What should you think about before migrating from Affinity to Attio?

The biggest mistake teams make is trying to recreate their Affinity setup inside Attio. Don't do that. Affinity and Attio have fundamentally different data models, and Attio's flexibility means you should be redesigning, not replicating.

The biggest migration mistake is trying to recreate your old setup instead of redesigning.

Start with your data model. Affinity organizes everything around lists: deals, portfolio companies, LPs, whatever you're tracking. In Attio, you need to decide what becomes a custom object and what becomes a list. A "Deals" list in Affinity almost always maps to a custom Deals object in Attio with a pipeline status attribute. Your "Portfolio Companies" list might just become a filtered list on the Companies object. Think about what deserves its own object versus what's really just a view on existing records.

The export from Affinity is actually straightforward. Their structure is rigid enough that the data comes out clean. You'll get your people, organizations, and list entries as CSVs. The real work starts when you're mapping Affinity fields to Attio attributes. Affinity's global and list-specific fields need to become either object-level attributes or list-level attributes in Attio, and getting this wrong creates a mess that's painful to fix later.

Relationship intelligence is where expectations need adjusting. Affinity's email and calendar sync builds a relationship strength score and interaction history that won't transfer. The good news is Attio has its own enriched attributes. It'll pull in company data, domains, social profiles, and more automatically once records exist. But Affinity's proprietary relationship scoring doesn't have a direct equivalent. If your team relies heavily on "who knows who" data, plan for that gap.

Notes and interaction history are the trickiest part of the migration. Affinity notes export as text, but they lose their threading and association context. You can import them into Attio as notes on the corresponding records, but it takes scripting to match them correctly, especially when notes are tied to both a person and a deal. Budget time for this.

What to leave behind: most teams over-migrate. Old list entries from three years ago, duplicate organization records, notes that are just email forwards. Skip all of it. A migration is the best opportunity to clean house. I typically recommend only bringing over active pipeline deals, current relationship records, and notes from the last 12 months.

Finally, don't migrate and then try to learn Attio. Build your new workspace structure first, get comfortable with how custom objects, relationship attributes, and automations work, then bring the data in. The migration is the easy part. The redesign is where the value is.