Day 3: Dependents graph

The hidden GitHub page — cheapest external-adoption proxy.

Yesterday

Yesterday's contributor-diversity reading told you whether the team is real. Today's signal tells you whether anyone outside the team cares about what they're building.

Why this signal matters

Most investors don't know GitHub exposes dependents. The dependents graph shows you every public repo that depends on this startup's code — the cheapest proxy for 'is anyone actually using this'.

The 5-minute exercise

1Open the org's flagship repo (the one in their README, or the most-starred).
2Click Insights → Dependency graph → Dependents.
3If the page exists: count the dependents, look at the names.
4If the page is empty or missing: the package is private or pre-distribution. Note that.

What you’re filtering for

Dependents that are not the startup's own repos. Real external usage means real adoption. A few hundred external dependents on a developer-tools startup is a strong product-market-fit signal even if revenue is zero.

Edge case

Some orgs use private package registries (npm scoped, internal PyPI). Dependents won't show — that's a sign of enterprise distribution, not weakness. Cross-check with npm-stat.com or pypistats.org if a public package exists.

Bonus

Cross-reference the dependents list against your portfolio's GitHub orgs. If two of your portfolio companies are already using this startup's code, that's a warm-intro vector your AngelList syndicate doesn't have.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow: README freshness — the most under-rated leading indicator on this list.

Curriculum: /challenge · Methodology: /methodology · Paper: ssrn.com/abstract=6606558