Signal types — the 8 signals Mama tracks.
Each signal has its own collection pipeline, freshness window, and best-fit deal type. Knowing the differences makes you better at deciding which signals to weight in your ICP rubric and which to act on first.
TL;DR
Funding · Hiring · Exec moves · Tech changes · Product launches · Office moves · Job changes · Custom bots. The first 4 are the workhorses (~80% of brief triggers). The next 3 fit specific motions. Custom bots are your own detectors. Freshness matters more than accuracy — a 95%-accurate signal that's 30 days old beats a 99%-accurate one that's 60 days old, every time.
The 8 signal types at a glance
| Signal | Freshness window | Refresh cadence | Best-fit motion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Funding | 0-90 days | < 6 hours | Selling into newly capitalized companies |
| Hiring | 0-120 days | Daily | Tools where role hiring signals upcoming budget |
| Exec moves | 0-90 days | Daily | Stack-displacement opportunities |
| Tech changes | 0-60 days | 48 hours | Integrations & replacements |
| Product launches | 0-21 days | Daily | Marketing tools, agencies |
| Office moves | 0-60 days | Weekly | Facilities, regional GTM |
| Job changes | 0-90 days | Real-time (Orbit) | Relationship-driven sales |
| Custom bots | Configurable | Configurable | Anything you can define a rule for |
01Funding
The strongest single signal. A funding round concentrates intent: budget is fresh, leadership is hiring, the company is building. Optimal outreach window: weeks 2-6 post-announcement. Earlier, the team is celebrating; later, the budget has been allocated.
Sub-types: Seed · Series A-E · Late-stage · Debt · Acquisition. Each sub-type maps to a different budget shape and decision-maker mix.
Full deep-dive — round-stage budget map, decay curve, source landscape
02Hiring
The leading indicator. A hiring spike for a specific role usually precedes the corresponding budget by 1-2 quarters. The team that detects at job-post time (not at hire-announcement time) gets ~8 weeks of head start on competitors.
Sub-types: Spike (3+ in 30 days) · Sustained · Replacement · Restructure. Spike + sustained are the highest-signal patterns.
Full deep-dive — 16-week leading-vs-lagging timeline, ATS source landscape, role-to-budget map
03Exec moves
A dual-nature signal — opportunity on the offense, churn risk on the defense. A new VP/C-level hire reassesses the stack in their first 90 days; 40% of incumbents get replaced in that window. Mama surfaces exec moves on both sides — challenger outreach + incumbent defense.
Sub-types: VP+ hire · C-level hire · Lateral move · Departure · Internal promotion.
Full deep-dive — first-90-days playbook, incumbent defense moves
04Tech changes
Mama's biggest data moat. Detecting that a company dropped Segment for Rudderstack, or added Snowflake, or swapped HubSpot for Salesforce — this requires multi-layer detection (JS sniffing + DNS + careers parsing + third-party feeds) that pure-API competitors can't replicate.
Patterns: Drop (removed a tool) · Add (new tool detected) · Swap (replaced one with another) · Consolidate (multiple tools → one).
Full deep-dive — detection layers, migration-anchored opener pattern
05Product launches
Detects public ships — Product Hunt, blog announcement posts, changelog updates, press releases tagged "launch." Best-fit for marketing tools, agencies, analytics platforms — anyone whose pitch involves "amplify the launch you just did."
Sub-types: Public launch · Beta announcement · GA milestone · Pricing change · Major version release.
Freshness window is short — 21 days max. After that the launch is no longer "new" and the angle is stale.
06Office moves
A niche signal but high-fit for some motions. Detects facility expansions, regional HQ moves, new office announcements. Mostly useful for facilities-adjacent tools (security, badge access, office software) and regional GTM teams (opening a new office in your geo = entry point for local rep).
Volume warning: Office move signals are noisy — many companies announce expansions that don't materialize. Use as a secondary anchor, not a primary.
07Job changes (Orbit)
The cheapest pipeline source most teams ignore. When a relationship you've built — a champion, an evaluator, even a friendly customer — moves to a new company, the new company often becomes a much shorter sales cycle than a cold account. Mama's Orbit feature tracks job changes across LinkedIn + X + GitHub + Substack for relationships you've added.
Conversion lift on Orbit-sourced accounts: 5-15× cold conversion. The relationship is the moat.
Full deep-dive — relationship type lift, pipeline-from-base math · Orbit feature docs →
08Custom bots
Pro and Company tier. Define your own detector — a regex on a competitor's careers page, a phrase scan on industry forums, a webhook from a niche data source. The bot runs on your schedule and the matches show up in your signal feed alongside the built-in 7.
Three tiers of crawler: Built-in (the 7 above) · On-demand (one-off crawls you trigger manually) · Custom (persistent bots that run on schedule). Pro starts with 5 custom bots; Company is unlimited.
Signal combos — when 1+1 = 5
Single signals are good. Signal combos are extraordinary. When two signals fire on the same account within a 30-day window, reply rates compound — typically 2-3× over the single-signal baseline. The 4 combos with the strongest evidence:
| Combo | Single-signal baseline | Combo baseline | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| Funding + Hiring (data/eng) | 5-8% | 14-22% | 2.8× |
| Exec move + Tech change | 4-6% | 11-18% | 2.5× |
| Funding + Exec move | 5-8% | 13-19% | 2.4× |
| Tech change + Hiring | 4-7% | 10-16% | 2.2× |
Mama auto-surfaces combos in the signal card grid with a "Combo" badge. Treat these as P0.