Certification build

Designing a Full B2B SaaS Revenue Workspace in Attio

Nature: the assessment project for the Attio Experts Program, which resulted in Pelotis's certification as Attio Certified Expert Partner. CloudScale Analytics is a fictional company defined by Attio for the assessment — the architecture and every design decision are real and reviewable.

The brief

CloudScale Analytics: a Series B business-intelligence SaaS with contract values from $12K to $120K ACV. Design their complete revenue workspace — from inbound demo request to renewal and expansion — and defend every architectural choice. This is the useful thing about certification builds: unlike client work, everything can be shown.

The architecture

Objects.Two standard (People, Companies) plus two custom: Deal and Subscription. The interesting decision is what didn't become an object — no "Lead" object, no dummy intake object. Leads are a state, not a thing; modeling them as things is how CRMs rot.

Five lists, each owning one job: SDR Leads · AE Pipeline · Active Customers · Upcoming Renewals · Expansion Opportunities. Lists are views with responsibilities, not folders.

The three decisions worth reading

1. The staging-area pattern.Typeform demo requests land in the SDR Leads list as list-specific attributes — they do not touch the Companies or People objects until an SDR reviews the lead and marks "Demo booked." Result: the core database stays pristine while intake stays fast. Unreviewed form spam never pollutes company records. Most CRM implementations get this exactly backwards, writing every form fill straight into the database and spending forever cleaning it.

2. Find-or-create deduplication, keyed on company website + work email. The promotion workflow from staging to database checks for existing records before creating anything. Deduplication designed at day zero costs one workflow; deduplication at month twelve costs a consulting project.

3. Subscriptions as history, not just state. All subscription records — active and lapsed — live in one object distinguished by a Status attribute, with a deliberate one-to-one cardinality and ARR auto-set from plan tier by workflow. The renewal and expansion lists then derive from subscription data instead of being maintained by hand. Churn analysis becomes a query, not an archaeology dig.

Four workflows wire it together: intake promotion, deduplicated record creation, ARR automation, and lifecycle transitions between the five lists.

Why publish a certification project?

Because architecture is the part of CRM work clients can never see in advance — every real workspace is confidential. This build is the one place I can show the full reasoning: what became an object and what didn't, where automation ends and human review begins, and why cardinality decisions made in week one determine whether reporting works in year two. The methodology here is the same one running in production for real clients.

Pelotis builds and runs GDPR-clean revenue systems for EU startups — Attio Certified Expert Partner, Braze certified, ex-Amazon/Audible MarTech. Migrating to Attio or starting fresh? The data model is where we begin.

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