Highintent

What do they actually do

Highintent is a lightweight SaaS tool that watches for buying signals and alerts B2B sales teams when prospects look likely to buy. Users set up monitors for the signals or accounts they care about, and the product sends alerts so reps can prioritize outreach at the right time (highintent.ai).

The live product exposes clear workflows—sign in or book a demo, create a monitor, receive alerts, and search for signals or prospects—indicating an active onboarding flow and working core features (highintent.ai, Y Combinator company page).

Who are their target customer(s)

• Head of Sales at an early-stage B2B startup: Too many target accounts to monitor manually, so they miss moments when prospects are ready to buy. Needs timely, reliable signals so reps spend time on high-probability conversations instead of broad outbound.
• SDR/BDR doing outbound at a startup: Spends hours researching and messaging prospects who aren’t interested, hurting quota and morale. Needs clear cues on who to contact and when, with enough context to craft relevant outreach.
• Revenue Operations or GTM ops manager: Signals are fragmented across marketing, product, and web tools, creating manual triage and inconsistent pipeline. Wants alerts that flow into the CRM automatically with minimal cleanup.
• Growth marketer or founder running early demand gen: Can’t tell which campaign responders or product users are close to buying, so lead-to-opportunity conversion is low. Needs a prioritized list for sales based on concrete buying signals.
• Account Executive covering mid-market or named accounts: Misses timely triggers across accounts and engages too late or focuses on the wrong opportunities. Needs fresh, prioritized signals to reach the right stakeholders at the right moment.

How would they acquire their first 10, 50, and 100 customers

• First 10: Run founder-led pilots with YC and prior GTM contacts, handling setup and weekly check-ins to prove alerts lead to meetings and pipeline (highintent.ai, YC).
• First 50: Turn pilot wins into short case studies and 2–3 monitor templates, then hire one SDR to target similar buyers via LinkedIn/email and route to the demo/self-serve flows; require CRM integration during pilots so value is measurable (highintent.ai).
• First 100: Open a self-serve funnel (free trial + templates), add targeted paid/retargeting, list in CRM/GTM marketplaces, and work with a few reseller/agency partners; add referrals and standardized onboarding so a small CS team can scale.

What is the rough total addressable market

Top-down context:

A practical U.S. starting point is all businesses with 10+ employees—about 1,537,732 firms—large enough to run a sales motion (summing 10–19, 20–49, 50–99, 100–249, 250–499, 500–999, 1000+ brackets) (NAICS counts by company size).

Bottom-up calculation:

Using 1,537,732 firms: at $2k ACV the TAM is ~$3.08B; at $12k ACV ~$18.5B; at $60k ACV ~$92.3B (illustrative pricing; U.S. only) (NAICS). If focusing near-term on 10–49 employee firms (1,218,789), TAM is ~$2.44B at $2k ACV.

Assumptions:

• Target customers are U.S. firms with 10+ employees as a proxy for having sales/ops roles (NAICS).
• Illustrative ACVs: $2k (self-serve), $12k (mid-market), $60k (enterprise); actual pricing will shift TAM.
• Counts include all industries; near-term SAM likely narrows to B2B sectors with CRM adoption.

Who are some of their notable competitors

• 6sense: Enterprise ABM/revenue platform with broad third-party intent, predictive scoring, and seller alerts; overlaps on in‑market account detection and alerts but is a heavier enterprise suite (platform, sales alerts).
• Bombora: Intent data provider (Company Surge) that flags account-level research surges; often feeds tools like Highintent rather than running agent workflows itself (overview, alerts use cases).
• ZoomInfo: Combines intent, contact data, and trigger "Scoops" with deep CRM integrations; strong for large sales orgs seeking enrichment + workflow delivery (Intent, Scoops).
• G2 Buyer Intent: First‑party buyer research signals from G2 pages (pricing, compare, profiles) that alert sellers to active account research (docs, product).
• Apollo.io: All‑in‑one sales platform with partner-sourced intent, sequences, and database; overlaps for SDRs who want intent-driven outreach in one tool (overview, docs).