Startup Skill is a collection of agent skills for researching, evaluating, and planning startup ideas, including competitor analysis, market positioning, financial projections, and investor pitches. It is for founders and teams deciding whether an idea is worth pursuing and how to present or develop it. The catalogue contains four skills, two instructions, and one plugin from the project.
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.
npx skills add ferdinandobons/startup-skill --skill startup-competitorsgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ferdinandobons/startup-skillWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ferdinandobons/startup-skill/startup-competitors)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ferdinandobons/startup-skill/startup-competitors"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ferdinandobons/startup-skill/startup-competitors/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ferdinandobons/startup-skill/startup-competitors"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ferdinandobons/startup-skill/startup-competitors.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- Socket pass
- Snyk warn
- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00155 | $0.03570 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00062 | $0.01428 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00031 | $0.00714 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00015 | $0.00357 |
Grade A, and why
startup-competitors 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 1mo 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 269 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Startup Competitors
Deep competitive intelligence that goes beyond surface-level profiles. Produces actionable battle cards, pricing landscape analysis, and strategic vulnerability mapping using real web data.
How It Works
INTAKE → RESEARCH (3 sequential waves) → SYNTHESIS → BATTLE CARDS
The process is focused: understand the product, research competitors deeply across 3 dimensions, synthesize findings, and produce actionable output. Typical runtime: 15-25 minutes in Claude Code (parallel agents), 30-45 minutes in Claude.ai (sequential).
Language
Default output language is English. If the user writes in another language or explicitly requests one, use that language for all outputs instead.
Phase 0: Resume Check
Before anything else, check if a PROGRESS.md created by this skill exists in the working directory or a project subdirectory (the skill name field says startup-competitors). If it does, read it and resume from the last incomplete phase. Tell the user: "I found progress from a previous session. You completed [phases]. Picking up from [next phase]."
If no progress file exists — or the one found belongs to a different skill — start from Phase 1.
Phase 1: Intake
Short and focused — 1-2 rounds of questions, not an extended interview. The goal is just enough context to run targeted research.
Check for Prior startup-design Work
Before asking questions, check if a startup-design session has already been completed for this project. Look for these files in the working directory or subdirectories:
01-discovery/competitor-landscape.md— competitor profiles and analysis01-discovery/market-analysis.md— market size, trends, regulatory01-discovery/target-audience.md— customer personas, pain points00-intake/brief.md— product description and context
If these files exist, read them and use the data as a head start:
- Extract the product description, target market, and known competitors from the brief
- Use the competitor list from
competitor-landscape.mdas the starting point for deeper analysis (startup-design profiles 5-8 competitors at surface level — this skill goes much deeper on each) - Pull market size and trends from
market-analysis.mdto contextualize the competitive landscape - Use customer pain points from
target-audience.mdto focus the sentiment mining on what matters most
What ships with it
8 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.
- references/honesty-protocol.md 4.8 KB
- references/research-principles.md 2.8 KB
- references/research-scaling.md 4.3 KB
- references/research-synthesis.md 8.5 KB
- references/research-wave-1-profiles-pricing.md 6.8 KB
- references/research-wave-2-sentiment-mining.md 6.8 KB
- references/research-wave-3-gtm-signals.md 7.2 KB
- references/verification-agent.md 5.1 KB
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.
- 1mo ago First seen · 269 lines · 155 tokens per session scan A 79701a39ce42
startup-competitors is a skill published in the GitHub repository ferdinandobons/startup-skill (1,231 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 155 tokens to every session and 3,570 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.
Other skills, from other repositories
strategic-moat
Assess the defensibility of a product or company across 8 moat types, grounded in habit-forming product theory, the Fogg Behaviour Model, and aggregation theory. Trigger phrases: "moat analysis", "strategic moat", "defensibility assessment", "competitive moat", "how defensible is my product".
competitive-landscape
Conduct a comprehensive competitive landscape analysis including competitor profiling, value chain mapping, positioning maps, and whitespace identification. Trigger phrases: competitive analysis, competitor analysis, competitive landscape, market analysis, who are my competitors.
product-ecosystem
Analyze a product's value chain and ecosystem strategy using aggregation theory, identifying integration opportunities and portfolio coherence. Trigger phrases: "ecosystem strategy", "product ecosystem", "aggregation theory", "value chain analysis", "product portfolio strategy".
vrio-analysis
Conduct a VRIO (Value, Rarity, Imitability, Organization) analysis to assess competitive advantages of a product or company. Trigger phrases: vrio, vrio analysis, competitive advantage assessment, resource analysis.
pre-mortem
Pre-mortem risk analysis for product launches. Identifies Tigers (real risks), Paper Tigers (overblown concerns), and Elephants (unspoken worries) to improve launch readiness. Trigger phrases: "pre-mortem", "pre mortem", "launch readiness", "risk analysis", "what could go wrong".
verification
Verify the quality and completeness of any PM strategy artifact before sharing with stakeholders. Re-reads the document and validates against a structured checklist. Trigger phrases: "verify my strategy", "check my document", "quality check", "review before sharing", "is this ready to share".