Solo Founder Anti-Patterns

Solo Founder Anti-Patterns is a skill for Claude Code from ericvtheg/solo-founder-toolkit. It costs 92 tokens per session (2,845 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A skill for spotting common strategic mistakes made by solo founders and indie hackers when building and growing a product.

In plain words
What is it for?
It supports product-idea checks, feature prioritization, MVP scope decisions, technology-choice reviews, and business-strategy discussions.
Why use it?
It helps identify wasted effort, over-engineering, weak product validation, and other choices that can slow a small business.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the solo-founder-toolkit plugin — 3 skills, 4 commands, 1 agent, 1 MCP server shipped together

Good fit It supports product-idea checks, feature prioritization, MVP scope decisions, technology-choice reviews, and business-strategy discussions.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ericvtheg/solo-founder-toolkit/solo-founder-anti-patterns
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 ericvtheg/solo-founder-toolkit --skill solo-founder-anti-patterns
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ericvtheg/solo-founder-toolkit

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install solo-founder-toolkit, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 3 skills, 4 commands, 1 agent, 1 MCP server.

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 Solo Founder Anti-Patterns

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericvtheg/solo-founder-toolkit/solo-founder-anti-patterns/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericvtheg/solo-founder-toolkit/solo-founder-anti-patterns)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericvtheg/solo-founder-toolkit/solo-founder-anti-patterns"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericvtheg/solo-founder-toolkit/solo-founder-anti-patterns/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 Solo Founder Anti-Patterns

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericvtheg/solo-founder-toolkit/solo-founder-anti-patterns"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericvtheg/solo-founder-toolkit/solo-founder-anti-patterns.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 92 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,845 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.
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 $0.00092 $0.02845
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.01422
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00569
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00284

Measured 11d ago against content hash ef63692e3c1f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Solo Founder Anti-Patterns 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 11d 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/solo-founder-toolkit/skills/solo-founder-anti-patterns/SKILL.md · 244 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 244 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Solo Founder Anti-Patterns

Identify and avoid common strategic mistakes that prevent solo founders and indie hackers from achieving profitability and sustainable growth.

Purpose

This skill helps solo founders recognize anti-patterns—commonly adopted solutions that appear logical but prove counterproductive for bootstrapped, single-person businesses. The focus is on operational and psychological risks that undermine the core goals of growing recurring revenue, expanding userbase, and maintaining lean operations.

When This Skill Applies

This skill is relevant when evaluating:

  • Product decisions: Should a feature be built? Is the idea validated?
  • Technical choices: Is the tech stack too complex? Is infrastructure over-engineered?
  • Business strategy: Is the market viable? Is the growth approach sustainable?
  • Resource allocation: Where should time and money be invested?

Particularly valuable during project inception, feature planning, and when experiencing burnout or slow growth despite high effort.

Core Anti-Patterns Framework

Product Ideation and Validation Anti-Patterns

The "Secret Building" Trap

Building in isolation without early feedback creates massive sunk-cost fallacy. The "Zuckerberg Delusion"—the belief that ideas are so unique they must be developed in total secrecy—prevents validation and wastes months or years on products nobody wants.

Counter-strategy: Build in Public (BIP). Share progress early and often. BIP serves as both marketing channel and validation mechanism, gathering real-time feedback while the product is still malleable.

The Free-User Validation Fallacy

Email sign-ups and waitlists do not demonstrate value. Free users prove willingness to use a zero-cost tool, not willingness to pay. The only true validation metric for bootstrapped founders is a customer taking out their credit card.

Counter-strategy: Test willingness to pay immediately. Even the most minimal viable product must solve the core problem and have pricing attached. Collect payment information upfront, even during beta periods.

Read the full file on GitHub · 244 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 11d ago First seen · 244 lines · 92 tokens per session scan A ef63692e3c1f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Solo Founder Anti-Patterns is a skill published in the GitHub repository ericvtheg/solo-founder-toolkit (8 stars, last pushed 7mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 92 tokens to every session and 2,845 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 2026-08-31.

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