Relational CRM Build
A venture fund needed a CRM that could model the complex relationships between investors, portfolio companies and deal stages — and update itself. We built it from scratch in Attio.
The challenge
The fund was tracking deals in a mix of Notion databases and a spreadsheet. Relationships between LPs, portfolio companies, co-investors and deal stages existed only in people's heads. There was no automated enrichment, no pipeline reporting and no way to see cross-object relationships at a glance.
The approach
Relationship schema design
Mapped all entities: Companies, People, Deals, Investors, Funds. Designed Attio's object graph to reflect real-world relationships — a deal links to a company, multiple people and a fund, each with typed attributes and bi-directional associations.
Automated enrichment pipeline
Wired Clearbit enrichment via Attio webhooks — every new company record auto-fills headcount, funding stage, tech stack and LinkedIn URL within 30 seconds of creation.
Stage automations
Built automations that move deals through pipeline stages based on activity triggers: call logged → move to Due Diligence, document signed → move to Portfolio. Each transition notifies the deal lead in Slack.
Reporting & views
Set up filtered list views for each partner's active deals, a fund-level pipeline report and a weekly digest automation that emails the GP a snapshot of all deals that moved stages in the past 7 days.
The outcome
- Deal record updates dropped from a weekly manual process to real-time automated triggers.
- Full bi-directional relationship graph between all entities — no data stranded in silos.
- Partners saved an average of 8 hours per week on CRM admin.
- Pipeline reporting went from quarterly to live, with per-partner and fund-level views.
"For the first time, I can open the CRM on Monday morning and actually trust what I'm looking at.
Self-Hosted Automation Hub
Ready to build something like this?
Tell me where the friction is. I'll map the system, automate the busywork, and hand it back clean.