A decade in a day · Applied

Ten years of developer-investor practice — in twelve modules.

When a curriculum exists, you compress a decade of practice into a Saturday. The reader doesn’t need to repeat your mistakes — they need the conclusions you walked away with, in the order that made them inevitable.

Twelve modules · 340minutes total · designed to be read in one sitting on a Saturday morning, or in chunks across a week. Skip the modules you already lived through. The links at the end of each module take you to the live page where the module’s teaching is wired into the product.

Module 1 · 25 minutes

Identity — name the buyer you actually are

Question: Why does identity precede method?

If you decide you're a 'mini-VC' you'll buy fund-grade tooling and complain about the price. If you decide you're a 'developer-investor' the right tools, prices, and rhythm fall into place. Identity is upstream of every purchase decision. The identity close lives or dies on this naming.

Module 2 · 30 minutes

Methodology — the signal that grounds everything

Question: Why commit-velocity acceleration, not commit count?

Counts are noise. Acceleration relative to a company's own baseline is a regime change. We use a 14-day rolling window, two-period confirmation, contributor-quality filter. The SSRN paper (n=219) shows the signal preceded fundraises by 21–47 days IQR. The methodology is the only durable moat — every other element on the site rests on it.

Module 3 · 25 minutes

Dream customer — name the people, not the segment

Question: Who is this for, in 30 seconds?

An engineer who reads commit logs for fun and writes €5k–€50k checks on the side, 5–40 angel checks a year, more curious about codebases than about pitch decks. Three thesis axes: AI infrastructure, dev tools, technical SaaS. The disqualifier is as important as the qualifier — Series-B+ partners with six-figure data budgets are not us.

Module 4 · 35 minutes

Funnel architecture — six rungs, one ladder, one cadence

Question: Why six tiers and not three? And why a monthly drop on top?

Free → €7 → €9.97 → €97 → €497 → €1,997. Every rung exists because the rung below it doesn't fit one specific check size or one specific cadence. Free is for cadence-builders. €7 is for thesis-testers. €9.97 is for the daily-rhythm buyer. €97 is for the syndicate. €497 is for the small fund. €1,997 is for the deep-dive on a single sector. Never let a buyer leave at zero commitment when there's a free rung below. Above the rungs sits the continuity layer — a net-new monthly drop (sector deep-dive, methodology release, founder essay, or tool) that turns the paid tier from a tool subscription into an anticipation engine.

Module 5 · 25 minutes

Reverse-engineering — what the leaders are optimising for

Question: How do you read a competitor's funnel?

Don't read their pricing. Read their lead form, their bridge page, their stack-claim, their close. Harmonic optimises for partner-budgets. Tracxn optimises for sector breadth. Affinity optimises for warm-intro routing. None of them optimise for the developer-investor — that's not a pricing-gap, it's an ICP-gap. The competitor teardown you ship is the one that fills the blind spot.

Module 6 · 30 minutes

The core claim — one belief that closes the buyer

Question: What's the single belief that, if held, makes everything else inevitable?

If commit-velocity acceleration is the most leading public signal in venture capital, every other deal-flow source — pitch decks, AngelList, Crunchbase, warm intros — is a lagging indicator. The whole investing thesis falls or stands on whether that belief is true. Once you accept it, everything we sell follows automatically. If you don't accept it, no amount of stack will move you. Find this belief for your own product before you write copy.

Module 7 · 30 minutes

The Conversion Story — five steps from belief to action

Question: Old way → new vehicle → external → internal → frameworks. Why this order?

The canonical conversion script. (1) Name the old way the buyer was sold — for us, 'best deals come from your network.' (2) Reveal the new vehicle — engineering acceleration. (3) Remove the external struggle — you don't need fund-grade tooling. (4) Remove the internal struggle — you don't need to become a different person to source. (5) Show the frameworks — Sunday digest, Wednesday filter, end-of-quarter sweep. Each step is a beat the reader has to walk through; skip one and they bounce.

Module 8 · 25 minutes

The Stack — turn features into anchored value

Question: Why itemise standalone value before the price?

Eight objects, each with a standalone value, totalling €1,728/yr. The buyer's brain anchors on the total. The price (€9.97/mo = €119.64/yr) becomes a 14× discount — which is the actual story. Stack order matters: the most desirable thing first, the bonus last. Never bury the dashboard inside the methodology vault. Lead with the thing the buyer wants most.

Module 9 · 30 minutes

The Closes — five named patterns, one buyer profile each

Question: Money / Identity / Pricing / Urgency / Encore — when does each fire?

Money close fires for the spreadsheet buyer. Identity close fires for the engineer who's tired of pretending to be a partner. Pricing close fires for the rate-anchor — €1,728 retail vs €119.64 founding. Urgency close fires for the calendar — every Monday skipped is one 21–47-day window closed. Encore is the safety net for everyone — eight lines, the whole offer in one block, before the FAQ. One of the five always lands; you don't pick, you stack.

→ /walkthrough — four-close grid + encore

Module 10 · 25 minutes

Traffic — earned, owned, and the one we don't pay for

Question: Why earned and owned, not paid?

Owned: email list (free Acceleration Watch), RSS, MCP server in the buyer's IDE. Earned: Reddit AEO, dev.to long-form, Substack mirror, federated social (Bluesky / Mastodon / Farcaster), academic SSRN citation. Paid: deferred under HOLD until earned-only proof. The reason isn't ideology, it's compounding — earned channels keep paying after you stop. Paid channels stop the day the budget does.

Module 11 · 30 minutes

Agent-side distribution — the second internet

Question: Why publish to /md, agents.json, llms.txt, and OpenAPI?

Half the readers in 2026 are agents, not browsers. We publish six redundant agent surfaces: /md/<path> markdown mirror, agents.json discovery, llms.txt + llms-full.txt corpus, OpenAPI 21 endpoints, knowledge-graph.json, model.json. The agent-side reader doesn't see your hero CTA — they see the schema. The site is 1,060+ pages on the human side and 1,400+ surfaces on the agent side. Both sides matter.

Module 12 · 30 minutes

Ethics + scale — the lines that don't move

Question: Where does GitDealFlow refuse to scale?

Anonymity rule: no podcasts, no founder-face content, no real-name signatures. The product is a dataset, not a personality. Methodology rule: every claim is reproducible against the public Zenodo dataset; we don't keep a private edge. Pricing rule: founding-member rate locks forever before the public hike — never renegotiated retroactively. Free-tier rule: the 5 core MCP tools are free forever; new paid tools are added alongside, never gated. Scale stops where the buyer's trust would have to.

What to do tomorrow

Don’t print this. Pick one module and live in it for a week.

A Saturday-morning read changes nothing if you don’t pick a single beat to embody. We’d pick Module 6 — the core claim — and rewrite it for whatever you’re building this quarter. Once you have your core claim, every other module re-reads in five minutes.

Get the free Acceleration Watch →Or read the 3-min primer →

Curriculum compressed from direct-response sales canon.

Ten years of developer-investor practice — in twelve modules.

Don’t print this. Pick one module and live in it for a week.