startup-strategy

startup-strategy is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills. It costs 38 tokens per session (4,008 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to starting and growing a young company, from testing whether people need a product to finding customers, raising money, and building a team.

In plain words
What is it for?
Testing product ideas, measuring customer engagement, planning growth, preparing fundraising, and deciding how to build the company.
Why use it?
It helps founders make decisions while the business model is still uncertain. It focuses attention on useful evidence, customer needs, and common mistakes that can waste time or money.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Good fit Testing product ideas, measuring customer engagement, planning growth, preparing fundraising, and deciding how to build the company.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills/startup-strategy
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.

Any agent
npx skills add cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills --skill startup-strategy
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 startup-strategy

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills/startup-strategy/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills/startup-strategy)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills/startup-strategy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills/startup-strategy/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for startup-strategy

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills/startup-strategy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills/startup-strategy.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 38 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,008 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00038 $0.04008
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.02004
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00802
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00401

Measured 10d ago against content hash 78498d5e32d2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

startup-strategy 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 10d 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.

categories/business/startup-strategy/SKILL.md · 384 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 384 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Startup Strategy Skill

Core Principles

Startups are not smaller versions of big companies. They are temporary organizations designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. Until you find product-market fit, everything is an experiment. After you find it, everything is about execution and growth.

The Five Commandments of Startup Strategy

  1. Build something people want. This sounds obvious, yet most startups fail because they build something nobody needs. Everything else is secondary.

  2. Speed is your only advantage. Big companies have resources, brand, distribution, and talent. Your only edge is the ability to move faster, iterate, and learn.

  3. Measure what matters. Vanity metrics (page views, registered users) feel good but lie. Actionable metrics (retention, revenue, activation) tell the truth.

  4. Founder-market fit is non-negotiable. You must deeply understand the problem and the customer. Outsiders can't build what insiders can see.

  5. Fundraising is a means, not an end. Raising money is not a milestone. It's fuel. The destination is a sustainable, scalable business.

Startup Maturity Model

Stage Name Key Question Duration Risk
1 Idea Is this problem worth solving? 1-4 weeks Building the wrong thing
2 Validation Will anyone pay for this? 1-3 months False positives/negatives
3 Traction Can we acquire customers efficiently? 3-12 months Running out of runway
4 Growth Can we scale what's working? 12-24 months Breaking the product/team
5 Scale Can we build a lasting company? 2-5+ years Losing the culture

Critical insight: Each stage has a different playbook. Don't try to scale before you have traction. Don't optimize before you validate. Match your strategy to your maturity level.


Lean Methodology

Build-Measure-Learn Loop

The fundamental unit of progress in a startup is not features shipped — it is validated learning.

Read the full file on GitHub · 384 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. 10d ago First seen · 384 lines · 38 tokens per session scan A 78498d5e32d2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

startup-strategy is a skill published in the GitHub repository cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills (470 stars, last pushed 16d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 4,008 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 2026-08-30.

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