How the Pulse is measured
The Pulse is a measurement, not an opinion and not a vote. Eleven public signals are read from the startup's own site and code, each weighted, and the weights are renormalised over the signals that actually resolved — so a company with no public repository is not scored as though its repository were dead.
Signals and weights
| Signal | Weight |
|---|---|
| Sitemap freshness | 25 |
| Latest post | 20 |
| Last commit | 20 |
| Last release | 10 |
| Homepage changes | 10 |
| Pricing page | 5 |
| Careers page | 5 |
| Open roles on Wadline | 5 |
| Status page | 5 |
| Website reachable | — |
| TLS certificate | 0 |
What we will not claim
- No state and no score are published below three resolved signals, or with no time-based signal at all. Those profiles say so.
- A signal we could not measure, or one a site's robots.txt told us not to collect, carries no weight in either direction and is reported as unmeasured.
- A shutdown is only ever recorded by a person. The measurement can see that a site stopped responding and flags it for review; a failed request is as often a DNS migration or a bot block.
- Nothing a submitter can influence by asking people to click is measured: no vote counts, no traffic estimates, no social following.
- Requests honour robots.txt, run one at a time per host with Crawl-delay respected, and identify as WadlineBot with a contact address.
How often we look
A startup that is shipping is rechecked daily; one that has gone quiet, less often. Every profile shows the date it was last checked.
- Growing1d
- Steady3d
- Quiet7d
- Dormant14d
- Closed30d
The data
The whole set, with per-signal detail and the weights above, is published as JSON so anyone can check the arithmetic rather than trust it.