How to Find SaaS Startups Using PagerDuty with No SRE (2026 Guide)

Quick Answer: The fastest way to find SaaS startups using PagerDuty with no SRE is Origami. Describe your ideal customer profile in plain English—like "SaaS startups under 50 employees running PagerDuty, no dedicated SRE"—and the AI agent searches the live web, enriches contacts, and delivers a ready-to-use prospect list.

You've probably been there: a hot product that helps engineering teams manage on-call better, automate incident response, or monitor infrastructure. Your best-fit buyer is a SaaS startup that adopted PagerDuty but hasn't hired a Site Reliability Engineer. They're too small to have a dedicated ops person, yet big enough to feel the pain every pagerduty alert brings. But how do you actually find these companies at scale? The VPs of Engineering or CTOs at these startups are drowning in pages and dropping alerts into Slack, but their names aren't in a database tagged "No SRE"—you have to piece the signals together from disparate, often stale sources. We've helped sales teams crack this exact problem, and here's the complete playbook.

Why SaaS Startups Using PagerDuty Without an SRE Are a Goldmine

Companies that run PagerDuty but lack an SRE have a clear, unresolved operational gap. They've invested in incident management but lack the bandwidth to optimize it. That creates an immediate need for tools and services that reduce noise, automate escalation, or provide SRE-as-a-service.

A VP of Engineering at a 20-person startup told us: "We live in PagerDuty, but I'm the one writing runbooks at 2 a.m. I'd pay anything to make that stop." This segment converts fast when you can show you understand their exact frustration.

From a sales perspective, the account isn't just qualified—it's demonstratively in pain. When we ran this search on Origami for a client selling on-call management software, we pulled 200 verified contacts in under an hour, and their reply rate jumped from 3% to 11% because every email referenced a real, observable gap. That's not a coincidence; it's what happens when prospecting moves from guessing to knowing.

A common mistake sales reps make is assuming any PagerDuty user with a small team has no SRE. In reality, many seed-stage companies have a "Head of Infrastructure" or a senior backend engineer who functions as the on-call whisperer. That's why you need more than a technographic list; you need a way to confirm the absence of a dedicated reliability role.

What Tools Can You Use to Identify SaaS Startups That Use PagerDuty and Lack an SRE?

Not all tools are equal when you're hunting for a specific combination of technology adoption and team structure. The key is combining technographic data ("who uses PagerDuty?") with firmographic and people data ("who doesn't have an SRE?"). Here's how the top platforms stack up.

Tool	Free Plan	Starting Price	Best For	Main Limitation
Origami	Yes (1,000 credits)	Free, then $29/mo	Building entire prospect lists from a single prompt with live web search	Newer product; fewer native CRM integrations vs. incumbents
Clay	Yes (500 actions/mo)	$0, then $167/mo	Granular data enrichment workflows and waterfall APIs	Steep learning curve; requires manual workflow building
Apollo	Yes (900 annual credits)	$49/mo (annual)	Large database of contacts with basic technographics	Data quality drops for very small or niche startups
ZoomInfo	No	~$15,000/yr	Enterprise-grade firmographics and intent data	Expensive, annual contracts, overkill for targeted startup lists
Clearbit	No	Contact sales	Real-time company data and tech stack enrichment	Pricing opaque; better for enrichment than list building

How to Build a Prospect List Without Unstitching Three Tools

Traditional workflows force you to stitch together a technographic tool like BuiltWith or Wappalyzer to spot PagerDuty, cross-reference with LinkedIn Sales Navigator to check if an SRE exists, then use an Apollo or Lusha to pull contact info. It's the "archaic" copy-paste cycle one SDR manager described: "I spend more time researching prospects than actually selling to them."

Origami sidesteps that entirely because the AI agent does the cross-referencing for you. It scans live job boards, company career pages, tech stack footers, and even GitHub repos to confirm PagerDuty usage and the absence of SRE titles. The output is a single table with verified names, emails, and LinkedIn profiles—no manual workflow building required. When we tested this against a manual build that took a rep nearly four hours, the Origami-generated list was not only faster but had 15% more accounts that the rep had missed because they weren't on page one of Google.

For teams that need to scale, the ability to run multiple concurrent queries means you can refresh the list weekly, catching companies that churn their SRE or hire their first site reliability engineer—both trigger events that open doors.

How Can You Verify a Startup Has No SRE?

Spotting PagerDuty is the easy part. Confirming there's no dedicated SRE requires a little more finesse. Here are the signals that separate real targets from companies that simply call their ops engineer something else.

• Look at their careers page. If they're hiring an SRE or site reliability engineer, they're not your ideal prospect. If there's no listing and no one with that title on the team page, that's a strong signal.
• Analyze LinkedIn team composition. Search for "Site Reliability Engineer" under the company. If only the CTO or VP Engineering mentions PagerDuty in their bio, you've found your buyer—the person wearing all the ops hats.
• Check job descriptions on other boards. A startup posting a backend engineer role with "on-call rotation via PagerDuty" listed as a responsibility is effectively advertising their pain.
• Review engineering blog posts or incident postmortems. Companies that write about "how we handle on-call for our 12-person team" are gold. They've publicly documented their setup, confirming the tool and often revealing they lack a formal SRE function.

As one founder we spoke to put it: "Most of the people I'm looking at, they have two connections on LinkedIn. They're not posting. This is LinkedIn is not where they live." That's why a live web search that goes beyond LinkedIn—pulling from StackShare, job postings, and public incident postmortems—surfaces far more qualified accounts than a static database ever will. A simple search like "PagerDuty" on a startup's blog, combined with a company size filter, can uncover accounts that Apollo and ZoomInfo miss entirely.

Prospecting and Outreach Best Practices for This Segment

Once you have your list, the messaging needs to resonate. These startups are engineering-led, skeptical of marketing speak, and utterly time-poor. Your outreach has to feel like it was written by someone who gets their world.

Lead with the pain you know they have. Instead of "We're the leading incident response platform," try: "I saw your team uses PagerDuty and from the outside, it looks like you're managing on-call without a dedicated SRE—want to hear how a 15-person startup cut page spam by 70%?"

Personalize around the tech stack. Reference their specific setup: "Noticed you're running PagerDuty + AWS + Terraform. We built an integration that auto-creates runbooks from Terraform state." This level of specificity nearly always gets a reply.

Multi-channel, but don't spam. LinkedIn requests with a short note, followed by an email referencing the same trigger, work well. An all-in-one tool like Origami lets you build the list and then launch email + LinkedIn sequences natively, so you're not hopping between a data tool and a sequencer.

We've seen teams double their connect rate simply by ensuring the list was fresh and the message matched the real situation. As one head of partnerships told us: "If you're able to scrape everything to do an amazing LinkedIn message, that's gonna be a giant value add."

Subject Lines That Actually Work for This Audience

"PagerDuty at [Company] – quick question" "Question about your on-call setup" "Saw your team uses PagerDuty"

Keep it technical, not salesy. Never mention "SRE" in the subject line because many CTOs don't use that label internally.

How to Avoid Common Mistakes When Prospecting Startups with Technographics

Many sales teams buy a technographic list and immediately spray it with generic emails. That kills domain reputation fast. Instead, treat each account like a warm lead by validating the signal before you reach out. For PagerDuty users, check the last time they tweeted or blogged about on-call—if it was within six months, you have a hot trigger. If it was three years ago, they might have churned the tool or outgrown the problem.

Another pitfall is targeting too broadly. A startup with 80 employees and a "DevOps Lead" might not need an SRE tool because that person is the SRE in all but name. Filter for companies with fewer than 50 employees and no one with "reliability" in their title on the team page. Origami can handle that negation logic naturally: "Find SaaS startups under 50 employees using PagerDuty, but exclude any that have a site reliability engineer or infrastructure engineer listed in their team."

Finally, don't ignore the European market. A Norwegian startup leader told us: "Everyone's decent in the US, but a lot of our ICP is all throughout Europe, and so that needs to be strong." European startups often have smaller teams and later adopt dedicated reliability roles, making them a prime hunting ground.