positioning

A short, structured session that helps a startup decide how to describe and position itself. Positioning means choosing who the product is for, what category it belongs in, and how it should stand apart.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to choose a market approach, define customers to target and ignore, write a positioning statement, select a brand style, and plan evidence to gather over 90 days.
Why use it?
It removes the ambiguity of trying to appeal to everyone or making claims that cannot be checked. It turns those choices into a clear statement and a time-bound plan for proving it.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/gerstep/positioning-plugin/positioning
Any agent
npx skills add Gerstep/positioning-plugin --skill positioning
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Gerstep/positioning-plugin

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 116 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,052 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 $0.00116 $0.01052
Opus 5 $0.00058 $0.00526
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00210
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00105

Measured 2d ago against content hash ed3e8921a438, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

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 2d 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.

skills/positioning/SKILL.md · 87 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 87 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Positioning

A 15-minute forced-choice session that produces a positioning statement and the artifacts a startup needs to hold a position: message architecture, mind virus, compass, ignore list, worldview, archetype, and a 90-day proof plan.

Position or be positioned. If you don't pick a category, you will be assigned one. The market's default setting is disbelief, so competition has shifted from making claims to surviving verification. This skill forces the choices, then makes every claim either provable today or a dated bet.

Operating rules (read first)

Questions. If an interactive question tool is available (for example AskUserQuestion in Claude Code or Cowork), use it for every forced choice. Otherwise ask in plain text: one question at a time, numbered options, wait for the answer. Never stack questions in plain-text mode.

Forced choice. No "all of the above". Gut answers over polished answers — tell the user 30 seconds per question is enough. The pain of choosing is the exercise.

Time. The session targets 15 minutes total. Never block on research; never loop. Phase budgets are in the session script. If research has not returned by the statement phase, proceed without it and mark the pack "research pending".

Research. If a subagent tool is available, launch research in the background during setup. If only web search is available, run a few quick searches inline between phases. If there is no web access, skip research and say so in the output. Never invent competitors.

Files. All artifacts live in positioning/ under the current working directory (create it if needed). Never overwrite another founder's answers file.

Which moment is this?

If the user asked for a specific mode in plain words ("compile", "start over", "new session"), obey that. Otherwise check positioning/ in the current directory and route:

State Moment Script
No positioning/ dir, or no answers-*.md files First run — run the session references/session.md
One or more answers-*.md, no positioning.md Ask: run your own session, or compile the team's answers now? references/session.md or references/compile.md
positioning.md exists Offer: a new founder session, or recompile to update the pack references/session.md or references/compile.md

Read the full file on GitHub · 87 lines

Files

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.

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. 2d ago First seen · 87 lines · 116 tokens per session scan A ed3e8921a438

Subscribe to this mod's changes

positioning is a skill published in the GitHub repository Gerstep/positioning-plugin (108 stars, last pushed 26d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 116 tokens to every session and 1,052 once invoked, about $0.0006 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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