Why we invested in HeadsUp

Slack, Zoom, Datadog, Twilio, Dropbox, Airtable, Calendly, Zapier — household names in SaaS all with one thing in common — they nailed “Product-Led Growth”.

These are companies who scaled through the process of knowledge workers and developers adopting products (usually on a free tier) and deriving so much value from them that they proliferated within organisations (resulting in enterprise contracts), quickly becoming standards within their category. As software continues to eat the world, we believe that PLG is here to stay as a dominant go-to-market strategy for new market entrants. 

Despite these companies’ ability to scale quickly, PLG companies still only convert a small portion of their free users into paid clients and even fewer succeed in upselling customers or cross-selling additional products, therefore leaving huge amounts of value on the table. When they do manage to upsell and cross-sell, this is a slow process that requires engineers to extract relevant product usage data for sales and marketing teams to act on.

Enter HeadsUp, a platform for non-technical teams to to easily understand when users are ready to upgrade or close to churning giving them the ability to intervene with personalised outreach. If HeadsUp succeeds, we believe they have a chance of becoming the core operating system for the next wave of PLG companies that come to market. 

We always get excited here at firstminute when founders are solving their own problems that are experienced by so many others. Earl and Momo fit this exact mold when they shared their story of how they built this tool at Fiscalnote (which IPO’d earlier this year for $1.3bn) to give sales teams visibility into how customers were using the product. We are thrilled to join them on their journey democratising this software for large and small companies alike (they are already working with blue chip clients such as Contentful!) alongside our friends at 645 Ventures, Wing VC, Character and operators from leading PLG companies such as Algolia, Amplitude, Miro, Drift, Crossbeam and Asana. 

If you are a PLG company that wants to empower your sales and marketing teams to generate more revenues and deliver a better user experience for your customers, please do reach out!