I built StarBack — discover projects from people who star your GitHub repo

Have you ever looked at a new GitHub star and wondered:

Who is this person, and what are they building?

That question led me to build StarBack.

StarBack is a GitHub-native tool that turns new stargazers into a project discovery feed.

When someone stars your repository, StarBack looks at the public repositories they own, ranks them using signals like activity, stars, forks, description, topics, and homepage, then adds the most interesting project to an Inbox inside your GitHub repository.

No separate dashboard.
No server.
No database.

Everything runs with GitHub Actions, Issues, and the GitHub REST API.

How it works

The flow is roughly:

Someone stars your repo
        ↓
GitHub Actions runs
        ↓
StarBack checks their public repositories
        ↓
Repositories are ranked
        ↓
The best one is added to your StarBack Inbox

The Inbox is just a normal GitHub Issue, for example:

StarBack Inbox · August 2026

- [ ] user/project-a — TypeScript · ★126
- [ ] another-user/project-b — Rust · ★48

So instead of treating stars as just a number, you can use them as a way to discover developers and projects connected to your own work.

Why I built it

GitHub stars are mostly one-directional.

Someone finds your project, stars it, and usually disappears into the stargazer list.

But many of those people are builders themselves.

I wanted a lightweight way to answer:

“What interesting things are the people discovering my project building?”

I also wanted it to stay completely inside GitHub instead of creating another SaaS dashboard that needs hosting, authentication, a database, and maintenance.

That constraint shaped StarBack into a reusable GitHub Actions workflow.