saas-idea-validator

saas-idea-validator is a skill for Claude Code from cbrock84/headcount. It costs 93 tokens per session (979 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A framework for testing whether a software or startup idea solves a real problem and could become a viable business. It examines customers, alternatives, competition, pricing, protection from copying, and execution.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define the target customer, identify current workarounds, assess competitors and market access, consider monetization, and reach a go-or-stop verdict.
Why use it?
It exposes weak assumptions before time and money are spent building the product.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the executive plugin — 7 skills shipped together

About the project

headcount is an organization of independently installable Claude Code plugins, each grouping skills for a department such as finance, security, or demand generation. Claude Code users install the departments they need and invoke their skills for specialized work; the catalogue entries are skills and related agent tooling from that organization.

cbrock84/headcount · 1,247 stars · on GitHub · cbrock84.github.io

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/cbrock84/headcount/saas-idea-validator
Any agent
npx skills add cbrock84/headcount --skill saas-idea-validator
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cbrock84/headcount

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install executive, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills.

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 saas-idea-validator

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cbrock84/headcount/saas-idea-validator.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/cbrock84/headcount/saas-idea-validator)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cbrock84/headcount/saas-idea-validator"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cbrock84/headcount/saas-idea-validator.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 93 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 979 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 $0.00093 $0.00979
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.00490
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00196
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00098

Measured 6d ago against content hash 051ffcc723f9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

saas-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 6d 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.

plugins/executive/skills/saas-idea-validator/SKILL.md · 90 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 90 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

SaaS idea validator

Most ideas fail for reasons visible before any code is written. Finding them costs an hour; not finding them costs a year.

Interrogate in this order

Problem. Who has it, how often, and what does it cost them today? An idea survives this only if you can name a specific person and what they currently do instead. "Businesses struggle with X" is not a problem statement — it is a category.

The strongest signal is a workaround: someone has built a spreadsheet, hired a contractor, or strung tools together to survive this. Paid workarounds are validated demand.

Market. Who exactly, and how many, and can you reach them? A large market you cannot address cheaply is smaller than a narrow one you can. Ask specifically: where do these people already gather, and what would it cost to reach a hundred of them this month?

Competition. Established competitors are usually good news — they prove budget exists. The dangerous answers are "nobody is doing this" (usually because it does not work or nobody pays) and "everybody is doing this" with no differentiation.

Name the actual alternative, including doing nothing and using a spreadsheet, which win far more often than competitors do.

Monetization. Who pays, how much, and out of which budget? Products die between "useful" and "someone has a line item for it." If the buyer and the user are different people, that is a different and harder business.

Defensibility. What stops a competitor copying this in a quarter? Features are not a moat. Data, switching costs, network effects, distribution, and regulatory position are.

Execution. Can this team build and sell it? Distribution is more often the binding constraint than engineering, and it is more often the one nobody has thought about.

The verdict

Give one. "It depends" is an evasion.

  • Pursue — what to validate first, and the cheapest test.
  • Pursue if — the specific condition that must hold, and how to check it.
  • Reframe — the adjacent idea that is stronger, and why.
  • Do not pursue — the reason, stated once, without softening.

Read the full file on GitHub · 90 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. 6d ago First seen · 90 lines · 93 tokens per session scan A 051ffcc723f9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

saas-idea-validator is a skill published in the GitHub repository cbrock84/headcount (1,247 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 93 tokens to every session and 979 once invoked, about $0.0005 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 2026-08-30.

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