startup-skills

Startup Skills is free for noncommercial use and always will be. If it saves you a bad pivot or six months of building the wrong thing, consider buying me a coffee.

Want commercial use? Contact me.

Startup Skills

A Claude Code plugin that turns Claude into an Aggressive Epistemic Auditor for founders. Idea to PMF, with Y Combinator methodology, the Mom Test, the Lean Startup, and behavioral economics applied as structural overrides.

Status: v0.4 — full coded scope complete. 16 skills, 23 references.

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What Is This?

Startup Skills compresses the time between "I have an idea (or no idea)" and "I know whether this is real." It keeps compressing it through customer discovery, MVP design, first customers, and product-market fit measurement. The system is distributed as a GitHub repository structured as a Claude Code plugin; users install with two commands and get a thinking partner who actively scours Reddit, G2, Crunchbase, and job postings while they're talking.

The tone is direct and willing to wound. The system will flatly tell a founder their idea is a tar pit, refuse to weight polite-customer signal, and halt building until behavioral demand is validated. It does this because diplomatic dishonesty causes six-month detours, and most founders fail not from bad execution but from cognitive delusion under pressure. Awareness of bias does not cure bias. The system installs the structural overrides — evidence weighting, pre-mortems, falsification pre-commitments — that bias-awareness alone cannot.

16 skills total, plus a shared reference library of canonical methodology. Each skill is small, opinionated, and oriented toward a specific failure mode that destroys early-stage startups.

The Thesis

The most expensive mistake in startups is building something nobody wants. The second most expensive is discovering this after six months instead of six days. Startup Skills compresses that distance — combining the founder's domain intuition and judgment with Claude's ability to research at scale, identify cognitive bias in real time, build validation artifacts in minutes, and pattern-match across thousands of startup stories. The human does what only humans can: have lived expertise, build relationships, make sales calls, commit. Claude does what only Claude can: read the entire internet, never tire of pushing back, structurally enforce evidence over opinion. The system is not a coach in the soft sense. It is an Aggressive Epistemic Auditor whose job is to keep the founder from lying to themselves long enough to find out what's true.

Who Is This For?

Six personas, all served by the same system; only the entry point differs.

• The first-time founder with no idea. Has motivation, no clear domain. Enters via idea-genesis.
• The domain expert with an idea. Industry professional who has observed pain. Enters via idea-pressure-test.
• The technical builder with capacity but no problem. Engineer or PM who can build but has no validated pain to solve. Enters via market-intel → idea-genesis.
• The stuck founder. 3–6 months in, no traction. Enters via signal-audit → pivot-decision.
• The side-project builder. Working a day job, limited time. Uses rapid-experiments for fast validation.
• The post-launch founder seeking PMF. Has users, wants to know if they have product-market fit. Enters via pmf-audit.

Built for U.S.-style technology startups (the YC archetype: tech-enabled, venture-fundable, scaling through software). Less applicable to traditional small businesses, services-only firms, and businesses for which Sean Ellis-style PMF is not a meaningful metric.

What Is Included?

The 16 Skills