idea-validator

idea-validator is a skill for Claude Code from bjorn-ingmanson/thefroject-plugins. It costs 46 tokens per session (738 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided process for checking whether a business idea is worth pursuing before building it. It examines the problem, potential customers, market size, competitors, and whether people may pay for a solution.

In plain words
What is it for?
Evaluating a product idea, side project, or business opportunity and recording the assessment in a validation Markdown file.
Why use it?
It helps expose weak assumptions early, before you spend significant time or money on development.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the thefroject-customer-success plugin — 47 skills, 11 commands shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/bjorn-ingmanson/thefroject-plugins/idea-validator
Any agent
npx skills add bjorn-ingmanson/thefroject-plugins --skill idea-validator
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bjorn-ingmanson/thefroject-plugins

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install thefroject-customer-success, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 47 skills, 11 commands.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for idea-validator

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bjorn-ingmanson/thefroject-plugins/idea-validator.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/bjorn-ingmanson/thefroject-plugins/idea-validator)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bjorn-ingmanson/thefroject-plugins/idea-validator"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bjorn-ingmanson/thefroject-plugins/idea-validator.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 46 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 738 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00046 $0.00738
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00369
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00148
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00074

Measured 5d ago against content hash b6bcbd4101cc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

idea-validator scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

customer-success/skills/idea-validator/SKILL.md · 65 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 65 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Idea Validator

Validate whether an idea is worth pursuing before investing time and money. The goal is not to prove the idea is good. The goal is to find reasons it might fail, early enough to pivot or abandon.

Writes

  • outputs/validation-[idea].md

Step 1: Problem Clarity

Answer these honestly:

  1. What problem does this solve? One sentence. If you need a paragraph, the problem is not clear.
  2. Who has this problem? Specific person, not "everyone." What is their job title, daily routine, current frustration?
  3. How painful is it? (Hair-on-fire / annoying / nice-to-have). Only hair-on-fire problems reliably produce paying customers.
  4. What do they do today? The current solution (even if it is duct tape and spreadsheets) is your real competitor.
  5. Why has nobody solved this yet? If the problem is real and big, why does a solution not already exist? (Timing, technology, distribution, regulation, or nobody has tried)

Step 2: Market Size

Estimate quickly:

  • TAM (Total Addressable Market) — everyone who could theoretically use this
  • SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market) — the segment you can actually reach
  • SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market) — realistic first-year target

Use: number of potential customers x what they would pay annually. If SOM is under $100K, this is a side project, not a business. That is fine, but know it going in.

Step 3: Sell Before You Build

The best validation is someone paying you before the product exists.

Methods (ranked by signal strength):

  1. Pre-sell — describe the product, ask for payment or commitment. A credit card is the strongest signal.
  2. Landing page — describe the value, measure email signups. Conversion rate matters more than volume.
  3. Manual delivery — do the thing by hand for 5-10 people. If they pay, the demand is real.
  4. Interviews — talk to 10+ potential users. But discount what people say they would do. Watch what they actually do.
  5. Survey — weakest signal. People say yes to everything in surveys.

Read the full file on GitHub · 65 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 5d ago First seen · 65 lines · 46 tokens per session scan A b6bcbd4101cc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

idea-validator is a skill published in the GitHub repository bjorn-ingmanson/thefroject-plugins (1 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 46 tokens to every session and 738 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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