How Nick Sharp Is Disrupting An $80 Billion Market With Attio

**Wouter Teunissen** (0:00)
What's the most important founding decision that's allowed you to disrupt this market?

**Nicolas Sharp** (0:03)
90% of businesses over 10 people have a CRM. It is a huge, huge, huge market. How do we build brand recognition in a very entrenched market? Software malleability and configuration is going to completely, completely change. If you were excited about no code, this is the real no code moment. It was massive, massive, massive shit. And so we sketched out this product. I can literally remember saying these words to Alex. I said to him, wouldn't it be super annoying if we saw a YC company do this? And he was like, dude, that would just drive me insane. Well, let's not let that happen. Let's build it.

**Wouter Teunissen** (0:36)
At Attio, you're disrupting a huge market. You're going up against competitors worth hundreds of billions of dollars and in only a few years, you've been able to service thousands of customers, raise 60 plus million dollars. I want to ask you, what's the most important thing, most important founding decision you made when you decided to start Attio that's allowed you to disrupt this market?

**Nicolas Sharp** (0:57)
OK, so this is a really interesting question. And there are annoyingly two answers.

**Wouter Teunissen** (1:05)
All right, let's go.

**Nicolas Sharp** (1:06)
They're both very important.

**Wouter Teunissen** (1:08)
OK.

**Nicolas Sharp** (1:08)
So hopefully kind of interesting topics in themselves. But number one was choosing my co-founder. So Alex, who has been with Attio, joined Fundstack, which we'll talk about, which is the company previous to Attio, joined sort of a few months into that, but was there for the founding day of Attio. And having him as a co-founder was kind of totally pivotal to our success. And so really, really important. You know, as a... it's kind of as big as a marriage in the business world, right? This is like, you know, the most important person in the company. So that was a really big decision and a good one. Yeah. The second one was essentially our decision, which was hard at the time because it sort of goes against a lot of the sort of pervasive wisdom about how to build companies, especially, you know, startups, was that we didn't launch the product for three years.
And, you know, I'll go into all the reasons why that was. But kind of, you know, the opposite of be embarrassed about your product, get it into the world as quickly as possible, iterate, try and make a dollar within, you know, get your first customers within three months. We didn't do that at all.

**Wouter Teunissen** (2:34)
How did you know that was the right decision?

**Nicolas Sharp** (2:36)
We knew it was the right decision because we had this, you know, at that point, we were absolutely, like, maniacally focused on building a CRM. And we knew that we, you know, it would not be possible to build an MVP of the product we wanted to in three years. And we also knew that a lot of CRMs that did manage to get to market, got some early traction, failed to, like, really scale over time. And largely that was because they hit massive barriers in the way that they'd been built. And so we had these really big ideas about the data structure, the flexibility, the foundations of a product we wanted to build.
And we just couldn't build it quickly. We didn't think it would be three years. We actually thought it would be like 12 months, maybe 18 months. But 18 months in, we were still building. And we did start to go and get customers. So, you know, quite early, we started to onboard people, et cetera, and we would, you know, we would kind of watch them initially fail with the product and all that kind of stuff. But we didn't charge them for that. We didn't, you know, we didn't have a website for a really long time. So it's kind of very like hand-to-hand type stuff. And yeah, three years until we actually went kind of general access to GA.

**Wouter Teunissen** (4:01)
Yeah. You did have all those customers before going wide. What was the process like of deciding to actually go and launch?

**Nicolas Sharp** (4:08)
Yeah. So we had, there were a few metrics that we were keeping track of. So the first was, could we get people to use the product every day? And what we were looking for there was the ratio, the sort of the number of people that would use the product, how many days a week people would use the product essentially. And we had lots of, we sort of steadily over time watch that number go up. And so that was one of the things that kind of we kept a close eye on. And that's your Dow-MAU daily active user to monthly active user ratio. And then the other thing that we were paying really close attention to was retention. So if someone started three months ago, three months later, are they still using the product?