How to find users with email for your dev tool + script
If you’re building a dev tool, your best early users are already telling you who they are. They’ve starred a repo adjacent to yours. They care about the problem. They’re not a cold list, they’re a warm one , you just have to do a tiny bit of work to reach them.
The catch is that GitHub hides emails on profiles. But most developers leak theirs anyway, through commits in their own public repos. The author.email field is right there in every commit. That's the seam.
The idea is dumb-simple. Pick a repo whose stargazers are your target audience, pull the stargazer list from the GitHub API, walk each person’s recent repos, read the commit metadata, grab author.email, filter out the noreply@github.com ones, dedupe. No scraping, no sketchy tooling, just the public API and public commit data.
I wrote a bash script that does the whole thing. You need gh (authenticated via gh auth login) and jq. That's it. You run it, paste a repo, set a cap, and a few minutes later you've got a CSV with names, emails, logins, and which repo of theirs you got it from.
./scrape_stargazer_emails.sh
GitHub repo URL or owner/repo: vercel/next.js
Max stargazers to scan [200]: 100
Five minutes later there’s a CSV waiting for you with a hundred real emails of real developers who star projects in your space. The script and the walkthrough are here: https://npad.run/p/how-to-find-emails-of-github-repo-stargazers-hytfnmtgph.
Now the part that actually matters.
This works way better than a Show HN. A launch post gets you two hours of attention from people scrolling past fifty other launches that day. Half of them never even click. But a personal email, written like a human, that mentions something specific from their GitHub, that gets read. Sometimes it gets a reply. Occasionally it gets a user who sticks around and tells their friends.
A few things I’ve learned the slightly harder way. Don’t go wider than 200 stargazers, the returns get noisy fast, more bots, more dead accounts, more noreply emails that slipped through. Don't bulk-send the same template to everyone, because the moment you do that you've turned a warm list into spam, and the recipients can tell. Spend twenty seconds looking at each person's profile and mention their actual repo in the first line. It quadruples replies. Send from a real address with your real name on it, not hello@yourstartup.com. And space the sends out, four or five seconds between each, because Gmail flags bursts and you do not want to land in spam jail on day one.
If you’re shipping a dev tool, this is probably the highest-ROI hour you’ll spend on go-to-market this week. The script is free, the API is free, and the audience is pre-filtered for you. The only hard part is writing the actual email, and you should be writing those one at a time anyway.
Easy way: https://npad.run/p/how-to-find-emails-of-github-repo-stargazers-hytfnmtgph (put this to your claude code, u will get the full working script in one shot, thank me later)