What is Market Signals?

Market signals are the raw inputs that Overheard processes into opportunity briefs. A signal is any public data point that indicates demand, frustration, or an emerging gap — a Hacker News post with unusually high engagement, a Reddit thread where users request a specific tool, a GitHub repository gaining rapid stars, or a Product Hunt launch filling an obvious need.

Overheard fetches approximately 250 signals per day from four sources: Hacker News (front page, Ask HN, Show HN stories from the last 48 hours), Reddit (posts from r/SaaS, r/startups, r/Entrepreneur, and r/smallbusiness), GitHub (repositories created in the last 48 hours sorted by stars), and Product Hunt (daily launches via their Atom feed).

Not all signals become Alpha Cards. The pipeline clusters signals by keyword overlap, then scores each cluster by total engagement multiplied by a source diversity factor. Only the top-scoring clusters — typically 3 to 10 per day — are synthesized into opportunity briefs.

The term "market signals" is used instead of "data" or "intelligence" because it accurately describes what these are: indicators that suggest something is happening, not proof that an opportunity will succeed.