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-positioninggit 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-positioning)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ferdinandobons/startup-skill/startup-positioning"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ferdinandobons/startup-skill/startup-positioning/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-positioning"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ferdinandobons/startup-skill/startup-positioning.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 | $0.00186 | $0.04004 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00074 | $0.01602 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00037 | $0.00801 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00019 | $0.00400 |
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 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 — 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 context01-discovery/competitor-landscape.md— competitor profiles01-discovery/target-audience.md— customer personas, pain points02-strategy/positioning.md— initial positioning work
From startup-competitors:
intake.md— product and market contextcompetitors-report.md— strategic competitive analysisbattle-cards/— per-competitor profilespricing-landscape.md— pricing analysis
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/frameworks.md 7.8 KB
- references/honesty-protocol.md 5.0 KB
- references/research-principles.md 3.4 KB
- references/research-scaling.md 3.8 KB
- references/research-synthesis.md 16 KB
- references/research-wave-1-alternatives.md 7.0 KB
- references/research-wave-2-market-frame.md 8.0 KB
- references/verification-agent.md 5.4 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 · 303 lines · 186 tokens per session scan A a2eb3742688e
startup-positioning is a skill published in the GitHub repository ferdinandobons/startup-skill (1,231 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 186 tokens to every session and 4,004 once invoked, about $0.0007 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".