Modal's story

In 2021, Erik Bernhardsson started a project to build a simple way to deploy arbitrary workloads to the cloud, without the hassle of managing infrastructure.

His goal was to create a tool that would allow him to iterate on ideas faster, without getting bogged down in the complexities of Kubernetes clusters, containers and hardware requirements.

What began as a convenient solution for himself quickly turned into Modal, a serverless computer platform that makes it easy for developers to launch and manage compute-intensive tasks, particularly those related to AI and ML. They raised a $16m Series A just last year, and have thousands of users, including companies like Ramp, Substack, and Suno.

“Modal is an infrastructure product which aims to make it really easy for developers to launch arbitrary cloud workloads, particularly those that are very compute intensive,” says Margaret Shen, Head of Business Operations at Modal. “We work especially closely with teams building AI products or features, and help them to fine-tune and deploy their machine learning models.”

PLG hindered by HubSpot

The dream of every PLG startup is to have a centralized place that tracks both product and customer data, so that GTM teams can get detailed insight into every user, identify PQLs, build personal customer relationships, and reduce churn.

Like many startups, Modal tried using HubSpot to unify their data, but they struggled to build a CRM which actually represented their business.

“It was really difficult to set up HubSpot to reflect our data structure,” says Margaret. “The way it represents different objects and relationships felt really clunky, and we quickly ended up with a CRM cluttered with all sorts of floating records, duplicate companies, and mismatches between records.”

HubSpot’s lack of flexibility also created issues for Modal. “As a PLG business, the notion of workspaces is really key for us to track product data. HubSpot does not have native support for that type of data. Trying to create a workaround was so confusing that we could never quite figure out how to set it up in an optimal way,” says Margaret.

Given the huge expense of HubSpot and the hassle of trying to force PLG motion to fit its data structures, Modal knew they needed to find a CRM that could truly represent their business.

The fojow. moment

When Modal heard about Attio, they were immediately excited by the prospect of a modern CRM.

“When I first opened Attio, I instantly got the feeling that this was the start of the next generation of CRM,” says Margaret.

Margaret was thoroughly impressed by Attio’s powerful data model. “For there to be such a powerful and flexible object relational system was incredible. It finally felt like I could configure our CRM to fit our business needs, rather than the other way around,” says Margaret.

Modal also loved the product design. “Attio is so sleek and modern that it’s ultimately just a delight to work in. I genuinely feel happy when I’m in the product, which is almost unheard of in the CRM space.”