How Dopt uses Attio to build out its GTM engine and scale as they grow

Dopt's story

In life, they say, first impressions are everything. That goes for software too. When a user first interacts with your product, you want them to be impressed, you want them to understand, and you want them to find value quickly.

Having good in-product onboarding and education flows is hugely important to user adoption. In the past few years, business software has been going through profound changes. There has been a big shift in product development from a top-down, prescriptive approach to a bottom’s up, customer-centric one. Now software increasingly allows users to build and configure their products exactly the way they want them, instead of having to adapt to one-size-fits-all solutions.

That flexibility is powerful, but it means that SaaS products now cover more use cases and have deeper interaction models making it more important than ever to invest in building great onboarding that helps users realize value. The existing product onboarding tools haven't kept up, they're rigid, inflexible, and built for an older era of software.

Enter Dopt, an early-stage startup out of Oakland, CA that is building developer infrastructure for product onboarding that allows companies to easily build these crucial product experiences exactly as they want them to be.

Notion, Airtable, Zapier and a whole lot of manual effort

For early-stage startups, CRM is often the last thing they think about adopting when in the initial stages and growth.

"There are so many great tools that are designed for growth that we incorporate in our stack: Linear, Dovetail, Segment. CRM was never one that came to mind," said Alon Bartur, co-founder and CEO of Dopt. "It’s typically very bulky, cumbersome and inflexible. We ended up using Notion, Airtable and Zapier to build a makeshift CRM that suited our needs at first. At the very least with that setup, we could make changes on the fly."

Dopt used Airtable to track customers, prospects and wait-list members; Notion to take notes for calls and customers, and Zapier to connect everything. The result was a lot of manual effort and spreadsheets, which had a huge impact on productivity across the company.

"We had to make sure that everything was updated, everywhere, at all times. It was painful and took way too much time. Something would break and I'd have to spend 3-4 hours at a time trying to figure it out, re-sync, etc.," said Bartur. "It was impossible to scale with us and just really inefficient overall."

The Attio moment

As an early-stage, nine-person company, Dopt knew that Salesforce, Hubspot and other more traditional and rigid CRM systems weren't going to be the right fit for them.

Dopt wanted to find a flexible CRM that understood the needs of a startup and could remain nimble enough to scale with his company moving forward. Too often Salesforce and Hubspot alternatives "sacrifice flexibility for a rigid structure that could never work with our constantly changing needs."

"I was resigned to a life of maintaining my rat's nest of spreadsheets and notes until we had no choice but to switch over to a CRM," said Bartur. "And then we found Attio, which changed everything. The product looked amazing, so I signed up immediately."

Bartur was impressed from the very beginning. "The fact that we could just connect our email inboxes and calendar and get a full-fledged, always-up-to-date CRM with profiles, enriched data, interaction history and more was incredibly impressive," said Bartur.

Attio's ease of use, clean design and powerful feature set that allows businesses to mold their CRM however they want it quickly convinced him it was the right solution for Dopt.

"It was clear from the first minute that Attio was a 100x better version of what we built across Airtable and Notion, with the flexibility to be able to define what made sense for business. That same day I decided to connect our inboxes and calendars, port all of our makeshift CRM data and just use Attio moving forward."

How Dopt uses Attio

Attio is now the backbone for Dopt's entire go-to-market efforts, allowing them to iterate quickly at the drop of a hat across numerous different workflows.

“As an early-stage startup, our GTM motion is changing all the time. We’ve got so many different workflows: an early access program, sales pipelines, customer success, and more,” says Bartur. “Traditional CRMs are really hard to iterate and limited in scope. Attio, on the other hand, allows us to relentlessly iterate. It's now an integral part of our stack.” 

Early access program

Dopt is currently in private beta. Bartur and his colleagues are using Attio's integration with Typeform to manage their waitlist.

Prospects submit their information and their data is automatically added to an Attio list in real time. From there, every contact instantly becomes a new profile, enriched with data, and also visible to everyone on the team. Bartur's team members can then see and drill down on everything from contact history ("last interaction," "strongest connection," and more) to product usage, notes on any calls or meetings they've had, and more. It's a complete picture of each person — something they'd never be able to get using other solutions like spreadsheets and email.

With that information, they're able to vet, reach out to and engage with the right prospects — and ultimately build lasting relationships with them.

Customer success

Attio helps Dopt stay diligent and run a very tight customer development process that ensures they nurture and grow customer relationships from first contact through revenue and beyond.

"In addition to customer profiles, we're now using Attio to capture and store all the critical details around every call or meeting we have with a prospect or customer as well,” says Bartur. “This includes notes about the conversation as well as any next steps the team member assigned to that account needs to take."

As a result, there's no risk of missing a step, miscommunicating or missing anything important throughout the customer development process. "Being able to quickly jump into a note template and be ready for a call, or being able to reference tons of customer data at a glance, or knowing who in my team has been contacting someone....having all of that living somewhere where we're actually going to see it is so valuable.

Plus, it makes it much easier for the team to keep everything organized and up-to-date. That goes a long way toward providing greater visibility into what's happening across every customer relationship and helping the team make better decisions going forward.

Investor relations

For any early-stage startup, investor relations are always a key area of focus. You need to show investors and other key stakeholders that you have a strong foundation for growth, a steady stream of customers, and solid growth potential.

Attio helps Dopt capture all current investor relationships, track prospective investor leads and make sure investors are up-to-date with everything happening in the company.

Dopt uses Attio to stay on top of conversations with prospective investors. Having a history of notes, conversations, and the ability to set reminders and tasks helps him stay organized and efficient. This makes the lead up to fundraising much smoother, and he can easily keep track of a pipeline and shortlist. 

They also use Attio to activate the company's existing investors more effectively. They can send updates and requests to the company's thirty investors directly from Attio.

Single source of truth

For Dopt, Attio completely flipped their idea of what the most important tools would be for an early-stage startup.

"CRMs historically have been this huge tax. By the time you implement it, your entire sales motion changes. It's too much of a burden. Attio allows us to move quickly, and it doesn’t get in the way. It’s become a key part of our workflow.”

"We set out to build workflows immediately on top of our customer data to help us build an automated system that works for us as we experiment, scale and grow. I can now very easily stay on top of everything customer related, with a fraction of the effort I was putting in before. Attio saves us 30% of our time and efforts managing our customer relationships."