TL;DR: In today’s economic environment, GTM teams are under pressure to deliver revenue quickly and efficiently. However, they struggle to make the best use of their data (such as usage, CRM, 3rd party data) even though they are sitting on tons of it.
That’s why we built HeadsUp, to help companies identify which users to engage and when to best engage them. HeadsUp helps GTM teams with any of their objectives, from finding users stuck in activation to identifying upsell opportunities or churn risks.
Announcing our fundraise
Today, I’m thrilled to announce that we raised an $8.5m seed round from 645 Ventures, Wing Venture Capital, Firstminute Capital, and Character. We are delighted to partner with these world-class investors who have invested in iconic companies like Snowflake, Iterable, Gong.
Some great founders and operators also participated, from companies like Drift, Algolia, Asana, Amplitude, Miro, and Productboard. These leaders have experienced the problem HeadsUp solves first hand and see in HeadsUp the chance to change how go-to-market is done.
Go-to-market teams today face a data crisis
SaaS companies today collect a vast array of data on their customers. This ranges from usage data to billing and CRM data, and even 3rd party data like users’ job titles and how much their companies have raised in funding.
In an ideal world, this data should help go-to-market teams figure out when and how they should engage users.
Here’s an example. If a user is stuck on Feature X, marketing might want to send an email with specific content to unblock them. If the user is still stuck after a week, the sales-assist team should know to jump in to give them a walkthrough. After the user has used the feature for a month, and other data about their role indicates they are a good fit, enterprise sales should engage them to start the buying process.
However, this data is often inaccessible to GTM teams. Even when companies can pull the data out from these silo-ed databases, GTM teams are still left with the burden of interpreting the data. Sales reps aren’t hired to be analysts, so the results are usually lackluster.
As a result, even though modern SaaS products have millions of users, monetization is tricky. Most companies convert only ~1-2% to paid users, and fewer still monetize these paid users further through upsells or cross-sells.
That’s why HeadsUp exists.
HeadsUp makes all this easy by plugging into your data sources. We then run our proprietary ML model to determine which behavioral, demographic, and firmographic indicators truly matter. These indicators help GTM teams figure out who to engage, and when is the best moment to do so. Native integrations with sales and marketing tools (e.g., Marketo, Salesforce, Intercom) mean GTM teams can then automatically engage these users through HeadsUp.
HeadsUp’s origin story
At my first job, my co-founder Earl and I were early employees at Fiscalnote, a recently-IPOed SaaS company.
At Fiscalnote, we spent a lot of time working on providing sales, CS, and marketing teams visibility into how users interacted with the product.
We built out an internal tool that we were proud of at that time. But after speaking with 100s of other GTM teams, we realized there were several reasons a full-fledged product was required:
1. Building internally was too slow.
SaaS companies are goaled on revenue quarterly. A tool like this takes a whole team of data scientists and engineers at least 6 months, if they are fully dedicated. It was hard to justify diverting all these resources away from building the core product.
2. A product like HeadsUp can be laser-focused on solving this specific problem.
At HeadsUp, we’ve been able to niche down – for example, our ML model’s feature engineering is deeply optimized for this SaaS GTM problem. It accounts for nuances like seasonality, where the sales cycle and buying behavior varies from quarter to quarter.
We were also able to build more extensive integrations with GTM tools, like Salesforce, Slack, Marketo.
3. A more thoughtful tool could minimize the friction of adoption.
One pitfall we’ve seen is that many existing solutions just show your GTM team a bunch of data. Individual marketing and sales teams are often left to interpret the data themselves. Reps aren’t hired to be analysts, and they dislike being overwhelmed by data.
At HeadsUp, we spent a lot of effort making the product more prescriptive. It only shows you the indicators that matter. Of course, you have the option to change them, but it’s much less stressful to have the analytics first pick out a few needles from the haystack.
Subscribe to our newsletter below for more of our content. Or reach out for a chat to find out more about the product!
Thank you to our supporters
HeadsUp owes a lot to our early supporters.
Our customers trusted us with the most critical part of their business – their revenue.
Today, we are working with many iconic, billion-dollar businesses, from content management startups to data tools. Without them taking a chance on our tool, we wouldn’t have been able to learn so much. Or have the results to show for our work.
Our investors also bought into our vision, and supported us in this exciting journey to change how revenue teams work.
