Talk notes
Sourcing as a solo or small-team investor is fundamentally a time-allocation problem. You don't have an analyst pool, you don't have a six-figure data subscription, and you can't do diligence on every interesting company you see. The whole sourcing workflow has to compress into 5-7 hours per week or it doesn't get done. Here's how we recommend allocating that time.
Sunday, 15 minutes: read the weekly digest. The digest surfaces the top 5 movers in each of your subscribed sectors. Your job is to scan, not to deeply read. You're looking for two things: a name you recognize (positive signal, you already had context, now you have a fresh anchor) and a name you don't recognize that fits your thesis (cold signal, worth one more click).
Sunday, 30 minutes: build the week's shortlist. Click into the 3-5 names that survived the scan. Look at the org's recent commits, their contributor list, their public roadmap if one exists. Decide who to reach out to. Size the shortlist to your check size, a €25k checkwriter can productively talk to 5 founders in a week; a €500k checkwriter probably wants 2.
Monday morning, 45 minutes: write the outbound. Use the 4× reply-rate template, first sentence references a specific commit, function, or PR you saw. Second sentence states your thesis. Third sentence asks one specific question. No mention of fundraising, no calendar link, no investor-deck attachment. The reply rate from this template is roughly 4× the average cold-VC outbound rate in our subscriber data. Total weekly time: about 1.5 hours. Conversations generated: 1-2 per week steady state. Annualized: 50-100 first conversations a year, all sourced from public engineering data.