Use this pre-seed due diligence checklist before writing a check. Pre-seed DD is about founders and trajectory, not financials. Focus on team, market, and momentum.
Founder checklist: Domain expertise (deep understanding of the problem), Previous achievements (track record of execution), References (3-5 calls), Commitment (full-time, 10-year horizon), Coachability (open to feedback).
Market checklist: TAM ($1B+ for venture returns), Market timing (why now?), Competition (who else is solving this?), Regulatory risk (any compliance concerns?), Customer validation (any LOIs, pilots, or paid customers?).
Momentum checklist: Engineering velocity (GitDealFlow signal, top quartile for sector?), Product progress (working demo or MVP?), Hiring trajectory (growing team?), User/customer traction (any early adopters?).
A checklist earns its place when every line maps to evidence you can obtain. The items above follow the same public-data discipline behind GitDealFlow: 350+ startup GitHub organizations tracked across 15 sectors, refreshed weekly, with breakouts identified 21 to 47 days before the round. Where a line asks about engineering execution, the evidence is usually public: commit velocity, contributor concentration, and repository expansion, all confirmable from the repository itself rather than from a pitch deck.
A practical read-through of Pre-Seed Due Diligence Checklist for Angels: the dataset behind this page refreshes weekly across 350+ organizations and 15 sectors, and every figure shown traces to a public GitHub REST API pull. That matters for two reasons. Reproducibility: any number here can be re-derived from primary sources, which is the standard the published methodology sets for itself. Timeliness: engineering acceleration precedes announcements, so this page follows the data cadence rather than the news cycle, and the freshness endpoint always reports the exact pull date.
If Pre-Seed Due Diligence Checklist for Angels is your entry point, the fastest next steps are fixed: skim the glossary for the three or four terms that anchor the topic, open the research dataset to see the raw weekly snapshots behind the summary numbers, and run one live query against the free momentum checker with a company you already know well. Seeing the signal fire on a familiar name is the quickest way to judge whether code-side sourcing belongs in your own workflow.
One caveat worth stating plainly on Pre-Seed Due Diligence Checklist for Angels: momentum is a leading indicator, not a verdict. A repository can accelerate for reasons that never become a fundraise, and a quiet quarter does not mean a team is failing. The disciplined use of this page is as one input in a stack, a way to rank where scarce diligence time goes, and a way to notice change early. The methodology page documents every limitation, including the bot filter, the two-period confirmation rule, and the sectors where coverage is thinnest.