Setting Up the Signal Feed
Before Market Signals can surface high-quality matches, spend five minutes on calibration. This is the most important setup step — a generic signal feed produces noise; a calibrated one produces leads.Complete your company profile
Go to Settings → Company Profile and complete your company description, sector tags, and stage. Market Signals uses this as the baseline to score investor content relevance against your specific positioning.
Calibrate your thesis keywords
Navigate to Settings → Market Signals → Calibration. Set the specific thesis keywords that define your company’s investment story — not just your sector category, but your specific positioning within it. Example: “vertical SaaS for independent freight brokers” rather than just “logistics software.”
Set your signal parameters
In Parameters, control which content types Metal surfaces — web data, podcast mentions, published articles, or social posts — and how they’re weighted. Start with all four enabled; refine based on which produce the most actionable signals for your specific investor targets.
How It Works
Metal continuously monitors public content from thousands of investors — podcasts, Substack posts, LinkedIn articles, conference talks, and interviews. Each piece of content is analysed for investment thesis signals, which are then scored against your company profile for relevance. The result is a personalised signal feed: investors who are currently thinking and writing about spaces directly relevant to your raise, ranked by how closely their expressed conviction aligns with what you’re building.The Signal Feed
Navigate to Discovery → Market Intelligence to access your signal feed. Each signal card shows:| Signal field | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Signal Commentary | How clearly the investor expressed conviction |
| Overlapping Themes | What themes overlap with your business model and company thesis |
| Partners | Partners who have spoken or written about investment focus areas |
| Source | The original content item — podcast, blog post, article, or interview. Click View Source to read or listen before acting |
| A Summary | Click Summarise for a one-paragraph digest of what the investor said, why it’s relevant to your company, and what it suggests about their current conviction level |
Filtering the Signal Feed
You can filter the feed to focus on the signals most relevant to your current targeting:| Filter | What it does |
|---|---|
| Investor type | Limit to VCs, angels, corporates, or accelerators |
| Investor Focus | Filter investors by their investment activity, geo, stage or sector focus |
| Stage | Surface only signals from investors who express conviction at your round stage |
| Recency | Signals from the last 30, 60, or 90 days |
Why Market Signals Matter
Investors who are publicly articulating thesis in your space are actively forming conviction, easier to reference in outreach, and more likely to respond than investors targeted purely on historical portfolio data.“I came across your recent piece on [publication] about [thesis area] — it maps closely to what we’re building at [company]. I’d love 20 minutes.”A one-line reference to a specific thing they’ve said publicly is one of the most effective cold outreach openers available. Market Signals gives you the raw material for that.
Acting on Signals
For each signal, you have two actions:- Add to Pipeline — Sdds the investor to your pipeline with the signal logged as the sourcing reason. The content source is saved alongside the investor record for reference when drafting outreach.
- Pass — Dismisses the signal without adding to your pipeline. Metal learns from passes and refines the relevance of future signals shown to you.