Founding-100, €9.97/mo locked forever, before the public rate climbs to €49/mo.

1. 1Sideways Story

   Stage 1 · Sideways Story · The Opportunity

   There’s a class of investor that the data-product market simply doesn’t price for.

   Look at the deal-flow tool prices. Harmonic starts at €1,000/month per seat. Affinity is enterprise-only. Tracxn is in the same range. Crunchbase Pro is €99/month and doesn’t track engineering signals at all.

   All four are priced for institutional buyers, partners at funds with six-figure data budgets, signing 12-month contracts. None of them are priced for the investor writing €5k-€50k checks out of personal capital, who needs the same engineering-velocity signal but consumes it on Sunday afternoons, not in eight-person partner meetings.

   Founding-100 is the rate seat that admits this buyer exists. €9.97/month. The price isn’t a discount, it’s the right number for the consumption shape. The opportunity is to lock it before the public rate (€49/month) catches up to where the institutional tools sit.

2. 2Ownership Experience

   Stage 2 · Ownership Experience · See It Working

   Sunday morning, mug of coffee, dashboard open. Three sectors. Six accelerating orgs. Fifteen minutes.

   Picture the rhythm. Monday at 06:00 UTC the Acceleration Watch arrives in your inbox. Top 10 movers across every tracked sector. You skim, mark two, archive the rest.

   Sunday morning you open the Dashboard. You filter by your two sectors. Six orgs are accelerating. You hover with the Crunchbase extension, see the velocity score, decide whether two of the six are worth a 30-minute write-up. By 11am you have a watchlist for the week, or a pre-Crunchbase outreach you’re sending Monday morning, three weeks ahead of every fund.

   That’s the loop the €9.97/mo seat buys. It’s not a workflow you have to schedule, it’s a rhythm you fall into. The deep-dive PDF arrives the first Monday of every month, which keeps a calendar pin on the routine. The two Chrome extensions mean the velocity score is one hover away on every Crunchbase profile and Wellfound search.

3. 3Internal Struggle

   Stage 3 · Internal Struggle · The Doubts

   Three questions every founding-member buyer asks before they hit the Stripe link.

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   The 3-question objection walkthrough

   Synthetic walkthrough · 4 min · cued for Mon, 01 Jun 2026

   Synthetic-voice walkthrough renders June 1, the lock, the shutdown clause, the 100 cap.

   ‘Is the rate really locked forever, or is this marketing language for the first 12 months?’ The lock is contract-grade. As long as your Stripe subscription stays active, the price stays €9.97, through company growth, through public price hikes, through feature expansion. The only way the rate changes is if you cancel and re-subscribe, in which case you pay the public rate. The ‘forever’ in the marketing copy is the actual product spec.

   ‘What if the company shuts down?’ Methodology Vault stays public regardless. The SSRN preprint, the regression code, the Zenodo dataset, all CC BY 4.0, mirrored in three places, indexed in academic libraries. If the live aggregation goes dark, the methodology is reproducible from the public artifacts. You’re not buying a black box, you’re buying live convenience over a published method.

   ‘Why 100 spots, not 1,000? Is that just scarcity theater?’ 100 is the number of founding members the operations can serve at €9.97 without margin compression. Above 100 the per-customer cost of monthly deep-dives + Slack support + integration help passes the unit economics. The 100 cap is the real constraint, not a marketing ceiling. When it fills, new pricing serves new economics.

4. 4Big Idea, Open Cart

   Stage 4 · Big Idea · Open Cart

   23 of 100 spots taken. €9.97/month. Locked the day you subscribe, for as long as you stay subscribed.

   Open until 100 spots fill or June 30, whichever comes first. The counter at the top of /pricing is live (Stripe webhook → SHARP_2026_TAKEN), so the spot count is real, not a marketing prop.

   The math: 100 founding members at €9.97/month is €11,964/year of recurring revenue. That funds the GitHub-API layer, the regression compute, the dataset hosting, and one part-time analyst on monthly deep-dives. Above 100, the same operations stretch, which is why the public rate climbs.

   If the rhythm above (Monday digest, Sunday dashboard, monthly PDF, hover-extensions) maps to how you already source, the €9.97 lock is the cheapest decision on this page. If it doesn’t map, the free Acceleration Watch stays free and you lose nothing by skipping. The ladder is real. The rungs hold. Founding-member is the rung that closes when 100 fills.

See every door into VC Deal Flow Signal at /funnels or read the 12-minute walkthrough.