🎯 How Attio builds-in-public

The next-gen flywheel

November 21, 2024

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Read time: 4 minutes 19 seconds

2 weeks ago I wrote about one of my favourite trends in tech right now:

We received more thoughtful email replies than the last 5 combined, so for today’s piece I’m riffing on a similar note.

The most exciting startups today are ‘Building-in-Public’ (“BiP”), because it makes for magnetic marketing, organic growth flywheels, and identity-forming products. 

But I can count on one hand the number of companies doing BiP exceptionally well.

Here is one of them.

Enjoy.

– Tom

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How Attio builds in public

Chess Move

The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy

Any startup wanting to crack an established market faces a similar paradox:

→ Most buyers only want software they can trust.

→ But, to build trust you need established customers using your product.

The CRM industry has historically been dominated by slow-moving incumbents who release major updates quarterly and make product decisions behind closed doors.

Attio took a radically different approach to rapidly build a level of trust that would normally take a decade of high-touch B2B relationship-building: build the product in public.

Not merely sharing feature releases after they ship. But actively involving users in the ideation, design, decision-making, development, and refinement of the product. 

"We post even the smallest stuff because every update counts. The more you inform, the more ‘compound interest’ you create.” — Alexander Christie, Attio CTO / Cofounder

💡

Strategy Playbook: Transform your development process into a trust-building flywheel by making it completely transparent.

Breakdown

The how: The strategic playbook boiled down to 3x key takeaways

1.  Turn customers into co-creators

Two of Attio's core development principles are Speed and Scalability. By involving users directly in the product development process, they've supercharged both.

"Our users tell us what works and what doesn't, often before we even have time to build it out fully." — Nicolas Sharp, Attio CEO / Founder

This instant feedback loop helps Attio:

  • Increase confidence and shipping velocity through faster validation

  • Prioritise based on real user needs, not assumptions

  • Catch issues that were missed internally

"I guess it's like having people cheering you on at mile markers during a marathon. The energy from our community pushes us to move faster." — Nicolas Sharp

The team operates on a deliberate 50/50 split between advancement (new features) and improvement (user requests), ensuring innovation and user satisfaction stay in balance.

For both new features and user requests, Attio actively involves users to create development leverage beyond their employee base. 

With users always on the lookout for ideas, fixes, and improvements, the Attio team taps into a community of pseudo-teammates ‘working’ on the product in parallel.

2. Selling sawdust: market the very act of building 

There's an old saying that carpenters should sell their sawdust - the natural byproduct of their craft. Attio take this idea and apply it to the software development process:

  • Bug fixes become tweets

  • Features ship with an origin story

  • Improvements link back to user conversations

Attio’s sawdust is the thousands of chats, requests, feedback, and other inputs that are already taking place behind-the-scenes as they build the product.

They are already doing the hard work (building), so they may as well put in the marginal incremental effort to showcase those activites as marketing. 

This turns existing 1:1 interactions (Attio ↔ user) into scalable public broadcasts (Attio ↔ audience).

"It's good marketing because it shows the thought and care that goes into building the product. But what's more important is that it attracts a certain type of person to Attio… it often connects you with other creators and builders" — Nicolas Sharp

Typically, a CRM’s core ICP is marketers and salespeople. But Attio is building the LEGO of CRM - highly flexible, customisable, and able to support a long-tail of use cases. 

Attio encourages all team members to share their work, which attracts a broad variety of other personas to the product. 

3. Deliberately curate a cohort of superfans 

Within any user base, there's a segment who want to be more than just users - they want to be part of the journey.

Some users just use Attio (the tool), but others love Attio (the story/brand/feeling). 

And it is these users that drive the elusive yet asymmetrically valuable ‘word-of-mouth’ growth engine. 

This doesn’t happen accidentally. You need to create an ecosystem of opportunities for users to opt-in to this deeper relationship:

  • Beta tester programs

  • Behind-the-scenes interviews

  • Feature development discussions

Being so public with the process means you can’t exclusively share the wins - it forces you to share the losses too.

"When a release doesn't go as planned, we say so, and that honesty resonates with our users." — Nicolas Sharp

Somewhat counterintuitively, the transparency itself creates several strategic advantages:

  • The more you are willing to share, the more sawdust (content volume) you can market

  • Higher emotional investment and therefore retention among engaged users

  • Users feel a deeper connection with the Attio team, not just the product

  • More exposure to valuable lesser-used features

Most importantly, it creates a moat that competitors can't easily replicate. 

Anyone can copy features, but you can't copy community trust.

Rabbit Hole

The where: 3x high-signal resources to learn more

[4 minute read]

Attio’s viral manifesto about CRM in the age of AI.

“Imagine a world where your CRM is not just a manual system of record, but also an autonomous system of action. It’s a living, breathing entity that understands your business context inside and out, perfectly matching your business model.”

[9 minute read]

Founder Nicholas Sharp’s vision for Attio's AI-native CRM. 

  • A ‘system of record’, leveraging the powerful and flexible underlying data model that differentiates them from every other player in the space.

  • A ‘system of context’, automatically ingesting and understanding all of your structured and unstructured data from every video call, meeting, website, email, or document.

  • A ‘system of action’, autonomously conducting complex GTM tasks with out-of-the-box agents.

[2 minute read]

Attio’s recent fundraise + plans to disrupt the $89B CRM category.

Includes their growth philosophy, product roadmap, and hiring plans. 

A watershed moment for the industry.

That’s all for today’s breakdown - hope you enjoyed!

— Tom

P.S. Attio just shipped a new website and it kinda went viral (check out the love it got over on X).

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