startup-positioning

startup-positioning is a skill for Claude Code from ferdinandobons/startup-skill. It costs 186 tokens per session (4,004 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured process for deciding how a startup should be understood and described in its market. It combines customer needs, competitors, and market categories into positioning documents and statements.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to research customers and competitors, map alternatives, define a market category, and write positioning statements for a startup.
Why use it?
It helps when a product sounds interchangeable with alternatives or when the team cannot clearly explain who it is for and why it is different.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions Claude Code.

Part of the startup plugin — 4 skills 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/ferdinandobons/startup-skill/startup-positioning
Any agent
npx skills add ferdinandobons/startup-skill --skill startup-positioning
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ferdinandobons/startup-skill

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install startup, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 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 startup-positioning

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ferdinandobons/startup-skill/startup-positioning.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ferdinandobons/startup-skill/startup-positioning)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ferdinandobons/startup-skill/startup-positioning"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ferdinandobons/startup-skill/startup-positioning.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 186 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,004 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 $0.00186 $0.04004
Opus 5 $0.00093 $0.02002
Sonnet 5 $0.00037 $0.00801
Haiku 4.5 $0.00019 $0.00400

Measured 6d ago against content hash a2eb3742688e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

startup-positioning 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.

startup-positioning/SKILL.md · 303 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 303 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Startup Positioning

Market positioning strategy that produces a complete positioning document, Moore + Neumeier positioning statements, competitive alternatives map, and market category analysis. Built on April Dunford's framework, enriched with JTBD discovery and stress-tested with Neumeier's Onliness Test.

How It Works

INTAKE → RESEARCH (2 sequential waves) → POSITIONING SYNTHESIS

The process: understand the product and its customers, research competitive alternatives and market context, then build positioning through Dunford's 5+1 components. Typical runtime: 10-15 minutes in Claude Code (parallel agents), 20-30 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-positioning). 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. The goal is enough context to research alternatives and build positioning.

Check for Prior Work

Before asking questions, check if prior sessions have been completed. Look for these files in the working directory or subdirectories:

From startup-design:

  • 00-intake/brief.md — product description and context
  • 01-discovery/competitor-landscape.md — competitor profiles
  • 01-discovery/target-audience.md — customer personas, pain points
  • 02-strategy/positioning.md — initial positioning work

From startup-competitors:

  • intake.md — product and market context
  • competitors-report.md — strategic competitive analysis
  • battle-cards/ — per-competitor profiles
  • pricing-landscape.md — pricing analysis

Read the full file on GitHub · 303 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 · 303 lines · 186 tokens per session scan A a2eb3742688e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

startup-positioning is a skill published in the GitHub repository ferdinandobons/startup-skill (888 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 186 tokens to every session and 4,004 once invoked, about $0.0009 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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