Most CRMs Are a Liability – Not an Asset

01 /The Concept

Most CRMs get implemented once and then slowly become a liability – shaped around a sales process that no longer exists, filled with fields nobody updates.

The obvious question is: who needs that, and why? The "Why It Matters" section gets into it.

Attio's mission is to make it easy for a CRM to reflect *your* business processes and sales funnels rather than forcing you to bend your processes to fit someone else's system.

The platform gives companies all the building blocks to define custom data structures – whatever fields, properties, and tags describe their customers – plus the ability to build pipeline templates made up of whatever stages make sense for how they actually sell.

Attio also claims to deliver "the first truly multiplayer CRM" where all participants can collaborate in real time. That's an ambitious assertion.

Teams of up to three people can use the platform free. Paid tiers with extended functionality run from $29 to $119 per user per month.

The startup is growing rapidly, which shows in its funding trajectory. It first appeared in [a related review](/review/bolshie-dengi-v-uderzhanii-bolshih) in early 2023, when it raised a $23.5M Series A. It has now closed a new $33M round, bringing total investment to $64.2M.

02 /Why It Matters

One article covering Attio's latest raise notes that the startup "is growing quickly by attracting fast-growing startups as customers."

The success stories on Attio's website tell the same story. So does the tagline under the pricing page: "from zero to IPO" – meaning the platform is designed to stay useful and appropriate at every stage of a startup's journey, from a tiny team to a mature organization.

The real insight here is that building a startup isn't just about building a product – it also means continuously developing a *sales system*.

Most startups have already internalized the idea that product development is an endless cycle of hypothesis formation and testing. Products don't just accumulate features; the underlying concept gets rethought and rearchitected over time. The same logic should apply to sales. To improve sales performance, a startup needs to form and test hypotheses about how the sales process itself is structured – which means not just adding fields to contact records or inserting new pipeline stages, but *redesigning the CRM itself* so it actually supports the updated sales motion.

The platform is especially compelling for startups that have adopted Product-led Growth (PLG). In PLG, the engine of sales and expansion isn't a push from the sales team – it's behavioral signals from users interacting with the product itself. A simple illustration: Zuckerberg noticed early in Facebook's growth that users who added at least 10 friends within their first two weeks stuck around. That meant friend-count-in-first-two-weeks was the metric to track and act on. If he'd later identified a more predictive signal, the CRM would have needed rebuilding. In a growing company, this kind of restructuring needs to happen repeatedly – and each time it should take hours, not weeks.

A traditional CRM is designed as a single home for customer data. PLG requires something different: a single home for *both* customer data and product usage data. And that product usage data is specific to each product, likely to change as the product evolves, and sometimes requires rethinking which metrics matter at all. Attio is built for exactly this kind of iterative redesign – which is exactly the pain point that drives startups to it from conventional CRMs.

Pace ([covered here](/review/teper-luchshe-prodavat-po-drugomu)) is working on a similar idea – combining product usage data and customer data in one place. It started as a developer tool for embedding behavioral triggers and notifications, then evolved into a full platform marketed as making a separate CRM unnecessary. Pace raised $5M in its first round in 2022.

03 /Opportunities

Every startup needs to treat its sales system as something to develop and evolve actively – not just optimize incrementally. Sales, like the product, needs genuine structural rethinking over time, and those two tracks can evolve independently of each other. The corollary: even if PLG isn't the acquisition model, product usage data should still drive retention and expansion. Monitoring how existing customers use the product is the most direct and cost-effective lever for growing revenue – typically faster and cheaper than acquiring new customers.

Overstand ([covered here](/review/kak-sdelat-starogo-klienta-bolee-vygodnym)) – currently going through Y Combinator – focuses specifically on unlocking hidden expansion revenue. Its AI engine analyzes all customer communications, including support interactions, to surface signals that an existing customer is a candidate for an upsell or add-on. Those signals can be automatically pushed into a connected CRM – but only if the CRM's data model can actually hold and surface them cleanly. Otherwise sales teams end up manually reconciling signals from multiple platforms, which is exactly what leads companies to Attio.

CRMs can also be restructured automatically, not just manually. Day.ai ([covered here](/review/chtoby-pobedit-nuzhno-peredelat)) is building an "AI-native" CRM that monitors how a company uses its data and reshapes its internal data structures accordingly – no manual reconfiguration needed. The platform is still in testing, but the startup raised $4M in its first round in June.

The CRM market is large – $91.43B in 2023, projected to hit $262.74B by 2032. More importantly, the market leaders were architected around the assumptions of a different era. New features get bolted on from the outside because rewriting the core is too risky. This creates an opening – and the best place to enter is with new companies, not incumbents. Startups haven't yet locked into old CRM habits, making them far more receptive to switching. From that angle, Attio's deliberate focus on startups looks like exactly the right beachhead.