Marker.io’s story
In 2015, co-founders Gary Gaspar, Olivier Kaisin, and Emile-Victor Portenart were running a web design agency, when they realized just how laborious and inefficient quality assurance (QA) testing was.
“I was doing QA testing on a complex web application for one of our clients, and having to manually create individual Trello cards for every bug,” explained Gary Gaspar, CEO and co-founder of Marker.io. “There were hundreds of errors to flag, and I just reached the point where I was completely sick of this process. I knew there had to be a better way of annotating feedback for developers.”
Enter Marker.io, an intuitive, visual tool for reporting bugs and providing feedback on websites and web applications.
“Marker.io is like Intercom, but for web developers,” says Gary. “Our website widget is a visual tool which makes it really easy to annotate and communicate your feedback in real time on your website. We then plug directly into your Trello, Linear, Github, etc, in two-way synchronization to enhance your existing workflow.”
Since launching their tool in 2020, Marker.io has grown rapidly. “We've got 5,000 customers who have reported more than 3 million issues using our tool.”
Searching for a CRM which supports PLG
Like many early-stage PLG startups, Marker.io was eager to avoid the cost and complexity of adopting a CRM for as long as possible.
“With most CRMs, you open them and instantly feel completely lost in the platform," says Gary. “Making them accurately reflect product-led growth is a huge undertaking and often impossible, so we were holding off on making that commitment for as long as we could.”
Marker.io were instead using Intercom as a makeshift CRM of sorts, tracking all customer support and success issues, as well as inbound sales, which were growing at a rapid rate. But as they continued to scale, it became evident they needed a CRM to accelerate their growth.
“Intercom was fantastic for handling our customer support and success issues, but it’s just not designed for managing deals or identifying PQLs,” says Gary. “We eventually reached a breaking point of sorts, where we realized we were getting hundreds of leads a week, and not being at all proactive in contacting the best opportunities. We also started receiving increasingly complex inbound interest, and had no way of getting a history or overview of all our deals,” says Gary.
The team tried a huge number of CRMs, but none of them fit their needs.
“We stuck with Close for a while, but we just didn’t like how it forced us into one way of working,” says Gary. “It never really felt like it truly represented Marker.io, and we eventually just gave up.”
The Attio moment
When Gary finally stumbled across Attio, he was thrilled to find a powerful and intuitive CRM which he could tailor precisely to Marker.io’s needs.
“There was an instant wow effect the first time I opened Attio. The UX is phenomenal–it's like Notion and Linear had a baby, and it just works,” says Gary.
Gary was blown away by Attio’s out-of-the-box integrations, and native support for Workspaces and Users–two pivotal types of data for PLG motions. “To just click on a company and instantly see if it has an active paying workspace was incredible, especially coming from PLG. Beforehand, there were so many customers that we hardly knew who we were really speaking to. Now in just a glance we can see what plan they’re on, how many issues they’ve logged with our tool, and so on.”
He was also impressed by the automatic enrichment in Attio. “It’s amazing to just type in a domain and instantly see the location, estimated ARR, employee count, and more pop up,” says Gary. “It’s a huge time-saver.”
How Marker.io uses Attio
Today, Attio is at the heart of Marker.io’s product-led growth.
“Our team spends hours a day in Attio, triaging leads and surfacing new opportunities. It’s our single source of truth for all product and customer data, and key to driving our growth.”
A powerful engine for product-led growth
Attio’s data model natively supports PLG, meaning Marker.io was able to configure Attio precisely for their business model. Alongside the People and Companies standard objects, they’ve enabled the Workspaces and Users objects to track their product data, as well as the Deals object to work their pipeline.
“Having Workspaces and Users objects, and then being able to link them to our Deals, People and Companies objects has accelerated our growth to a whole new level,” says Gary. “To be able to activate these pre-built objects at the click of a button is incredible–there’s no other CRM like this for PLG.”
“I particularly love the way you can link different tables together and lookup data from other objects. Having our product and customer data all in one place gives us so much context when we’re speaking to people.”
Marker.io has directly integrated with Segment, meaning that their Workspaces and Users objects are Attio constantly updated with real-time product data.
“There was such a strong IKEA effect when we set up Attio and connected our workspace to Segment. The whole onboarding process was incredibly intuitive, and within minutes we were able to build our CRM precisely for our needs. It worked exactly how I wanted it to from the get-go,” says Gary.
Surfacing high-quality leads
Integrating product and customer data inside their CRM has been a major unlock for Marker.io’s growth.
“We have hundreds of new companies signing up every week, which made it really hard to find the gems,” says Gary. “Integrating our product data into Attio has been crucial to give us visibility over our entire customer base.”
“Having our product and customer data in one place really helps us surface new opportunities, including high-potential accounts, accounts who are a churn risk, and accounts we can target for upselling. Thanks to Attio, we’ve massively boosted our efficiency and increased our revenue.”
Scaling up alongside Attio
For Marker.io, Attio has quickly become a key tool in their GTM stack as they scale. “We’re continually adding new people into our Attio workspace as we expand the team,” says Gary.
“The response from the team has been overwhelmingly positive. We finally feel like we have a CRM that’s doing the work for us to accurately represent our business, rather than the other way around.”
Gary feels confident in Attio’s ability to scale with Marker.io as they grow. “I feel like you have built such a strong architecture and infrastructure at Attio, and I’m really excited to build on top of it. The speed at which the team ships new updates is incredible–we’re really looking forward to seeing what’s next on the roadmap.”
