Gatsby → Attio: member events, synced live
Gatsby powers some of the most exclusive member networks - UHNW clubs, founder collectives, invite-only communities. The problem is that the data stays in Gatsby, and your relationship intelligence lives (or should live) in Attio. Most teams end up running a nightly CSV export and hoping no one asks them what happened yesterday. We replaced that with a webhook pipeline. The moment a member RSVPs, checks in, joins a segment, or gets tagged inside Gatsby, the event lands in Attio as a linked activity on the right Person and Event records. No cron, no JWT expiry surprises, no "why is the list stale?" on a Monday morning.
Direction
Gatsby → Attio (webhook, bidirectional on select fields)
Stack
Gatsby API, Attio API, n8n (optional), Cloudflare / Render
The what
What this integration actually does
The how
How we build it
- 1
Audit the Gatsby objects you use - Events, Attendees, Hosts, Segments, Tags - and map them to Attio objects (People, Companies, and custom objects like Events or Chapters).
- 2
Register webhooks on the Gatsby side for the lifecycle events that matter: RSVP, check-in, no-show, tag added, segment change, member created.
- 3
Deploy a lightweight receiver (Cloudflare Worker or n8n webhook node) that validates the payload, looks up the matching Attio record by email, and upserts the activity.
- 4
Wire the reverse direction where it makes sense - e.g. "Hot lead" tag in Attio flows back to a Gatsby segment so your team can invite them to the next dinner.
- 5
Monitor with BetterStack or a Slack error channel so a failed payload never silently rots.
Under the hood
What lives inside the pipeline
- Webhook verification with the Gatsby signing secret (no open endpoint).
- Idempotent upserts - replaying a payload never creates a duplicate activity.
- Email-based matching with a fallback to phone, because Gatsby RSVPs are often on personal Gmails.
- Relationship attributes (not record-refs) on the Event junction object so attendance renders cleanly in the Attio UI.
- A "friendly name" resolver so the timeline reads "Attended Horizons Berlin Dinner" instead of "evt_8a3f…".
Hard-earned lessons
What we learned the hard way
- Gatsby's webhook path is /webhooks (plural). The docs occasionally imply singular. Get this wrong and you burn an afternoon.
- Some Gatsby endpoints that return 404 in Postman are actually Express routes that only respond to the dashboard origin - chase the header, not the status code.
- /login returns an empty body when the account uses SSO - don't treat that as a failure in your health check.
- Breezy (Gatsby's RSVP flow) is browser-only on certain tiers. Automations that assume a headless RSVP will silently drop.
- Chips through record-references render empty in Attio at runtime. Use relationship attributes on junction objects for bidirectional UI.
Case study
Horizons - UHNW member network
Problem
Event attendance and member tags lived in Gatsby. Attio had a stale snapshot from a monthly CSV. The ops team spent hours reconciling before every dinner.
Solution
Webhook sync replaces the cron. Three workflows went live in April: one in pure Attio, one hybrid (Attio + n8n enrichment), one fully in n8n for deeper logic.
Outcome
Attio is now the single source of truth for member relationships. JWT polling is gone. Every new RSVP lands as a linked activity within seconds.
FAQ
Questions we get
Webhooks are available on Gatsby's paid tiers. If you're on the free plan you'll need to poll, which we can build but don't recommend - it ages badly and loses state around cancellations.
Yes, on the fields Gatsby exposes as writable. Tags and segment membership are the common ones. Ownership and private notes stay in Attio.
The receiver tries email first, then phone, then falls back to a new Person record flagged for manual review. No silent duplication.
One to two weeks depending on how custom your event model is. Webhook plumbing takes days; the harder work is the data model, which is the same work you'd do even without Gatsby.
Want this running on your Attio?
Book a free 30-min call. We'll map your use case to what we've already shipped and tell you whether this fits - honestly.
Book a 30-min call