Playbook · operator how-to
How to build a weekly deal-flow newsletter from GitHub signals (no scraping)
A reproducible Friday-morning playbook for shipping a weekly deal-flow newsletter to your investor or founder audience — sourced entirely from the public signals feed.
A weekly deal-flow newsletter is the single highest-leverage piece of content you can ship if you're in venture, scout, or operator-investor mode. It compounds inbound (founders DM you because they recognize their repo in last week's issue), it compounds outbound (your cold emails reference a piece they've already read), and it forces you to keep your own pattern-matching sharp.
The reason most people don't ship one is that the data layer feels heavy — scraping GitHub, normalizing scores, dealing with rate limits. This playbook removes that work entirely. You pull from a single public endpoint Friday morning, write ten short paragraphs by Friday lunch, and you're shipping by 1pm with no infrastructure beyond your existing newsletter tool.
The 10-movers-per-week shape is intentional: small enough that you actually ship it, large enough that the cumulative monthly-archive is searchable and citable.
Before you start
Prerequisites
- · An email newsletter tool (Beehiiv, Substack, ConvertKit, Buttondown — all work)
- · 100+ subscribers (or willingness to build there)
- · Friday-morning consistency, ideally 6 weeks straight
Tools
- · GitDealFlow signals feed
- · Your newsletter tool
- · A simple email-to-RSS bridge if you want syndication (optional)
Steps
- 01
Friday 9am — pull the top-10 weekly movers
10mFetch
https://signals.gitdealflow.com/api/v1/signals.json?sort=delta&limit=10. Thedeltasort surfaces the repos whose composite score moved the most this week vs last week. You'll get a mix of new entrants and accelerators. - 02
Friday 9:15 — open all 10 in tabs
15mOpen each repo's GitHub page + their /signals lookup page in side-by-side tabs. You're priming yourself to write the 'what changed' beat for each.
- 03
Friday 9:30 — write the 'what changed' line for each
30mOne sentence per repo. Examples: 'Commit velocity 28-day percentile jumped from 61 → 88; two new committers joined this week.' 'Stars +2,100 but commit velocity flat — likely a Hacker News spike, watch for follow-through.'
- 04
Friday 10am — write the 'why it matters' line for each
30mOne more sentence per repo. The job here is to give the reader your interpretation, not just the data. Example: 'The contributor-influx pattern matches the pre-seed signal — expect a round announcement late June or July.'
- 05
Friday 11am — top-and-tail the issue
20mWrite a 3-paragraph opener (a theme you noticed this week across the 10) and a 1-paragraph closer (one ask of readers — a reply, a forward, a subscribe). Keep the issue under 800 words total — the constraint is what makes it readable.
- 06
Friday 12pm — schedule + cross-post
15mSchedule the newsletter for noon. Cross-post the opener as a single thread on Twitter / LinkedIn (3 tweets / 1 LinkedIn post). Include a 'full issue + the 10 repos' link back to your newsletter archive.
Run the play
Pull this week's top-10 movers →Frequently asked questions
What if I don't have a newsletter yet?
Start with Beehiiv free tier. Five-minute setup. The newsletter compounds slowly — assume 6 weeks of weekly ship before you see growth. The mechanic is consistency, not virality.
Can I commercialize this?
Yes — we'd just ask that you credit the signals feed (a single line at the bottom: 'Data: GitDealFlow public signals feed'). Many of the most-loved finance newsletters started this way.
What about competitive risk — won't I cannibalize my own deal flow?
The opposite happens in practice. Publishing your pattern-matching publicly attracts founders to send you their own deals (so they show up in your newsletter), which is exactly the inbound flywheel you want.