look after the pennies

Look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves.

My gran taught me that at a young age. I think Hubspot and Salesforce could have done with similar advice.

We launched the first paid version of Lightdash Cloud in late 2022, and as the first Sales hire, Hubspot felt like a natural choice. A friendly startup package with a tried and tested CRM.

A year later in August 2023, we’re growing quickly, customers are happy and GTM efforts are ramping up, everything seems fine until Hubspot reach out to us for renewal.

5x the annual cost, or stick with a reduced plan without email marketing or workflow automations, or anything else that should be table stakes for a CRM. OK fine, let’s have a call with them, we can probably negotiate down. 3 calls later, bounced between 3 account managers and zero movement on the price. Hubspot were trying to look after the pounds and they forgot about the pennies.

Naturally, we look elsewhere and Attio comes out of the blue. London-based ✅, beautiful UI ✅ a CRM people actually would want to use ✅ and guess what, literally all the things we needed from a CRM at a third of the price for the startup plan we had with Hubspot.

Within 2 weeks, I’d already spoke to Frank Mayfield and Matthew Fischer, had 100% of my Hubspot content fully migrated and we were using it across the whole company.

Another benefit is that I could provide FULL transparency to our whole company without worrying about juggling licenses. This took a huge burden off me with regards to Reporting and ad hoc questions about prospects and customers.

Attio looked after the pennies, and with last week’s Series B announcement, clearly the pounds are looking after themselves.

That’s just the migration story - stay tuned to hear about how I’ve built a slick GTM machine at Lightdash with Attio at the core.