Startup Channel Atlas 🇮🇳

How 350 of India's top startups (2010–2025) actually acquired their users — coded by marketing channel and growth stage, and queryable by an LLM.

Most "growth advice" is anecdote. This is a structured, evidence-derived dataset built to answer one question:

Which marketing channels are best — for a given industry, audience, era, scale/stage, product type, and budget?

Each of the 350 companies is coded for the channels it used at three stages (0→1, 1→10, scale), what worked, what failed, and situational variables (sector, model, era, trust burden, virality, CAC ceiling, category creation-vs-capture). It deliberately includes ~80 acquired / distressed / shut-down companies so you can learn from failure, not just survivorship.

Headline finding: channels are stage-locked more than sector-locked. TV was the entry channel for ~0 of 350 companies; it — like IPL and celebrity — is a scale-stage play. 0→1 is won on earned media, partnerships, SEO/content, product-led loops and community.

Quickstart — pick your lane

🧠 Option A — Ask any LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini)

The fastest path. Point your model at this repo and let SKILL.md be its brain.

1. Open your AI chat.

2. Paste the link to this repo (or paste the contents of SKILL.md).

3. Say: Read — the model adopts the channel-selection rules.

4. Ask, e.g. "I'm a seed-stage D2C skincare brand for tier-2 women in 2024, ~₹50L/month. Which channels first, and who proves it?"

SKILL.md explicitly tells the model not to dump the whole CSV into context — it reasons over the rules and pulls only the rows it needs, so answers stay cheap and grounded.

⚡ Option B — Give it a real brain (MCP server, for Claude Desktop / Cursor / Claude Code)

Runs a local server that exposes the dataset as query tools. No hosting, no token bloat — the model calls find_channels(...) and gets back a small, ranked, evidence-backed result.

Run with uv (recommended):

uvx --from git+https://github.com/lan-club-live/startup-gtm-skill startup-gtm-skill-mcp

Add to Claude Desktop (claude_desktop_config.json → Settings ▸ Developer ▸ Edit Config):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "startup-gtm-skill": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "git+https://github.com/lan-club-live/startup-gtm-skill", "startup-gtm-skill-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Or from a clone:

git clone https://github.com/lan-club-live/startup-gtm-skill && cd startup-gtm-skill
uv run startup-gtm-skill-mcp          # or:  pip install -e . && startup-gtm-skill-mcp

Then just ask Claude/Cursor a channel question — it will call the tools automatically.

Tools exposed: find_channels, get_company, search_evidence, channel_lens, list_filters, dataset_summary.

📊 Option C — Just the data (Excel / Pandas / your own build)

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv("data/startups.csv")
d2c = df[df["Sector"].str.contains("d2c", case=False, na=False)]
print(d2c[["Company", "0→1 Channels", "Scale Channels", "What Worked Most"]])

Or open data/startups.csv in Excel/Sheets and pivot away.

Related MCP server: Meta Ads MCP Server

What's in the box

startup-gtm-skill/
├── data/
│   ├── startups.csv          # 350 companies × channels-by-stage + variables + what worked/failed
│   ├── channel_matrix.csv    # company × 24 canonical channels (E=0→1, G=1→10, S=scale)
│   └── economics.csv         # 257 sourced CAC / ROAS / ad-spend datapoints (nothing estimated)
├── SKILL.md                  # the lightweight "brain": rules + decision trees + token discipline
├── src/startup_gtm_skill/
│   ├── query.py              # pure, dependency-free query logic (importable, testable)
│   └── server.py             # stdio MCP server wrapping query.py
├── pyproject.toml            # packaged for `uvx` / `pip install`
└── README.md

Dataset columns (startups.csv)

Rank, Company, Sector, Subsector, Model, Status, Era Scaled, Founded, Valuation ($mn), Funding ($mn), 0→1 Channels, 1→10 Channels, Scale Channels, First 1000 Users, Budget Band, Economics Datapoints, Paid vs Organic, Signature Moves, Sponsorships, Regulatory Events, Retention Channels, Trust Burden, Virality, Purchase Freq, CAC Class, Category Play, Core Audience, Geo Tier, What Worked Most, What Failed/Wasted, Confidence, Template

Methodology & honest limits

• Derived, not disclosed. Channel mixes are inferred from public evidence — press, DRHPs/filings, founder interviews, agency case studies, search footprints. Companies rarely publish their channel mix; this reconstructs it.

• Confidence-tagged. Every row is high/medium/low. Evidence density thins past rank ~250 — use the tag rather than trusting all rows equally.

• Quality loop. After the first 100 companies, an evaluation answered CMO-style questions from the data and adversarially judged them; the schema was then upgraded (calendar years, channel side, sourced economics) and flagged profiles were re-researched. See SKILL.md.

• Scope. Top 350 Indian startups by valuation, 2010–2025. India-centric; not a guide to other geographies or to today's channel costs without adjustment.

Contributing

Corrections and additions welcome — this is a living dataset. Open an issue or PR with a company row plus sources. Keep the confidence tag honest.

License

Data: CC-BY-4.0 · Code: MIT. Attribution appreciated — link back to this repo.