Free cheat sheet, for angels, scouts & seed funds
A 14-day screen for meaningful engineering acceleration.
TL;DR: Free one-page cheat sheet: three public GitHub signals, false-positive checks, and the 14-day window to watch. Based on 219 startup-period observations across 55 startups in the documented research panel.
Three engineering signals can move together in a two-week window. In the documented panel, the middle 50% of observed lead times ran 21 to 47 days before a public fundraise announcement. It is a sourcing signal, not a promise that any company will raise.
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What’s on the page
Everything you need to read the signal, nothing you don’t.
No 40-page e-book, no video funnel. One printable page you can pin above your desk: the three signals, the window, the observed lead time, and the one question that tells you whether a change deserves a closer look.
The Velocity Surge
How to read a commit-output deviation from a startup’s own baseline, the 2x-4x over 14 days that is the earliest indicator. What it looks like, and what it doesn’t.
The Contributor Spike
Why new developers joining the public repo in a concentrated window means the team is scaling before the hire announcement, and how to spot it without reading code.
The Infrastructure Buildout
New repos, new services, new architecture: the groundwork a company lays for the product that justifies the round. The signal investors almost never look for.
The 14-day window & the one question
When all three move inside two weeks, use the published finding carefully: across 219 startup-period observations from 55 startups, the median observed lead time was 5.4 weeks, with top-decile precision of ~65%; the middle 50% of lead times ran 21 to 47 days before a public fundraise announcement. The cheat sheet ends with the one question to ask before you reach out.
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The full method lives at signals.gitdealflow.com/methodology. The cheat sheet is the plain-English version for investors who never want to read code.
Not sure yet? See the full landing page, or read a real sample issue first. The cheat sheet will still be here.
Why This Page Exists
GitDealFlow is a public deal flow signal dataset: 350+ startup GitHub organizations across 15 sectors, refreshed weekly, with breakout teams surfacing 21 to 47 days before their round is announced. This page makes one part of that system legible: what it measures, how it is computed, and how to use it in a live sourcing workflow. The method is published end to end and falsifiable by design, with the working paper on SSRN and the dataset downloadable under CC BY 4.0.