4 min read
We held our first hackathon
James Mulholland Senior Product Engineer
At Attio, we believe the next generation of CRM won’t be defined by one-off integrations. It will be shaped by platforms where extensibility is effortless.
As we build our App SDK, we’re taking a step toward that future — building the primitives so that anyone can extend Attio with apps that run natively inside the product.
To test it, we invited over 50 developer teams to our first hackathon over a weekend in August. By Monday, they’d shipped dozens of production-ready apps: authentication, billing sync, AI sales roleplays, even coffee gifting. Here’s how it went.
“The extensibility of the SDK takes Attio from a good CRM to the best CRM. In two days, I went from 0 to having a complete user and workspace management integration between Better Auth and Attio.”
— Tobias Möritz
Building from first principles
CRM integrations tend to follow the same pattern. Customers ask for a billing sync app, you build it. They ask for an integration with Linear, you build it. Each takes months of engineering time, and the backlog never shrinks.
We’re doing things differently. Instead of chasing requests, we built primitives:
A custom JavaScript runtime to safely sandbox apps
Our own React reconciler and component library so UIs feel native
A secure serverless backend for running untrusted code
This is hard engineering work, but it means developers can build apps that are indistinguishable from Attio itself. When you make a call through Aircall or send a customer request to Linear, it doesn’t feel like “using an integration.” It just feels like Attio.
Putting it to the test
We held our first hackathon to see up close what developers could do with those primitives.
With $10K up for grabs and over 80 participants, engagement was high from the start.
Teams messaged us questions, ideas, and opinions throughout, exploring corners of the SDK we hadn’t expected. By the end, the range of submissions was immense: AI-powered FAQs, interactive maps, sales training roleplays, billing integrations, deduplication logic, and more.
The most valuable signal wasn’t just the number of submissions, but that so many were production-ready after only two days.
Of all submissions, three stood out for their depth, polish, and how naturally they extended Attio.
First place: Better Auth
Built by Tobias Möritz
A complete integration with Better Auth, a TypeScript authentication library with 19k+ GitHub stars.
Bidirectional sync for users, orgs, and custom objects
Session revocation, password resets, and invitations
Native user management inside Attio
“The SDK gave me the building blocks to package everything into something that feels native to Attio rather than bolted-on.”
Second place: Map Connect
Built by Nick Janes & Will Stenzel
An interactive mapping app that visualizes Attio records on dynamic maps. Sales and GTM teams can instantly see geographic patterns across their data.
Plot people, companies, and deals on a map
Cluster and filter to spot trends by region
“For years, building business solutions meant stitching together logic and UI in disconnected systems. With the App SDK, backend logic and frontend UI come together seamlessly. It’s a joy to build with.”
— Will Stenzel
“Even just brainstorming ideas for the hackathon opened up a sea of possibilities for integrations that could transform how people use Attio.”
— Nick Janes
Third place: Awesome Coffee
Built by Nicklas Scharpff, Philipp Dyck & Felix Rottler
A well-designed, unique app that lets you send specialty coffee to contacts from inside Attio, showing how you can embed a gifting motion directly in your CRM.
Send a thank you to a prospect or customer
Extend your workflow with a lightweight, fun app
“The SDK shows a real love for developer experience and sets the benchmark for how plug-ins should work. Its accessibility made it effortless to bring our vision for Awesome Coffee to life.”
Beyond the winners, we saw plenty more out-of-the-box uses of the SDK:
FAQIR: An AI-powered FAQ hub that turns Attio conversations into structured, self-updating FAQs.
10x.attio: Sales and success teams can spin up Jira tickets, feed Smartlead campaigns, log Zendesk signals, and more, without leaving Attio.
Skylar AI Roleplays: Skylar generates AI roleplays so sales reps can practice tough conversations before the call.
These projects captured the potential of the SDK: practical tools that solve real problems, and experiments that hint at entirely new ways of working inside Attio.
“It was inspiring to see so many teams come together over a single weekend, diving into the SDK, asking the right questions, and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in CRM.”
— Namit Chadha, Attio Product Manager
Looking ahead
CRM might sound like boring software, but at Attio we're reinventing the category from first principles. With the App SDK, CRM becomes a platform — extensible, adaptive, and shaped by the teams who use it.
This hackathon was just the first step. It showed that developers outside our team can use the SDK to produce polished, production-ready apps in days.
The next step is scaling that energy — growing a developer ecosystem where the best ideas for CRM come not only from us, but from the community of people building on top of Attio.
The future of CRM looks like native experiences, created in days instead of months, by anyone with an idea.