Brand Monitor: what your name is doing on the internet right now

Most brand monitoring tools tell you that your name was mentioned somewhere. Brand Monitor tells you whether the mention matters.

The difference is signal quality. A Stack Overflow comment with 200 upvotes from a principal engineer at Shopify is not the same as a bot tweet with 3 followers. Brand Monitor assigns authority scores, deduplicates cross-posted content, and classifies mentions by sentiment before they hit your inbox.

What Brand Monitor watches

GitHub — repository stars, forks, issues opened mentioning your project, PRs referencing your library, dependency additions (when someone adds your package to their requirements.txt and it becomes visible through dependency manifests). Engineer mentions on GitHub tend to be the highest-quality signal — someone found a problem or built something using your tool.

Hacker News — submissions and comment mentions. HN has a tight-knit engineering audience and a strong opinion signal. One positive HN comment from a recognizable username carries more weight than 100 random tweets. Brand Monitor scores HN mentions by commenter karma and thread position.

Reddit — cross-community monitoring across r/programming, r/devops, r/MachineLearning, r/startups, r/sysadmin, r/devtools, and configurable subreddits. The subreddit matters for authority scoring — r/MachineLearning mention ≠ r/gaming mention.

Discord — monitored servers via the Discord API (requires bot membership). Useful for developer community servers. Latency is near-real-time. Brand Monitor surfaces mentions in relevant channels and ignores DM-only servers.

Twitter/X — filtered by engagement threshold to avoid bot noise. A tweet with 2 likes from a 50-follower account isn't signal. A retweet chain from recognizable engineers is. Configurable engagement floor.

Product Hunt — comments and reviews on your PH listing, or mentions in other products' comments. Useful for launch monitoring.

Velocity classification

Brand Monitor groups mentions into velocity tiers that update on each scan:

• NORMAL — baseline activity for your brand. Establishes a 30-day rolling average.
• ELEVATED — 2× the 30-day average. Worth a quick check.
• SPIKE — 5× the 30-day average. Something happened. Positive or negative, you need to know.
• VIRAL — 10× the 30-day average. Response may be time-sensitive.

The velocity classifier prevents alert fatigue. If your name is mentioned 50 times a day on average and 55 times today, that's NORMAL and doesn't warrant a notification.

Deduplication

Cross-posting is common. Someone tweets about your tool, it gets posted to a Slack community, someone posts the tweet to Discord, a blog aggregator picks it up. Without deduplication, you'd see the same content six times.

Brand Monitor uses content fingerprinting (normalized text similarity) plus URL deduplication to collapse cross-posted content into a single canonical mention. The deduper shows the original source and the cross-post count.

Sentiment scoring

Each mention gets a sentiment score: POSITIVE, NEGATIVE, NEUTRAL, MIXED. The scoring is keyword-based rather than ML (which means it's fast and auditable). Negative keywords override positives in the summary — if someone says "love the concept but the docs are terrible," that's NEGATIVE.

The sentiment score is used to triage: SPIKE velocity + NEGATIVE sentiment = alert immediately. SPIKE velocity + POSITIVE sentiment = morning digest is fine.

Authority scoring

Not all voices carry equal weight. Brand Monitor assigns a platform-appropriate authority score:

• GitHub: star count of the commenter's repos, follower count, contribution activity
• HN: karma score, account age, past comment scores
• Reddit: account age, combined karma, subreddit-specific karma
• Twitter/X: follower count, verified status, engagement rate on recent posts

Authority score combines with velocity and sentiment to produce a relevance score for each mention. The top-3 highest-relevance mentions of the week go in the weekly digest header.

Weekly digest

Every Sunday, Brand Monitor sends a structured summary:

• This week's velocity: NORMAL / ELEVATED / SPIKE / VIRAL
• Sentiment breakdown: X positive, Y negative, Z neutral
• Health score: A-F composite (velocity baseline, sentiment ratio, authority average, growth trend)
• Top 3 mentions this week: authority-ranked
• One to watch: the highest-authority negative mention (if any) to address before next week

Current state

724 tests across 8 modules: mention crawler, authority scorer, velocity tracker, deduplicator, sentiment analyzer, health score calculator, weekly digest builder, and a Slack/email alert router.

The first customer use case is obvious: any developer-tool company that wants to know what engineers are saying about their product, before those engineers become vocal detractors or vocal champions. $29/month to monitor one brand across 6 platforms seems like an obvious spend for any product company.

The pricing target: $29/month (solo), $99/month (3 brands), $199/month (10 brands). The volume pricing matters because agencies and competitive intelligence teams want multi-brand monitoring.

Like the rest of this portfolio, the product exists. The deployment is pending. The first customer is an email away.