How to Raise Millions for $100 — The Lucrative Shadow Economy of Fake GitHub Stars
A new investigation just dropped, and it’s deliciously cynical: researchers scanned more than 18,000 repositories and uncovered roughly 6 million fake stars. The undisputed champions? AI startups (the non-malicious kind, at least).
Wrong.
Venture capitalists are obsessed with them. A partner at Redpoint Ventures openly admitted that many funds run scrapers across GitHub every day. The #1 filter? Star count. On average, you need ~3,000 stars to get a serious look for a seed round and ~5,000 for Series A. It’s not the only signal, but it’s a brutal gatekeeper.
And once something becomes a gatekeeper, a market appears.
Want 3,000 stars for seed? That’s $90–$2,500.
If you actually close a $2–5 million round, your ROI is absurd.
This is Goodhart’s Law in action: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
The authors of the report have a simple fix: stop worshipping stars. Look at forks instead.
Forking requires real effort — someone actually cloned your repo and did something with it. Faking forks at scale is way more expensive. Even better: track the forks-to-stars ratio. Real traction shows up there. Pure hype evaporates.
- Telegram → views (cheap) vs meaningful engagement (likes + comments + reposts);
- Mobile apps → installs vs Day-7 retention (DAU);
- SaaS → sign-ups vs paid conversions or 30-day usage.
Bots will always flood the cheapest metric. “Just detect them better” doesn’t work — detection always lags. The winning strategy is to move the goalpost to the metric that’s expensive to fake.
The product was actually impressive, but the growth-hacking burned their reputation so badly they’re still scrubbing “Shitsfield AI” memes off the internet years later.
Meanwhile, entire Telegram channels exist that are 100% fake — bought followers, stolen content, botted views, comments, and shares — yet blue-chip advertisers happily pay top rates because the vanity metrics look perfect.
It’s a human problem: we love easy numbers, and the market will always sell us the easiest ones.
Want real traction? Make the signal expensive to fake.
Also read:
- AI Is Kryptonite for Critical Thinking — Here’s Exactly How It Melts Your Brain
- Startups Are Reviving Dead Brains — And Big Pharma Can’t Look Away
- The Battle for Humanity’s Last Dataset
- US Intelligence Agencies Secure $9 Billion for AI Chips and Access to Anthropic’s Mythos Model
Thank you!