Alexander Christie

Alexander Christie, known as Alex, is co-founder and chief technology officer of Attio, a London, United Kingdom, company that makes a flexible CRM for go-to-market teams. He built it with Nicolas Sharp, and its customers range from Granola to Coca-Cola.

Making Ships Fly in Minecraft

As a teenager, Christie wanted to sail a ship in Minecraft, a game whose blocks did not move at the time, so he stayed up building a mod that let them. The mod, Movecraft, became his first experience of launching something online and having people download it, leave feedback and post videos of what they built, he said on the Founders and Builders podcast. Server owners who charged for access gave him a cut through PayPal. "It gave me this initial thing of this idea that you can build something, sell something, people will use it," he said. Because of the mod, his GitHub username is still AJCStriker, and he said "it will be forever."

Learning From Fundstack

In 2017 Christie and Sharp built Fundstack, a CRM made for venture capital firms, believing a focus on one industry would put them in a better position to build a universal product later, Growth Unhinged reported. It won a small set of customers paying high prices. "Through FunStack, we had an appreciation for how to do it wrong," Christie said, meaning they had learned how far beautiful product experiences could go once they stopped being flexible. For six months the team kept Fundstack running while building Attio in spare time, then shut down the old product and moved customers over one by one.

Deciding to Take On Salesforce

At first the founders called their new product a relationship workspace and were not ready to admit it was a CRM. "A friend of mine said at the time, the healthy human mind doesn't wake up in the morning and build a CRM," Christie recalled. He describes the decision as "temporary insanity, reality distortion" and credits a "blissful naivety" with letting them face the challenge. The moment of clarity came a couple of years in, when an investor asked how they thought about Salesforce. "It was like this first moment in this meeting where we kind of had the courage to be like, yeah, we're going to compete with Salesforce," he said.

Building for Daily Use

Attio spent about three years in development before its public launch. The founders watched the ratio of daily to monthly active users as their main signal. "If a user hates a tool, they'll cram their usage into one short burst, whereas if they love a product, they'll engage in small bursts throughout the day," Christie told Growth Unhinged. Attio has since raised more than $116 million from investors including GV, Balderton and Point Nine, and it is building toward an AI-era CRM that it advertises as "customer relationship magic."