add first-hand founder benchmarks section from podcast interviews

README.md

@@ -157,6 +157,39 @@ Unlike "post on HN and pray" advice, this playbook provides **specific timing, t
 - **Content SEO for OSS** — Documentation as SEO, tutorial content, changelog as blog posts
 - **Global distribution** — Chinese developer community (Gitee, CSDN, 掘金, V2EX), Japanese/Korean developer channels
 
+### What's New (July 2026): First-Hand Founder Benchmarks
+
+Fresh benchmarks from founders who ran this playbook end-to-end — including numbers investors and pricing pages rarely make public.
+
+**Open source → fundraising data chain.** One founder logged ~400 investor meetings over ~12 months for the angel round. After open-sourcing: ~6,000 stars in launch week (80% from overseas developers), 10K stars in 43 days, and an $8M Pre-A locked roughly one month after going open source (founder-reported). Two takeaways:
+
+- Investors buy **star velocity, not absolute count** — a steep launch-week curve reframed the entire fundraising conversation.
+- Some funds now run crawlers during due diligence to verify stars are organic. Coordinated-but-real community pushes pass; purchased stars do not.
+
+**The Day One minimum kit.** Four assets that must exist before any promotion — nothing more:
+
+| Asset | Bar to clear |
+|:---|:---|
+| One-liner website | A single sentence that says what it is |
+| Illustrated README | 30-second value prop + a clear star CTA |
+| One positioning article | "Open source X alternative" framing |
+| Minimal dev docs | 4 pages is enough to start |
+
+**6-step zero-budget cold-start SOP** (as practiced by founders, in order):
+
+1. Study a predecessor's launch — how a comparable project actually broke out
+2. README (per the kit above)
+3. Publish the "open source X alternative" article
+4. Directory submissions
+5. DM the competitor's Twitter followers directly
+6. Reddit
+
+**Healthy week-1 star geography benchmark.** For a global-first launch, founders converge on: US 19–21%, China ~19–21%, top-4 EU countries 10–15% combined. The discipline behind it: **no domestic posting in week one** — home-market virality first skews the geography and weakens the "global developer adoption" signal investors read.
+
+**Pricing test before the paid tier exists.** One founder shipped a deliberately vague pricing page with only a contact form — dozens of inquiries in 2 weeks, splitting roughly 70% free / 20% personal / 10% team (self-reported). Demand signal captured months before writing a single line of billing code.
+
+> Source: distilled from 12 founder podcast interviews (2024–2026); figures are self-reported by the founders involved.
+
 ### Use Cases
 
 - Early-stage open source project wanting its first 1,000 stars