OSS Growth Attribution
Produce an auditable growth reconstruction, not a generic marketing checklist.
Workflow
- Resolve the canonical repository and validate it against the product domain.
- Fetch GitHub repository metadata, releases, earliest commits, and timestamped stargazers.
- Build a star timeline with daily resolution around spikes and monthly resolution elsewhere.
- Search GitHub Trending, Reddit, Hacker News, Product Hunt, X, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, developer media, technical blogs, and localized communities.
- Extract original content URLs; never substitute search-result URLs when an original URL is available.
- Normalize items to the evidence schema.
- Align publication times with star velocity using the attribution model.
- Divide history into preparation, community seed, accumulation, breakout, localization/SEO, and ecosystem stages. Omit unsupported stages.
- Report representative content per channel with hook, format, audience, funnel role, and original link.
- List channels searched but not evidenced. Absence of public evidence is not proof an event never happened.
Source priority
- GitHub REST API and repository commits/releases
- Original posts, videos, launch pages, and project-owned pages
- Independent archives or channel-specific analytics pages
- Search result snippets only as discovery or dated snapshots
Use the API playbook. Follow the environment's web-access skill for browsing.
Attribution guardrails
- Label API fields and original posts as
observed. - Label cross-source temporal conclusions as
inferred. - Label percentage shares as
modeled; use ranges, never fake precision. - Do not credit a channel merely because it is common in OSS marketing.
- Treat GitHub Trending as both an outcome of prior velocity and an amplification channel.
- Do not sum overlapping platform effects as independent last-click conversions.
- Without first-party traffic, UTM, or referral logs, state uncertainty of at least ±10–15 percentage points.
- Never claim Product Hunt or Show HN impact without a canonical launch/discussion URL or strong corroboration.
Required output
Return an executive conclusion, attribution limits, stage timeline, channel contribution ranges, key content table with original URLs, hook analysis, unsupported hypotheses, exact-attribution instrumentation, and next-stage action plan. Every material claim needs a URL or a clear modeled label.