About Plasma
Plasma is a London-based Web3 infrastructure company building a next-generation payments network for stablecoins, with a focus on USDT. Their business model revolves around partnerships - with payment providers, exchanges, DeFi protocols, and ecosystem players - rather than a conventional SaaS sales motion. The team spans partnerships, growth, legal, and marketing, all working from a single Attio workspace.
The Challenge
Plasma had been using Attio for a while, but the workspace had grown organically and was showing its age. Several problems had accumulated:
Fragmented pipeline structure: Payments, Exchanges, DeFi/Eco, and Legal pipelines existed, but each had been set up independently with inconsistent attributes, mismatched stage names, and no clear logic between list-level and object-level data.
No cross-team workflows: When a partnership reached the contract phase, the legal team was notified manually via Slack DMs. Same for marketing activation requests. No automation, no paper trail in the CRM.
Inbound unqualified: A Typeform collected partnership inquiries, but submissions weren't flowing into Attio. Qualification was manual.
Meeting notes scattered: Half the team used Granola for call notes, but those notes weren't syncing to Attio records. Context before calls was hard to retrieve.
13 users, no shared process: The workspace was broadly adopted across partnerships, growth, legal, and marketing, but without a consistent data model or documented workflows.
Our Approach
Novlini delivered the project in 2 days, with a full discovery session to map Plasma's real partnership lifecycle before touching any configuration.
CRM Restructure
We audited the existing workspace and rebuilt the data model cleanly. Key decisions: Payments, DeFi/Eco, and Exchanges each became proper lists with their own stage definitions and attributes, while shared company-level data (location, LinkedIn, industry) was correctly anchored on the Companies object rather than duplicated across lists. Exchanges got its own specific attributes (region segmentation that differs from the other verticals). Unused objects (Users, Workspaces) were deactivated to reduce noise.
Cross-team Workflow Automations
Two core automations built in Attio, connected to Slack:
Legal trigger: When a partnership reaches the relevant stage in any pipeline, a notification fires automatically to the legal team's Slack channel, with context on the partner and the owner. The company is simultaneously added to a dedicated Legal tracking list in Attio, where the legal team can follow MOU and contract stages independently.
Marketing trigger: When the partnerships team is ready to activate a co-marketing campaign, the same logic applies: a Slack notification to Nathan and Jin (the marketing owners), and the partner is added to a Marketing pipeline with its own stages for briefing, production, and launch.
Typeform Integration
Typeform connected to Attio: inbound partnership inquiries now automatically create or update Company and People records in Attio, and route into a dedicated inbound qualification list. Assignment logic configured for first review.
Granola Integration
Granola connected natively to Attio: meeting notes from calls are automatically pushed as notes on the relevant company or contact records. No more manual copy-paste after calls.
Dashboards and Views
Reports built for the partnerships team: deals by stage, partnerships closed by owner, activity over time. Views configured per team for daily usability.
Documentation and Training
Full documentation of the data model, automations, and workflows delivered. One live training session for the business team. Recorded walkthrough for onboarding future team members.
Technology Stack
Attio - CRM, 4 pipelines, automations, dashboards (source of truth)
Typeform - inbound partnership form, connected to Attio
Granola - AI note-taker, synced natively to Attio
Slack - notification layer for legal and marketing triggers
The Results
Plasma went from an inconsistently configured workspace to a clean, cross-team CRM with automated handoffs between partnerships, legal, and marketing.
4 pipelines rebuilt - Payments, Exchanges, DeFi/Eco, and Legal, each with clean attributes and consistent stages
Legal and marketing triggers live - no more manual Slack DMs to notify internal teams
Inbound automated - Typeform submissions flowing directly into Attio, routed to a qualification list
Meeting notes synced - Granola integrated, full call history visible on every record
13 users enabled - documentation and training delivered across partnerships, growth, legal, and marketing
Why It Matters
Partnership-driven businesses have a CRM problem that's different from SaaS sales teams. There's no deal value to forecast, no close date to optimize. What matters is relationship continuity - knowing what was said 6 months ago, who owns each account, and how to activate legal and marketing without things falling through the cracks. Getting Attio right for this kind of motion requires designing the system around the actual workflow, not the default CRM template.