# HeadsUp

Aiolum story: https://aiolum.com/story/headsup/ · added 2026-11-05 · updated 2026-11-05

**In short.** HeadsUp (AI competitive-intelligence agent that tracks competitors' websites, Not stated in the sources): Live with a paid plan and 11564 public pages, November 2026. Evidence grade E: no revenue figure was checked. Team: 1 maker listed on Product Hunt (Dru Riley); headcount not published. Launched 17 August 2025; still running.

AI competitive-intelligence agent that tracks competitors' websites · Not stated in the sources · AI-native · solo founder · still running · group: Marketing and social content

- Outcome: Live with a paid plan and 11564 public pages, November 2026 (evidence grade of the headline number: E; no revenue figure)
- Launch: 17 August 2025; months from launch to the outcome: 15
- Team: 1 maker listed on Product Hunt (Dru Riley); headcount not published
- Outside funding: None stated in the sources
- Main factor: Distribution
- Meters, 1 to 4: evidence strength 1, copyable pattern 3, capital needed 1
- Tags: AI-native, Solo founder, Bootstrapped, Running, B2B, Marketing

Links:

- Visit headsup.bot: https://headsup.bot/

**The product.** A web service that watches the websites of a company's competitors and reports what changed: prices, product launches and positioning. You enter your own domain, it proposes a list of competitors, shows 90 days of their past changes, and then sends alerts and weekly summaries with recommended responses.

**Why it worked.** Companies want to know when a competitor changes its price or its message, but checking competitor sites by hand is slow. HeadsUp turns the check into an agent that reads the pages, explains the change and suggests a reply. It was launched on Product Hunt by Dru Riley, who also publishes the Trends.vc newsletter for founders.

Evidence grades: A = disclosed by a public company, a filing or a payment processor, or verified by one; B = two or more independent reports agree, or a journalist confirmed it; C = a founder claim that no one else verified; D = reported, not verified: one founder claim or a third-party estimate with no second source; E = no revenue figure found, so the headline is a non-money fact and the other facts carry their own grades; calc = computed on this page from graded facts.

## Summary

HeadsUp calls itself "Your AI Competitive Intelligence Agent". Competitive intelligence is the work of collecting and reading public information about competitors (prices, new features, marketing claims) to decide how to respond. An AI agent here is software that does this collection and reading without a person: it checks the competitors' web pages, detects changes and writes an explanation with recommended actions.

The product was posted on Product Hunt on 17 August 2025 with the tagline "The first AI competitor monitoring agent" and received 600 votes. The only maker listed is Dru Riley, whose newsletter site Trends.vc says it is "made with love by Dru Riley". The site sells one paid plan that its pricing script shows at US$39 a month, reduced from US$99, with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

No revenue figure, user count or customer count was found, so this story has grade E. The site also publishes 11,564 automatically generated pages about companies and their competitors, listed in its sitemaps. Those pages are a search-traffic method, described below without judgment.

## Pricing

HeadsUp price in November 2026, read from the plan section script of headsup.bot, because the /pricing address returned 404 (grade C)

| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paid plan |  | 39 | unlimited insights; shown as reduced from US$99 |

One plan is shown. The script displays US$99 a month crossed out and US$39 a month as the price, described as US$1.30 a day, with a 30-day money-back guarantee. No yearly price is shown. The plan lists unlimited insights, Slack alerts, Zapier workflows, weekly briefs, competitor SEO data, unlimited team members on a shared dashboard, exported reports and a history of past changes.

## How much revenue does HeadsUp make? The numbers, graded

A one-person competitor-monitoring agent, live with one paid plan since 2025; no revenue or user figure was found

| Fact | Value | Grade | Note | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Status, November 2026 | live, with one paid plan and a Stripe checkout link | C | Home page and plan script downloaded 5 November 2026. | [1, 2] |
| Launch on Product Hunt | 17 August 2025, 600 votes | C | Product Hunt API record of post 999606, tagline "The first AI competitor monitoring agent". | [3] |
| Team | 1 maker listed: Dru Riley | C | The Product Hunt record lists one maker and links Trends.vc. The plan script gives the support address dru@headsup.bot. No headcount is published. | [2, 3] |
| Price | US$39 a month, shown as reduced from US$99 | C | The company said this in its plan script. Billed monthly; no yearly price shown. | [2] |
| What it watches | competitors' price changes, product launches and positioning shifts | C | Home page: "Immediately uncover 90 days of your competitors' strategic moves". The subjects are companies and their websites, not individual people. | [1] |
| Generated public pages | 11,564 addresses in the sitemaps | calc | Calculated: 7,359 company pages, 1,990 competitor pages, 2,205 change pages, 7 site pages and 3 analysis pages in the six child sitemaps, downloaded 5 November 2026. | [4] |
| Content of a generated company page | description, SEO metrics, list of competitors | C | Example: the Attio page shows domain authority, backlinks, estimated organic traffic and "Companies in the same market", with "Report updated: October 23, 2026". | [4] |
| Revenue, users, customers | not found | E | No figure on the home page, the plan script, the Product Hunt record or Trends.vc. | [1, 2, 3, 5] |
| Outside funding | none stated | C | No source mentions investors or a round. | [3] |
| Time from launch to the November 2026 status | 15 months | calc | Calculated: August 2025 to November 2026. | [1, 3] |

How to read this table: a grade C value comes from the company's own pages or from the maker's own Product Hunt post. A "calc" value was computed on this page. No value is grade A or B, and no value is a revenue figure.

## When did HeadsUp launch, and how did it grow? Timeline

From a Product Hunt launch in August 2025 to a site with more than 11,000 generated pages in November 2026. Each entry carries its grade.

- **17 August 2025** (grade C [3]): Posted on Product Hunt as "The first AI competitor monitoring agent" by Dru Riley. 600 votes.
- **6 September 2025** (grade C [4]): Earliest last-modified date in the company sitemap, the start of the generated company pages.
- **23 August 2026** (grade C [4]): According to a comment in robots.txt, the company and comparison sitemaps were declared from this date, after an internal SEO review of 20 August 2026.
- **October 2026** (grade C [4]): Generated company reports carry update dates such as 23 October 2026.
- **5 November 2026** (grade C [1, 2, 4]): Site live with one paid plan at US$39 a month, as its plan script showed, and 11,564 addresses in its sitemaps.

## Why did HeadsUp work?

### Instant value on the first visit

The customer types one domain and gets a competitor list plus 90 days of past competitor changes at once, so the product shows its use before the customer waits for any new alert.

### Explain, do not only notify

Plain website-change monitors send a difference between two versions of a page. HeadsUp's home page says it tells "exactly what changed, why it matters, with recommendations to respond". The AI writing step is the product.

### Generated pages for search traffic

The site publishes thousands of pages, one per company, competitor list or detected change, each with a link to "Track with HeadsUp". This is programmatic SEO: pages made automatically from a database so that searches such as a company name plus "competitors" find the site. No source says how many customers came this way.

## How it was built

These details come from the page source of headsup.bot. They are grade C, and some of them are visible in the public page code.

- A React single-page application; an HTML comment says the footer links sit outside the React root so that crawlers see them.
- Payments go through a Stripe checkout link in the plan script.
- Product analytics with PostHog, loaded on the home page.
- Integrations for customers: alerts to Slack and workflows through Zapier, as the plan lists.
- No source names the AI model provider.

Sources: [1, 2]

## Who tried this before HeadsUp, and why did they fail?

Three companies in our database of failed startups sold monitoring or business data and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.

The failed startups come from our database of dead startups, retold here in our own words; Its entries are AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so they carry no evidence grade.

### Verelo (2012 to 2013; funding US$200K; cause: Ran Out of Cash)

- Promise: Monitoring of a website's uptime, malware and performance from many locations.
- Why it died: It used its budget in six months and could not convince businesses to pay for specialised monitoring.
- Record: 

### Elucify (2016 to 2019; funding US$500K; cause: Competition)

- Promise: Sales intelligence: fresh, accurate business data for sales teams.
- Why it died: Larger data companies outcompeted it, and its crowdsourcing model could not keep the data accurate.
- Record: 

### onetool (2020 to 2023; funding US$120K; cause: Competition)

- Promise: One dashboard to manage and reduce a company's software subscriptions.
- Why it died: Competitors added AI features while it did not, and it fell behind.
- Record: 

## What changed

Verelo shows that businesses do not easily pay only for an alert that something changed. Elucify shows that business data loses its value when it is not fresh and accurate. Both problems apply to competitor monitoring.

HeadsUp's answer is the language model: it reads the changed page and writes what the change means and what to do, which was costly human analyst work before 2023. A one-person company can now sell that analysis at US$39 a month, as its plan script showed. Whether enough customers pay for it is not shown in any source.

## Can one person copy HeadsUp now?

**Verdict: Yes, the method is open to one person.**

The parts are a page fetcher, a change detector, a language model that explains the change, and email or Slack delivery. None of them needs capital. The harder part is getting customers, and HeadsUp's sources do not show which channel worked.

1. Show value on the first visit: take one input (a domain) and return past data at once.
2. Sell the explanation and the recommended action, not only the alert.
3. Deliver where the customer already works: Slack, email, Zapier.
4. If you publish generated pages for search, make each page useful on its own and watch the search engines' rules on scaled content.

**What is still open.** Monitoring agents for other public changes about companies: job postings, app store releases, documentation changes, public tenders.

## What could go wrong for HeadsUp?

- **What is not verified.** No revenue figure, user count or customer count was found. We looked at the home page, the plan script, the Product Hunt record and the maker's Trends.vc site; there is no payment-processor profile and no founder interview with numbers. A reader could look for a TrustMRR or Stripe-verified profile, or a revenue figure in Dru Riley's own posts.
- **Large generated page corpus.** The sitemaps list 11,564 generated pages about companies, competitors and changes, and an HTML comment on the home page calls them "the generated corpus" and refers to an internal SEO assessment. The product itself is sold for competitor monitoring, not for search-engine manipulation. Google's spam policies treat scaled content made mainly to rank as abuse; whether these pages are useful enough on their own is a judgment that this page does not make.
- **Placeholder terms and unchecked testimonials.** The terms of service say they "will be updated with complete details" and name no company. The plan section says "Trusted by teams like yours" with six photo files named by first name and initial; we did not verify those people.
- **Competition and model providers.** No other story on this site is a competitor-monitoring product; the closest are SEO tools such as ChatSEO and Rankability, and HeadsUp also shows competitors' SEO data. No source names the AI model it uses, so its dependence on one model provider cannot be checked.

## Sources

1. HeadsUp home page, headsup.bot, read 5 November 2026 — https://headsup.bot/ (grade C). Read in full, including the page source. Source for the product description, the HTML comments and the analytics script.
2. HeadsUp plan section script (PaidPlansSection), read 5 November 2026 — https://headsup.bot/assets/PaidPlansSection-CdfslMVa.js (grade C). Read the text strings of the script, because /pricing returned 404. Source for the price, the plan features, the guarantee, the Stripe link and the support address.
3. Product Hunt API record of post 999606: HeadsUp, The first AI competitor monitoring agent, 17 August 2025 — https://www.producthunt.com/ (grade C). Read the harvester's copy of the official Product Hunt API record (downloaded 5 November 2026). Source for the launch date, votes and maker.
4. HeadsUp robots.txt, sitemaps and the generated Attio company page, read 5 November 2026 — https://headsup.bot/sitemap.xml (grade C). Read robots.txt and all six child sitemaps and counted their addresses; read one generated company page in full.
5. Trends.vc home page, read 5 November 2026 — https://trends.vc/ (grade C). Read in full. Confirms that Dru Riley runs Trends.vc, the site linked from his Product Hunt maker profile. It does not mention HeadsUp.
6. Database of failed startups, local export — /method/#dead (grade C). Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.

Contact: aiolum@livyden.com. Run HeadsUp? Send corrections or a verified figure to aiolum@livyden.com (subject: Correction: HeadsUp).