A working framework for converting deal-press into demand gen — and the running log of what we've pulled, issue by issue.
The point isn't to summarize newsletters. It's to ask, of each item: does this change what a mid-market owner should believe, feel, or do about selling? If not, it's noise. The pipeline below is the repeatable lens — apply it to any issue, any source.
Does it touch a $5M–$100M+ EBITDA owner — their sector, their buyers, their timing? Mega-cap and pure-VC items usually fail here.
Classify it: buyer behavior, valuation/multiples, timing/window, regulatory mood, or sector-specific comp.
Rewrite it as something an owner would care about. "PE moves downmarket" becomes "more buyers will compete for your business."
Map it: awareness ("am I ready?"), consideration ("is now the time?"), or decision ("why an advisor / why us?").
Name the deployable output: a post, a one-pager, a sector outreach hook, or a thread to keep watching.
Most of the triage value is knowing what to ignore. Three buckets:
Changes an owner's belief about value, timing, buyer pool, or risk. Examples:
Real but not yet actionable. Track it across issues until it reaches critical mass, then promote it. Examples:
Interesting, irrelevant. Don't let it dilute the log. Examples:
When an item is borderline, run it against these. If it can't pass at least one, it's Skip.
The forward test separates content owners save from content they scroll past.
The single most common question in the consideration stage. Timing signals are gold.
Post-LOI retrades, earn-out disputes, rollover dilution — wedge content beats generic "thinking of selling?".
A named transaction in a known vertical is an immediate outreach door-opener.
Durable narratives ("PE is buying again") beat perishable urgency ("tax change imminent"). Premature urgency ages badly.
Reverse-chronological. Each entry is one observation translated for the owner audience, plus the deployable move. Filter by theme below.
index.html and add an object to the LOG array near the top of the script — newest first. Fields: date, source, title, obs, move, themes[], stage. Commit and your host (Cloudflare Pages / Vercel / Netlify) redeploys automatically. This is a static page, so entries live in the file itself — there is no database.
A thread graduates from Watch to Deploy when enough independent signals stack up. The number is a rough heat score — how substantiated the thread is right now.
Ideas surfaced by the log, scored by readiness. Ready means the supporting signal is substantiated enough to build now.
IDEAS array in the script — fields title, format, rationale, status (ready / building / parked).