An entrepreneur since he was 12 years old, Torrey Leonard was used to building things that worked for him. When he founded Thoughtly, Attio was a key part of his initial system. The platform helped him manage sales and pipeline, and it made sense for an entrepreneur working solo.
“As someone with an engineering mind, it made a lot of sense,” Torrey said.
Then Thoughtly started hiring. With a new VP of Revenue, a team of account executives, and customer success managers, their GTM platform needed to work better for a larger group.
When leads arrive faster than a sales team can follow up, opportunity can quickly become a bottleneck. New York-based startup Thoughtly builds AI agents that hook into a customer’s CRM and turn demand into conversions through autonomous calls, texts, and emails.
Built on AWS infrastructure, these agents can schedule appointments and follow up, helping revenue teams close the gap between incoming demand and the people available to handle it.
Thoughtly’s old CRM, however, stood in their way. As new hires wrestled with the system’s integrations and reporting, its limitations became hard to ignore.
“Our team struggled to generate the right reports. It was like pulling teeth,” Torrey said. “A lot of that fell to the language used in the platform itself. Much of it is logical, which makes sense to an engineering team or a solo founder. But when you grow to a much larger team, it becomes very challenging.”
Team members began to offer suggestions for an alternative.
“When I started onboarding one go-to-market revenue team member after another, they all asked for HubSpot,” Torrey said.
“When I started onboarding one go-to-market revenue team member after another, they all asked for HubSpot.”
— Torrey Leonard, Co-Founder and CEO, Thoughtly
Cost is always a factor when changing platforms. In addition to access to partners, resources, and education, HubSpot for Startups offered a discount that led to immediate savings.
“HubSpot is really inexpensive for us compared to our old platform,” Torrey said. “And over time, it scales really well. So as we add seats, even when we do graduate from the program, the pricing does not jump up.”
Thoughtly had lived with friction for years, but it took only a few weeks to migrate all details and integrations into HubSpot. Soon, the team had a familiar platform that enabled them to work more efficiently.
With the old CRM, the Thoughtly team frequently used Zapier and N8N to connect everything, and used custom code that they had to write. HubSpot eliminated the extra steps.
“Now we have great reports that are built out of the box,” Torrey said. “Everyone can understand where we are this month, where we are this quarter, and what we’re all rowing toward together.”
The majority of Thoughtly’s customers use HubSpot as their system of record. So, the team connected their own HubSpot instance into their AWS-backed Thoughtly account to get a firsthand view of the customer experience.
Once HubSpot and Thoughtly are linked, a Thoughtly agent can figure out how to convert a lead, then build a follow-up campaign. Suddenly, people across the organization were learning the nuances around record naming conventions, how information moved through the CRM, and how agents operated on top of that data.
“The coolest part is the revenue team, not the product or engineering team, can actually give us feedback on the product, because they are using it,” Torrey said.
The shift from builder to user allowed Thoughtly to build with more customer empathy and make their AI agents better in the process.
“The coolest part is the revenue team, not the product or engineering team, can actually give us feedback on the product, because they are using it.”
— Torrey Leonard, Co-Founder and CEO, Thoughtly
Another crucial layer for Thoughtly is AWS, which they use to deploy backend services and infrastructure.
“It’s imperative for us to have an agent that sounds and acts human-like,” said Thoughtly Co-Founder, CTO, and Head of Product Alex Casella. “AWS helps us get there faster.
“It’s imperative for us to have an agent that sounds and acts human-like. AWS helps us get there faster.”
—Alex Casella, Co-Founder, CTO, and Head of Product, Thoughtly
The team chose AWS over GCP and Microsoft Azure for its reliability, speed, range of services, and support, all of which contribute to more natural agent interactions. Servers sit in different regions to support customers around the world, and Thoughtly enjoys more than 99% uptime and a half-second reduction in latency.
Thoughtly's entire value chain lives on this shared infrastructure: HubSpot runs on AWS, Thoughtly builds on AWS, and Thoughtly's agents deploy into HubSpot.
“We have a HubSpot integration that we provide to our customers,” Alex said. “They use that integration for us to then pull data from their CRM so our agent has the context and is able to manage tasks and call their leads using the latest information. So the HubSpot CRM integration is deployed to AWS.”
Every day, Thoughtly's platform embeds itself deeper into HubSpot and the tools around it.
“It’s this flywheel where we can learn from customers and we can also learn from ourselves independently in HubSpot,” Torrey said.
As the flywheel turns, the founders’ ambition expands. They want to turn more opportunities into conversions, and more conversions into growth.
Torrey believes HubSpot can help do the same for other organizations, especially startups transitioning away from founder-led sales into a go-to-market organization.
“If it's just you, maybe it's too early for HubSpot. But if you are getting to that point where just using a CRM isn't enough anymore, that's when you need to switch over to HubSpot for Startups,” Torrey said.
“If you are getting to that point where just using a CRM isn't enough anymore, that's when you need to switch over to HubSpot for Startups.”
— Torrey Leonard, Co-Founder and CEO, Thoughtly
