About HeadsUp

HeadsUp is a product-led sales platform based in San Francisco, California, founded by Momo Ong and Earl Lee in 2020.  

They help go-to-market teams tap into their product usage data, to identify which customers to engage, when to reach out, and what the optimal playbook is.

HeadsUp’s product identifies Product Qualified Leads (PQLs), by identifying users with a high intent to upgrade, based on usage patterns and other data (billing, CRM, firmographic). Companies like Dropbox and Hubspot have built powerful internal tools and entire data science teams to hunt for PQLs within their users. HeadsUp gives companies this capability through a simple, no-code tool.

HeadsUp’s journey to using OSlash

As is often the case with startups, the early days are a rollercoaster ride. From building the product, to building the team, to building the brand - there are not only infinite opportunities to grow and leave an unforgettable mark on the world, there are also infinite opportunities for chaos to reign supreme. As HeadsUp expanded to a team of more than 10 members, the challenges accompanying growth started surfacing and they felt an increasing need to retain context in the company.

“We wanted to figure out a quick and simple way to bring everyone on the same page as far as communication within teams and across departments was concerned. Our vision had always been to create an organizational culture that fostered informed cooperation and a shared sense of transparency, a shared sense of moving together in the same direction, without compromising on the speed crucial to our success.”

• Nathan Wang Liao, Head of business operations

A lot of productive time that could have been devoted to bug-fixes and overall product improvement, was spent merely exchanging information back and forth. While creating and managing flows, there was an additional problem of duplicate documentation. It resulted in scattered and repeated information which required consolidation. 

That’s when their product development team heard about OSlash - an enterprise URL manager built for modern workplaces and teams to manage their information (that lives in links) in one place. 

“Seamless collaboration between teams and across departments - a fundamental outcome promised by OSlash - sounded exactly like what we wanted. So we signed up.”

Time savings increased drastically with the creation of the first batch of shortcuts itself. The transformation of the everyday standup meeting from a long URL on Zoom to the shortcut o/standup saw a bunch of grateful developers and testers, all reporting on time, perhaps for the first time. Delays due to searching for the link and then copy-pasting it in the browser were wiped out. 

The success of o/standup prompted an extension of the shortcuts to the company all hands meeting, now referred to as...you guessed it right - o/allhands. Everyday back and forth regarding meeting links across teams began was almost fully obliterated.

The next step was experimenting with OSlash collections in the form of o/prd, with which everyone could access all product related documentation in one place, therefore eliminating the need to scroll through unending Slack threads and digging deep into their emails for links to the product roadmap, demos, onboarding, pricing documents, and everything else.

The transition from talking about getting work done more quickly and smoothly to actually getting it done more quickly and smoothly had begun.

How OSlash works with HeadsUp today

Like all things new, adapting to working with OSlash took time. Not copy-pasting links anymore, an action most people previously performed on autopilot, took some getting used to. Soon, however, the switch to naming all important pages and links became second nature. 

“Naming links is powerful. It makes it far easier to recall, share, and access information. Now whenever anyone creates a doc or stumbles upon one - regardless of which application it's in, we try to create a Shortcut for it... it's become a natural way of working for everybody.”

In the opinion of the content team, “life has become considerably simpler” since OSlash.

After all, OSlash came in pretty handy during their website revamp.

With branding guidelines tucked away in Notion, graphics and other assets on Figma, company images in Dropbox, and website copy scattered across multiple Google Docs, keeping everyone on the same page (quite literally) was proving to be an unforeseen challenge, standing in the way of effective collaboration.

But, if the product team could do it, so could they. Armed with an intuitive keyword based collection called o/website-revamp - which included shortcuts such as o/website-revamp/branding, o/website-revamp/design, and o/website-revamp/content - they proceeded to draw up a significantly more user-friendly and eye-catching website in a matter of two weeks, a task anticipated to take upwards of a month, without OSlash.

With o/website-feedback, the whole team knew where and how to give their inputs on the drafts. In the next one week, the final website was ready. Collaboration, previously a challenge, had become seamless. And with it, the overall productivity had risen as well. 

Eng Heng, HeadsUp’s PM and Head of Ops, echoed this sentiment.

“OSlash took care of two of our greatest pet-peeves: the onboarding process as well as the searching and sorting through support tickets.”

With OSlash, onboarding could be elevated to the fast track - from sharing scores of links, documents, credentials, rights and whatnot with the new hires, they graduated to sharing the collection containing all relevant information just one shortcut and one click away. Onboarding someone, like at most new enterprises, was a hot mess. Now, it's a seamless two day process

Looking forward

While it is natural for work to take place in silos to an extent in any modern workplace, having a central repository of information act as a single source of truth can be immensely helpful to cut through the clutter and the noise. 

“The outcome we expected was that we'd no longer have to frustrate ourselves into the effort that goes into finding and maintaining all the links. But the reward has been so much more.”

Seamless collaboration and simplified access to information are not the only benefits that OSlash brings to the table. 

Cross-functional communication is also much more efficient with OSlash as unlike lengthy documentation and messy URLs, shortcuts can be shared across teams and departments simply by saying them out loud.

That may not be ideal in a world where remote work is fast becoming the norm rather than the exception. So OSlash comes with features like the input-widget (which autocompletes shortcuts in text editors, emails, and Linear) and integrates easily across apps like Slack for making shortcuts work everywhere that people do. 

“As we bolster our social media presence, we would increasingly adopt OSlash to bring in new inputs for content planning, scheduling, posting, and community management from product, engineering, design, and customer support teams. Reducing communication overhead across teams and moving ahead faster will be extremely crucial in levelling up our social media game.”

What began as an experiment for one person at HeadsUp, has now become the default way of working for all the 7 teams currently powering the company. And that’s not all. HeadsUp wants to make it the default way for everyone in the future as well. They plan to do this in two ways. First, by having a dedicated collection for each team and department. And second, by ensuring OSlash comes mandatorily pre-installed on all work-systems from here on. 

“A multiplayer browser experience that also promises to be the world’s fastest to date - now that is the kind of future we want to be part of at HeadsUp,” concludes Nathan.

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If you are interested in checking out HeadsUp, take a look at their demo. Also feel free to reach out HeadsUp’s founder Momo at momo@headsup.ai. Existing OSlash users also get a 1-month free trial and 10% off!