How Pagerly used Updately to capture teams frustrated with PagerDuty pricing and book 35 demos in their first month
“We were finding prospects who were literally complaining about their PagerDuty bill on Reddit and Twitter. Updately surfaced them, crafted the perfect message, and we just had to show up to the demo. It's like having a sales team that never sleeps.”
Mansi
Head of Growth, Pagerly
How Updately identified high-intent buyers for Pagerly
Updately's AI continuously monitored these buying signals on LinkedIn to surface the right prospects at the right moment.
Pricing Complaints (Reddit & Twitter)
Engineers and engineering managers complaining about PagerDuty or incident.io being too expensive on Reddit, Twitter/X, and HackerNews — the strongest buying signal for Pagerly.
Job Postings
Companies posting roles for Incident Managers, SREs, or On-Call Engineers — indicating investment in incident response infrastructure and potential need for new tooling.
Network Signals
Prospects from target accounts viewing Pagerly team profiles, engaging with their LinkedIn posts, or connecting with Pagerly employees — showing direct interest.
Vendor Switch Discussions
LinkedIn posts and comments from engineering leaders actively asking for PagerDuty alternatives or sharing their experience migrating away from expensive incident tools.
Slack Tool Discussions
Engineering teams discussing Slack-native tooling preferences, on-call rotation pain points, or incident workflow automation on social platforms.
Pagerly had built a powerful, affordable alternative to PagerDuty and incident.io for incident management and on-call scheduling — deeply integrated into Slack where engineering teams already work. But breaking into a market dominated by incumbents like PagerDuty (with $400M+ ARR) and the fast-growing incident.io was brutal. Their small team couldn't manually track every frustrated engineer venting about expensive on-call tools on Reddit, Twitter, and LinkedIn. They knew the demand was there — teams were actively looking for cheaper, Slack-native alternatives — but finding these prospects at the right moment was like searching for needles in a haystack.
Updately became Pagerly's competitive intelligence and outreach engine. They configured signals to monitor social platforms where engineers openly discuss tooling frustrations: Reddit threads about PagerDuty pricing, Twitter posts complaining about incident.io costs, and LinkedIn discussions about on-call tool fatigue. Beyond social listening, Updately tracked job postings for 'Incident Manager' and 'On-Call Engineer' roles — a strong indicator that companies were investing in incident response infrastructure and might be evaluating new tools. Network signals from LinkedIn (profile views, connection requests from target accounts, engagement with Pagerly's content) added another layer of intent data. When a high-intent signal fired, Updately's AI crafted messages that directly addressed the prospect's specific pain point — whether it was cost, Slack integration, or on-call scheduling complexity.
From signal to closed deal — a real example
Here's exactly how Updately turned a LinkedIn buying signal into revenue for Pagerly.
Signal Detection — Reddit
Updately detected an Engineering Manager posting on r/devops: 'PagerDuty is charging us $42/user/month and we're a 60-person eng team. There has to be a better option.' The post had 87 upvotes and dozens of replies.
Cross-Platform Research
Updately identified the poster's LinkedIn profile, verified they were an Engineering Manager at a Series B SaaS company with 60+ engineers, and found they had also liked a tweet complaining about incident.io pricing.
Empathy-First Connection
Mansi sent a LinkedIn connection request referencing the general pain of on-call costs at scale — no product pitch, just acknowledging a shared frustration that every growing eng team faces.
Value-Driven Follow-Up
Followed up with a message sharing a cost comparison breakdown of incident management tools, mentioning how Slack-native solutions can cut costs by 70% while keeping engineers in their existing workflow.
Deal Won
The demo led to a pilot with their on-call team, which expanded to company-wide adoption within 3 weeks. The prospect specifically cited the Reddit-to-LinkedIn journey as 'the most relevant cold outreach I've ever received.'
Generated $890K in qualified pipeline within 2 months
Booked 35 product demos in the first month — up from 6 with manual outreach
Achieved a 44% reply rate on signal-triggered LinkedIn outreach
72% of demos came from prospects who had complained about PagerDuty/incident.io pricing
Closed 8 deals directly from Reddit frustration signals in the first 60 days
Reduced cost per qualified meeting by 80% compared to paid ads
Ready to see similar results?
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