were to pivot and really build something that we think would ultimately be much better and more ambitious than this, what would it look like?

And then we drew out what then became Attio. We couldn't help but go for it.

I was so lucky with Alex. He actually joined Fundstack as the first engineer and was just brilliant. He’s an incredible engineer and also incredibly resilient. He strikes that balance of being very upbeat and positive, but also a realist. It’s the perfect combination when you’re doing something as crazy hard as building a full-fledged CRM.

He had all of the right personality traits and most importantly, we worked really well together. We’re very different people, but we compement each other really well.

When we shut down Fundstack and started Attio, I had zero doubt that he was the right person to do that with.

We started Attio from the perspective of a blank canvas approach. We wanted to build something extremely flexible – much more similar to Notion or Airtable. We asked ourselves: what would the foundational architecture of that look like?

We realized that it would take intense engineering. If we wanted to build a powerful, flexible CRM, we wouldn’t be able to take the typical MVP approach, where you build a quick prototype and iterate as you hear from customers.

We accepted that we'd have to put a lot of groundwork into getting the foundations of the product right.

Of course, the foundations were much larger than we expected. That was okay with us – we got comfortable with the idea that that would take a while because in the end that’s how we were going to support our product vision.

In the end, it took us three years to build.

[When we first started building Attio] we'd raised so little money, so no investors were losing sleep at night over our big ambitions.

That actually was fortunate. Had we raised more money, I think that potentially we wouldn’t have been able to do what we did.

But because we were a very small team, and we had real clarity about what we were trying to build, everyone bought into it and we set up a nice environment for the long haul.

All the pressure we put on ourselves was on making the right product decisions, building things quickly but sustainably, and just trying to methodically get through this backlog of things we needed to build.

For me personally, being a VC didn't capture my imagination in the same way that building a company or product does.

I think it's a fantastic career. It's interesting and an incredible education. You meet incredible people, and I was very fortunate to have that because it really gave me access to the inner workings of companies.

But the kind of context switching and changing, looking at different problems in different markets all day, it just wasn't for me. I really wanted to work on one thing and make improvements every day on it.

It became very obvious to me that I wouldn't continue as a VC.

The interesting thing is that when I became a founder, within about three months, I was mortified about some of the things that I said as a VC. I realized that actually a lot of the advice I gave was very different from the reality on the ground.

It was super early days. The surface area of the product was small at that point, but the things that it did do, it did well.

We started with an early access program and used the feedback from that to cover gaps in the product.

So if there was something that the product couldn't do, or if there was something where the onboarding or setup was super rough, we used human effort to bridge those gaps.

For our very first customers, we often spent multiple days trying to get their data in through super custom hacky ways, configuring the product for them, etc.

We took all those learnings and built the product more and more. That’s really how it started.

When you’re in closed beta, your product is not being used by a ton of people. There is always this existential question: people are using it, but would they pay for it?

You have to ask yourself: are we providing enough value that people will pay for the product?

Early on, we thought: well, let's just have a really simple price, and let's test it.

At first we actually started with a very high price compared to the market. And people did pay for it! So that was great and that was a great point of validation.

However, we then very quickly learned that while people would pay that price, we were actually losing a lot of customers because it was too expensive.

CRM is a product that you want people to really get embedded into their company. You want as many people in the organization as possible to be using it. It's real value with the amount of people in the team that use it. You don't want it to be siloed data.

So we launched a new pricing plan, which was less than half the price. It was a really big success and made closing deals much easier.

So we got to the point where we basically had two plans. They were selling well. But what we really wanted to do was go exponential in our user growth.

We wanted to help startups as much as we can, get them in early, and grow with them. We should be there very early on, because implementing CRM later on in a company’s lifecycle is much more complicated.

With our free plan now, it means that our user base is growing at about 500% a year and because of freemium, we also have a really nice funnel and great opportunity for monetization later.

Even though we're building a horizontal tool, we're very particular in our messaging and very particular about the kind of companies we try to reach.

This is an important thing for anyone building horizontal products. Your marketing needs to be very targeted.

So we've defined our ideal customer profile and even the ideal persona of the kind of person that we think is perfect for Attio, which is founders and builders at early-stage startups.

The way we think about it is that there are two types of products, and each one needs to be marketed differently. One is where you have a new market or a market that people aren't very familiar with. You need to convince them that they need whatever the new thing is that you’re building.

For example, let’s say a new VR headset comes to market. The pitch would be helping the prospect understand why they need one in the first place. You’re trying to educate them on its value.

If you’re in a market where people know that they need your type of product, it’s your job to convince them why they need your product specifically. For example, if you build a television, you don’t need to convince people they need a television and that it will bring the wonders of cinema into their home. You need to convince them why they need your television.

CRM is a “why us” market rather than a “why one.” People know what a CRM is and know that they need one.

So our job is to answer the question convincingly as to how we’re different from other CRMs in the market.

A lot of that is done through brand and it's done through crafting a message, a look, and a feel that resonates with your target audience.

We knew early on that we're up against incumbents and we're trying to persuade people that we’re better than them. Brand plays an important role in that.

The easiest way to understand the difference is that Attio is incredibly powerful and allows you to quickly build your CRM exactly like how your business works. There’s no compromise between flexibility and intuitiveness.

You don’t have to shoehorn your business into a product that’s rigid and opinionated.

You can mold the CRM around your business. We bring incredible flexibility into the CRM market.

The product seriously resonates with people who have a builder mindset. We’re always amazed by the things that our customers build in Attio.

We got a lot of inbound from VCs, but we mostly ignored it because we were so focused on building the product.

However, one of our main investors at the time reached out and basically said there's a partner at Redpoint named Alex Bard that you've got to meet. And I was like “we're not interested in fundraising right now, we’re super focused on building the product.”

He said, “I understand, but Alex knows CRM inside-out. He spent a ton of time at Salesforce. Just speak to him.”

I had a call with him and Alex was one of the few investors I spoke to who really understood what we were trying to do, and also didn't shy away from the ambition of the product. He really understood it.

Most people were like, “well, it's too complicated to build, why don't you start with something really small?”

But Alex really got it. We spent a bunch of time with him over the next few weeks. We had this really intense period of chatting all the time and it was very clear that this wasn't just about the money. He was super passionate about the product and our vision, and it was about having someone on board who could add a ton of value. It was a great decision.

When you use Attio for the first time, it syncs with your email and calendar and creates a view of your customer relationships with profiles, timelines of interactions and conversations, access to emails and intelligence on the strength of each relationship.

You can also connect any other data source to Attio through our API. From there, you can sort through and filter these records and build workflows for different industries, use cases or scenarios.

We've had incredible growth this year and we're very excited about the progress that we've been making. Next year is going to be an even bigger year for us on the product and business front.

We’ve got some really big product launches coming down the pike and we’ll also continue to massively expand our go-to-market efforts.

Ultimately the goal is to continue to build the best possible CRM for our customers and make it more and more powerful. That’s our focus.

I think our philosophy about how Attio ultimately wins the market is to keep the focus on building the tools that customers need to solve their problems, rather than just building features.

From a product perspective, we want to be the engine for go-to-market teams.

And of course, the ultimate ambition is to IPO.