Making web infrastructure magic

In 2019, Jake Cooper was scaling infrastructure at Uber when he hit a wall: shipping even simple apps meant wrangling outdated tools and required a full DevOps team. It was slow, fragmented, and built for a different era.

He started questioning why. What if infrastructure wasn’t a bottleneck? What if deployment could be instant? Convinced there had to be a better way, Jake left Uber to build the platform he always wanted, where developers could focus purely on shipping code.

Two years later, he launched Railway: the all-in-one developer platform that makes full-stack software development instantly accessible for anyone, anywhere. Railway provides engineers with a single platform where they can build, deploy and monitor apps, from the biggest idea down to the smallest line of code. 

“We bring intuitive design and user experience to the world of infrastructure engineering,” says David Banys, Head of Product Marketing. “You input your code and Railway builds, runs, scales and monitors it, so you can focus on building your product.”

Having raised a $20 million Series A led by Redpoint Ventures and angel investors from Github, Linear and Datadog, today the team ships new features to over 500,000 users every week, taking on AWS, Google Cloud, and DigitalOcean. 

Railway is on a mission to make it intuitive for everyone to deploy code, by making web infrastructure feel like magic.

Friction, friction, friction 

Railway is rapidly building a product for developers, by developers. As their customer base and live deployments started to scale exponentially, the time came for them to centralize their data in a CRM.

The team needed a tool that could give them the visibility they wanted. “We began feeding our data into every CRM we could find,” recalls David, “but it just wouldn't work.”

From Salesforce to HubSpot, traditional CRMs fell short. “Legacy CRMs weren’t built for teams like ours,” says David. “We sell software based on metered billing, which requires complex revenue accounting. These tools didn’t grasp our model, they simply pushed their traditional sales approach.”

The team simply couldn’t represent their data, implement their business model, or access the features they needed. “The data structures in traditional CRMs are outdated, the interfaces are cumbersome, and managing them demands a full-time administrator,” says David. “It was just friction, friction, friction, all the time.”

“We're a strong technical team,” says David, “so we generated an algorithmic adoption score, tracked revenue, and forecast run-rates in code, but there was no single place to pull it all together.”

With no workable solution, Railway was forced to improvise. “We ended up streaming adoption alerts into our chat,” he recalls. “It reached a point where I didn’t think any CRM would ever come close to what we needed.”

“The ultimate system of record”

After months of trudging through legacy CRMs, Railway hit a breaking point. “We realized they were products built for another era, and that's not the company we are, or the product we're trying to build,” says David. “How could we, as a PLG company, use a tool that was against our own values?”

Then they found Attio.

“A friend of the company referred us to Attio, and as soon as we saw the product, we knew this was a completely new kind of software,” says David.

While other CRMs forced the team to jump through hoop after hoop to even just shoehorn their business model, Attio allowed Railway to configure their dream CRM rapidly. “Immediately, it was fast, powerful, and had a beautiful user interface to work with,” says David. “It was noticeable right from the moment we synced.”

“The self onboarding was incredible. Instantly, we could sync our data and get going all on our own terms. Attio really resonated with us as a company. It gave us the exact experience we want to give to our users.” 

The team got up and running fast. “Even in the very beginning, we’d ship something every day that was an instant value-add. It was so satisfying,” adds David. “With every record, attribute, filter and dashboard we built, Attio was building our ultimate system of record.”

How Railway uses Attio

With Attio, Railway has built a product-led-growth machine. Using custom objects, intelligent automation and powerful integrations, the team has built their workspace around a metered-billing, subscription-based business model, something that just was not possible with any other CRM. 

“Attio lets us mirror the way we actually work,” says David. “From a single place we can see every customer, how they’re trending, what’s up and what’s down. It’s a central space to understand it all.”

A living system of record 

Railway’s business model is centered around the teams building their products on the platform. Using Attio’s powerful data model, David has represented this unique customer and relationship data inside Attio.

“As a PLG company, we love the Workspaces object," shares David. “Right out of the box, we had this data model that maps perfectly onto our concept of teams, and the individual users related to each team.”

With Workspaces, Railway can track the progress of their customers on an individual and company level, in the precise ways they engage with the product. “It allows us to say, ‘here all our teams, by revenue, usage, adoption, activity – anything that we want to feed into it,” says David. 

The team’s favorite feature is the ability to create filters for their object data. “I have a few different filters that I check on a daily or weekly basis,” he shares. “I can check what our customer spend level is for the month, whether it is growing or not and more.”

“Attio gives us access to a birds-eye view of our top 100 to 1000 customers, with total ease.”

Real-time automated data sync 

As a developer company, Railway wanted a CRM that could handle their specific data needs. With clear documentation, an open API, and the freedom to integrate with any data source, Attio was the perfect fit. 

“We built our own enrichment bot to signal when a team signs onto the product and is in our ICP,” explains David. “When a new workspace appears on the platform, our custom script checks the domain against our ICP database and enriches the record with industry tags, seat counts, ARR, and lifetime usage.”

The team have also created an adoption score that feeds directly into Attio, so they can instantly analyze changes to adoption level over time. “Our adoption score is a home-grown algorithm that blends product signals from Segment, BigQuery, and manual inputs, into a single metric, which is then plugged into Attio for real-time updates and live tracking,” says David. 

“As a devtools company, we’re very technical–-this is our world, right? So a CRM like Attio, with all that documentation and code up front, is more than we could have wished for.”

Workflows that turn product signals into pipeline

David and team have used Attio’s workflows to translate live product usage into instant GTM insights. “I use workflows in Attio to send live alerts to our GTM chat,” says David. “So, if a customer reaches a certain monthly spend threshold, I've set up an automatic update that will stream into our chat.”

The team also uses the Deals object and workflows to amp up their sales-assisted growth, a crucial element in their enterprise component on top of their PLG motion.

“When a customer indicates through their actions in the product, or by clicking a form asking to talk to sales, we’ve set up an automation to create a deal record,” explains David. “We can then pick up these deals in triage during our GTM meetings, so we can provide those teams with tailored sales-assisted guidance.”

“It’s been a huge uplift for our GTM team,” he adds. “We're in Attio daily and our adoption has reached 100%. Other teams like engineering love to check it out too. It’s definitely become the central source of truth for our entire operation.”

Scaling up on an extensible canvas

Attio has enabled Railway to build their PLG machine, so they can continue supporting the next generation of web developers. 

David is looking forward to experimenting with the platform even further, in particular through more custom objects and email Sequencing. “The extensibility is the most exciting thing,” he says. “It’s a software blank slate that we can keep building on top of and growing with.”

“Attio is a dev company’s dream CRM. Everyone in our team is very technical, so it's the perfect platform for us to build on to understand our customers, gather crucial account information and produce critical new insights into our pipeline.”

“I’d definitely recommend it to any startup, especially those using subscription software or metered billing, or teams combining product-led and sales-assisted growth. The data model is just so flexible, and it's extremely easy to set up.”

Ultimately, Railway found a tool in Attio that they no longer thought existed in the world of CRM. “Attio feels like the exact kind of software we’d build ourselves,” says David. “We feel at home in it.”