Top-100 ICP list · Applied · ICP-scored

The Top 100 — the literal roster of 100 voices, ICP-scored, with engagement status.

The rule: pick the 100 publications, communities, and orgs whose audience already contains your dream customer. Don’t pitch — show up where they are, contribute, let the signal compound.

Most pages that quote the top-100 ICP list stop at the framework. We list the actual 100 names, numbered 1 to 100, with two layers: engagement status(what we’re doing about it now) and ICP score (how worth doing it is — Match × Reach × Engage, max 100). Together they turn the roster into a 2-axis working board.

Anonymity rule: every voice on this list is a public publication, org, or community. We don’t name the individual founders we track inside our paid product — that’s the buyer’s edge, not ours to publish.

Engagement status · 98 entries

29
Engage
Active engagement layer — we comment, post, or integrate.
14
Watch
Monitoring only — we read the signal, don't post.
1
Hold
Engagement paused. Listed for transparency.
54
Read
Read-only consumption. No engagement layer (or we choose not to).
0
Blocked
Cannot engage — platform constraint, anonymity rule, or policy.

ICP score: Match × Reach × Engage

Avg 77/100 · 31 T1 · 43 T2 · 24 T3

Match ×4: How concentrated this voice’s audience is with the developer-investor avatar (1–10). Weighted highest because a wide-reach voice with low Match wastes the cycle.
Reach ×3: Audience scale, log-ish (1 ≈ <1k, 5 ≈ ~50k, 8 ≈ 500k, 10 ≈ >5M). Multiplier is 3 — the rule: Match before Reach.
Engage ×3: How realistic it is for us to be present given (a) anonymity rule, (b) agent-native footprint, (c) channel bans / auto-mod limits. Caps low for podcasts, high for MCP.

Tier 1 ≥ 85 — lean in this quarterTier 2 70–84 — sustaining cadenceTier 3 < 70 — read-only / mental-model only

Score = Match × 4 + Reach × 3 + Engage × 3. Max 100. Re-scored quarterly; last pass 2026-05-06.

The actionable artefact

Top 25 voices by ICP score — where the next 90 days of work goes.

Sorted by Match × Reach × Engage. If a voice is in the top 25, we already have a monthly action against it (PR, comment, integration ship, Substack Note quote-thread, LinkedIn Company-Page reply).

1vercel· orgs we watch the mostWatchTier 1·97
2anthropic· orgs we watch the mostWatchTier 1·97
3Claude Desktop / Claude Code· / agents we integrate withEngageTier 1·97
4LangChain / LangGraph· / agents we integrate withEngageTier 1·97
5Vercel AI SDK· / agents we integrate withEngageTier 1·97
6supabase· orgs we watch the mostWatchTier 1·94
7huggingface· orgs we watch the mostWatchTier 1·94
8modelcontextprotocol· orgs we watch the mostEngageTier 1·94
9cloudflare· orgs we watch the mostWatchTier 1·94
10Cursor· / agents we integrate withEngageTier 1·94
11OpenAI ChatGPT GPT· / agents we integrate withEngageTier 1·93
12The Pragmatic Engineer· we readReadTier 1·91
13CrewAI· / agents we integrate withEngageTier 1·91
14MCP Registry· / agents we integrate withEngageTier 1·91
15AngelList· Company Pages on our weekly cadenceEngageTier 1·91
16Insight Partners· Company Pages on our weekly cadenceEngageTier 1·91
17Mastra· / agents we integrate withEngageTier 1·88
18Smithery· / agents we integrate withEngageTier 1·88
19Our SSRN paper (n=219)· datasets we cross-referenceEngageTier 1·88
20TLDR Tech· we filter throughReadTier 1·87
21openai· orgs we watch the mostWatchTier 1·87
22dev.to· where the conversation livesEngageTier 1·87
23Carta· Company Pages on our weekly cadenceEngageTier 1·87
24Y Combinator· Company Pages on our weekly cadenceEngageTier 1·87
25Crunchbase· Company Pages on our weekly cadenceEngageTier 1·87

10 substacks

Group avg 77/100

10 substacks we read

Long-form weekly that taught us to think about software, scale, and product the way the developer-investor reads code. Most are paywalled or comment-light — we consume, we don't dominate.

1.
Lenny's Newsletter
ReadTier 2·82
Product, growth, hiring — the discipline of going from PMF to ARR.
M 7R 10E 8
2.
The Pragmatic Engineer
ReadTier 1·91
Engineering-org reality at scale. Rare honest reporting from inside Big Tech.
Author Gergely Orosz active on LinkedIn personal — we read, never reply (company-page-only rule).
M 10R 9E 8
3.
Stratechery
ReadTier 2·80
Strategy, aggregation theory, platform dynamics. Required reading on every software business.
M 8R 9E 7
4.
Not Boring
ReadTier 2·77
Capital narratives. The why-now of category creation, told as story.
M 8R 8E 7
5.
Software Lead Weekly
ReadTier 1·85
What engineering leaders read each week. Hiring, comp, architecture.
M 10R 7E 8
6.
Last Week in AWS
ReadTier 2·84
Cloud economics with a sharp tongue. The gold standard for vendor scepticism.
M 9R 8E 8
7.
Construction Physics
ReadTier 3·56
Why software is eating slower-moving industries — and what doesn't translate.
M 5R 7E 5
8.
The Generalist
ReadTier 3·67
Deep dives on the funds, founders, and frameworks shaping the next cycle.
M 7R 7E 6
9.
Bits about Money
ReadTier 3·63
How financial systems actually work — read it before you build a fintech thesis.
M 6R 7E 6
10.
One Useful Thing — Ethan Mollick
ReadTier 2·81
The applied-AI substack the developer-investor reads on the train.
M 9R 8E 7

10 podcasts

Group avg 66/100

10 podcasts we listen to

We don't run a podcast (anonymity rule). These are the conversations that move our priors quarterly. Listen-only — no audio guesting, no founder voice on tape.

11.
Acquired
ReadTier 2·70
Three-hour deep dives on the companies that built the modern stack.
M 7R 10E 4
12.
Invest Like the Best
ReadTier 2·74
Patrick O'Shaughnessy's investor roster. Where mental models compound.
M 8R 10E 4
13.
20VC
ReadTier 2·71
Harry Stebbings on the operators behind the cap tables.
M 8R 9E 4
14.
Founders
ReadTier 3·53
David Senra's biographical series — the stories that shaped great founders.
M 5R 8E 3
15.
Lenny's Podcast
ReadTier 3·67
PMF, growth, leadership — the audio companion to the newsletter.
M 7R 9E 4
16.
The Logan Bartlett Show
ReadTier 3·69
Sharp questions, candid answers from operators and allocators.
M 9R 7E 4
17.
BG2 Pod
ReadTier 3·61
Brad Gerstner + Bill Gurley on the macro narrative behind the next decade.
M 7R 8E 3
18.
Stratechery Daily
ReadTier 2·71
Ben Thompson's audio deep-dive on the day's strategic story.
M 8R 9E 4
19.
Practical AI
ReadTier 2·72
Engineering-side AI: tools, frameworks, real implementations.
M 9R 7E 5
20.
The Rest is History
ReadTier 3·48
Long horizons. The pattern memory that prevents quarterly recency bias.
M 3R 9E 3

10 newsletters

Group avg 76/100

10 newsletters we filter through

High-density daily / weekly aggregators. Where new GitHub orgs, hiring waves, and infrastructure shifts surface before the press cycle.

21.
TLDR Tech
ReadTier 1·87
Daily 5-minute summary of the technical web.
M 9R 10E 7
22.
ByteByteGo
ReadTier 2·84
Architecture diagrams of the systems behind the products.
M 9R 9E 7
23.
Console.dev
WatchTier 1·85
Curated developer tools. Where the dev-tool ecosystem first shows itself.
Submission target — we monitor for openings to feature MCP server.
M 10R 7E 8
24.
Devtools.fyi
WatchTier 2·82
Independent reviews of the next-gen dev-tool layer.
M 10R 6E 8
25.
Hacker Newsletter
ReadTier 2·84
Weekly digest of the best HN threads. Catches what the daily firehose misses.
M 9R 8E 8
26.
DBOS / This Week in PostgreSQL
ReadTier 2·71
Database-layer momentum, where infrastructure investments compound.
M 8R 6E 7
27.
Refind
ReadTier 3·57
AI-curated reading list trained on our category.
M 6R 6E 5
28.
Devops'ish
ReadTier 2·75
Observability, platform engineering, infrastructure-as-code patterns.
M 9R 6E 7
29.
Frontend Focus
ReadTier 2·70
Where the React / Vue / Svelte ecosystems actually land.
M 7R 7E 7
30.
Mind the Product
ReadTier 3·63
The PM frame on the products we're tracking from the engineering side.
M 6R 7E 6

10 GitHub

Group avg 90/100

10 GitHub orgs we watch the most

The orgs whose merge cadence, contributor graph, and release notes set the meta for the developer-investor's attention surface. Public profiles only.

31.
vercel
WatchTier 1·97
Frontend-deployment platform — the meta-layer behind half our dataset's React orgs.
M 10R 10E 9
32.
supabase
WatchTier 1·94
Open-source Firebase. Pattern-defining for the BaaS ascension category.
M 10R 9E 9
33.
huggingface
WatchTier 1·94
Open-source AI infrastructure. Their merge graph is an industry leading indicator.
M 10R 10E 8
34.
anthropic
WatchTier 1·97
Where Claude / MCP land. Public-side of frontier-model tooling.
M 10R 10E 9
35.
openai
WatchTier 1·87
API-side public repos. The shape of the assistants ecosystem moves through here.
M 9R 10E 7
36.
modelcontextprotocol
EngageTier 1·94
MCP — the integration substrate underneath agent tooling.
We ship a registered MCP server (@gitdealflow/mcp-signal) and contribute issues/PRs.
M 10R 8E 10
37.
cloudflare
WatchTier 1·94
Edge / workers / D1 — the platform layer behind the next-gen serverless wave.
M 10R 10E 8
38.
neondatabase
WatchTier 1·85
Serverless Postgres. Watch the contributor expansion before the funding announcement.
M 10R 7E 8
39.
ollama
WatchTier 1·85
Local-LLM infrastructure. The merge graph is our best leading indicator for on-device AI.
M 10R 8E 7
40.
exo-explore
WatchTier 2·72
Distributed inference. New, growing, and reading like a 2026 thesis bet.
M 9R 5E 7

10 conferences

Group avg 68/100

10 conferences whose attendee lists we read

Where the orgs we watch on GitHub show up offline. We don't speak (anonymity), we read attendee lists and confirm contributor-graph spikes against in-person social proof.

41.
Strange Loop
ReadTier 3·60
Programming-language and infrastructure researchers. (RIP — but its alumni map is gold.)
M 9R 5E 3
42.
Hot Chips
ReadTier 3·55
Where the silicon-side of AI infrastructure shows itself first.
M 7R 6E 3
43.
QCon
ReadTier 3·69
Practitioner conference. Engineering directors of the orgs we track speak here.
M 9R 7E 4
44.
PyCon
ReadTier 2·72
Where the Python data ecosystem's contributor expansion converts to in-person social proof.
M 9R 8E 4
45.
OSCON / All Things Open
ReadTier 3·62
Open-source business models — where commercialisation patterns surface.
M 8R 6E 4
46.
RustConf
ReadTier 3·62
The Rust ecosystem's annual social graph reveal.
M 8R 6E 4
47.
DockerCon / KubeCon
ReadTier 2·72
Containers / orchestration — platform-engineering momentum.
M 9R 8E 4
48.
AWS re:Invent
ReadTier 2·71
AWS-customer announcements — secondary confirmation for cloud-native bets.
M 8R 10E 3
49.
GitHub Universe
ReadTier 2·82
Where the merge-velocity narrative our product is built on gets official.
M 10R 9E 5
50.
Y Combinator Demo Day
ReadTier 2·72
Public alumni list — back-checks against orgs we surfaced from GitHub side.
M 9R 9E 3

10 books

Group avg 67/100

10 books that shaped how we read code

The mental models behind the methodology. None are about VC — all are about how engineering, capital, and signal interact.

51.
Zero to One — Peter Thiel
ReadTier 2·72
Why the next generation of investments is found in monopoly, not competition.
M 9R 10E 2
52.
The Innovator's Dilemma — Clayton Christensen
ReadTier 3·68
Disruption from below — same shape as a 2× contributor spike from a quiet org.
M 8R 10E 2
53.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Ben Horowitz
ReadTier 3·65
Operating reality. The reason engineering signal beats deck signal.
M 8R 9E 2
54.
Crossing the Chasm — Geoffrey Moore
ReadTier 3·69
Where dev-tool early adopters become developer-investor dream customers.
M 9R 9E 2
55.
Direct-response sales canon
ReadTier 3·60
The funnel architecture this entire site is built around. Reverse-engineered from the modern direct-response playbook.
M 6R 9E 3
56.
Antifragile — Nassim Taleb
ReadTier 3·64
Why public, reproducible signal beats private, fragile rolodex.
M 7R 10E 2
57.
The Lean Startup — Eric Ries
ReadTier 3·68
Build-measure-learn — the pattern behind every velocity spike we surface.
M 8R 10E 2
58.
Working in Public — Nadia Eghbal
ReadTier 2·70
How open-source maintainership actually works. The substrate of our entire signal.
M 10R 7E 3

10 frameworks

Group avg 92/100

10 frameworks / agents we integrate with

Where the developer-investor already lives. Our MCP server, agent cards, and integration pages live in their tooling, not ours.

61.
Claude Desktop / Claude Code
EngageTier 1·97
The MCP-native client our integration was built for first.
M 10R 9E 10
62.
Cursor
EngageTier 1·94
The IDE where the developer-investor reads code daily.
M 10R 9E 9
63.
OpenAI ChatGPT GPT
EngageTier 1·93
VC Deal Flow Signal GPT — Action-mounted to /api/actions.
M 9R 10E 9
64.
Mastra
EngageTier 1·88
The TypeScript agent framework for production agents.
M 10R 6E 10
65.
LangChain / LangGraph
EngageTier 1·97
Python orchestration; we expose tools cleanly into both.
M 10R 9E 10
66.
CrewAI
EngageTier 1·91
Multi-agent crews; we ship a Crew tool template.
M 10R 7E 10
67.
Letta (MemGPT)
EngageTier 2·81
Persistent-memory agents. Long-context investor research.
M 9R 5E 10
68.
Vercel AI SDK
EngageTier 1·97
Streaming-first agent framework. Native integration.
M 10R 9E 10
69.
MCP Registry
EngageTier 1·91
Where the MCP ecosystem discovers servers.
M 10R 7E 10
70.
Smithery
EngageTier 1·88
MCP server marketplace. Live listing at smithery.ai/servers/kindrat86/mcp-deal-flow-signal.
M 10R 6E 10

10 communities

Group avg 77/100

10 communities where the conversation lives

Where investors and developers actually talk. We listen, we contribute, we don't dominate. Target conversations, not people.

71.
r/venturecapital
EngageTier 2·82
Investor forum. We engage in comment threads, never main posts (auto-mod filters product posts).
Comments-only — automod removes any main post that names a product.
M 10R 8E 6
72.
r/AngelInvesting
EngageTier 2·79
Angel-side reality. Developer-investor avatar lives here.
M 10R 6E 7
73.
r/MachineLearning
WatchTier 2·77
Where ML papers and infrastructure orgs first surface.
M 8R 9E 6
74.
r/ExperiencedDevs
WatchTier 2·78
Senior-engineer take on the orgs we track from outside.
M 9R 8E 6
75.
Hacker News
HoldTier 2·78
Where new orgs first get pattern-matched. Slow-burn thread-building.
Account currently blocked from submitting/commenting (2026-05-04). Resolution pending.
M 9R 10E 4
76.
Indie Hackers
EngageTier 3·66
Bootstrapper economics — different ladder than VC, same dataset.
M 6R 7E 7
77.
dev.to
EngageTier 1·87
Long-form developer publishing. Our cross-publication footprint lives here.
M 9R 8E 9
78.
X / Tech Twitter
WatchTier 2·75
Real-time signal. Read; don't broadcast (anonymity rule).
We post own-product threads only; we never engage personalities directly.
M 9R 10E 3
79.
Bluesky / Mastodon / Farcaster
EngageTier 2·77
Federated-side conversation. Three-platform redundancy.
M 8R 6E 9
80.
Substack Notes
EngageTier 2·73
Cross-newsletter conversation layer. Quoting + counter-quoting.
M 7R 7E 8

10 LinkedIn

Group avg 86/100

10 LinkedIn Company Pages on our weekly cadence

LinkedIn rule: a Company Page can only reply on other Company Pages' posts. So our Dream-100 layer here is the firms — not the operators. Cadence: 2× / week, 4-comment ceiling, manual posting only.

81.
Carta
EngageTier 1·87
Cap-table data — Peter Walker's team posts the strongest startup-data threads on LinkedIn.
M 9R 9E 8
82.
Y Combinator
EngageTier 1·87
Where the alumni list lives. Demo-day cycle drives a content wave we replicate every cohort.
M 9R 10E 7
83.
Crunchbase
EngageTier 1·87
Funding-data publishing arm. Pages here post the same trends we'd cite from raw data.
M 9R 9E 8
84.
AngelList
EngageTier 1·91
Syndicate / venture cap-table. Their fund-formation posts get developer-investor traffic.
M 10R 9E 8
85.
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)
EngageTier 1·87
American capital narrative. Page-level posts pull operator attention.
M 9R 10E 7
86.
Sequoia Capital
EngageTier 2·80
Top-tier capital. Long-form essays get cross-posted by the developer-investor.
M 8R 10E 6
87.
Index Ventures
EngageTier 2·84
Euro-tier mainstay. Engineering-leader fits.
M 9R 8E 8
88.
Insight Partners
EngageTier 1·91
Developer-tools concentration. Highest topic-fit for our positioning.
Insight Partners email engagement (jbash@) on our broadcast list since 2026-05-04.
M 10R 8E 9
89.
Bessemer Venture Partners
EngageTier 2·81
Cloud-cred publisher. State of the Cloud reports drive cross-platform threads.
M 9R 8E 7
90.
First Round Capital
EngageTier 2·81
First Round Review feeds the LI page; engineering-ops content reads our way.
M 9R 8E 7

10 public

Group avg 74/100

10 public datasets we cross-reference

Where we triangulate the signal. Every public dataset is a reproducibility check on the next prediction.

91.
GitHub REST + GraphQL
ReadTier 1·85
The primary substrate. Commit velocity, contributor count, repo events.
M 10R 10E 5
92.
GH Archive
ReadTier 2·73
Historical event log. Where we backfill the panel beyond the live API window.
M 10R 6E 5
93.
Crunchbase open data
ReadTier 2·71
Funding-event ground truth. The labels on our predictions.
M 8R 8E 5
94.
PitchBook (selected free)
ReadTier 3·61
Funding cadence by stage. Used as a sanity check, never the source.
M 7R 7E 4
95.
Common Crawl
ReadTier 3·61
Public web. Used to detect marketing-site shifts (Notion → Next.js).
M 7R 7E 4
96.
Stack Overflow Trends
ReadTier 2·74
Language adoption curves. Confirmation lens on tooling theses.
M 8R 9E 5
97.
Hacker News Algolia
ReadTier 2·75
Pattern-match against historical Show HN threads.
M 9R 8E 5
98.
PyPI / npm download stats
ReadTier 2·78
Package adoption. Usage-side confirmation of GitHub-side velocity.
M 9R 9E 5
99.
Zenodo
EngageTier 2·76
Where our SSRN dataset is mirrored. CC BY 4.0. Reproducible by anyone.
We publish our dataset here — not just consumers.
M 7R 6E 10
100.
Our SSRN paper (n=219)
EngageTier 1·88
ssrn.com/abstract=6606558. The methodology that grounds every prediction.
M 10R 6E 10

How we engage — the cadence behind the roster

One contact per surface, twice a week, ceiling of four.

The top-100 list is not a contact-list to email. It’s a board we work in public. Every Tuesday and Friday at 14:00 EEST, the company page replies on one or two posts inside the engage-tagged Company Pages, prioritised top-down by ICP score. Hard ceiling of 4 replies/week — LinkedIn throttles company pages above that.

On the Reddit side: comment-only on r/venturecapital (auto-mod removes main posts that name a product), 40-55 words, Twitter-tight, no em-dashes. Hacker News is currently on hold — the account is blocked from submitting / commenting; we publish here transparently rather than hide the gap.

Federated triple-mirror — Bluesky / Mastodon / Farcaster — runs on the same Tue / Fri pulse. Each post lives at its native URL, cross-quoted on Substack Notes, never astroturfed.

How to use this list

If three of these voices pattern-match to you, you’re our dream customer.

We didn’t make this page for SEO. We made it because every week one developer-investor emails us asking which substacks we read, which podcasts we listen to, which datasets we trust. This is the answer in one place. If you read three of these regularly, the free Acceleration Watch is built around your reading habits — same density, same priors, same Monday rhythm.

Get the free Acceleration Watch →Where we publish (the other side of the map) →

The top-100 ICP list is drawn from direct-response sales canon. The full audit of how this site reverse-engineers competitor playbooks is on /funnels.

The Top 100 — the literal roster of 100 voices, ICP-scored, with engagement status.

The rule: pick the 100 publications, communities, and orgs whose audience already contains your dream customer. Don’t pitch — show up where they are, contribute, let the signal compound.

One contact per surface, twice a week, ceiling of four.

Federated triple-mirror — Bluesky / Mastodon / Farcaster — runs on the same Tue / Fri pulse. Each post lives at its native URL, cross-quoted on Substack Notes, never astroturfed.

If three of these voices pattern-match to you, you’re our dream customer.