idea-stage

idea-stage is a skill for Claude Code from heyparsadev/claude-idea-validator. It costs 228 tokens per session (2,575 once invoked), scanned C, original, MIT.

A startup-idea validation guide for testing whether a problem is real and worth solving before building a product.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps formulate testable hypotheses, assess markets and competitors, plan customer interviews, and decide whether to continue, change, or abandon an idea.
Why use it?
It helps prevent teams from building based on assumptions or AI-generated confirmation instead of evidence from real people.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the founder-playbook plugin — 2 skills, 3 commands, 1 agent shipped together

Good fit It helps formulate testable hypotheses, assess markets and competitors, plan customer interviews, and decide whether to continue, change, or abandon an idea.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/heyparsadev/claude-idea-validator/idea-stage
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 heyparsadev/claude-idea-validator --skill idea-stage
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/heyparsadev/claude-idea-validator

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install founder-playbook, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 2 skills, 3 commands, 1 agent.

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 idea-stage

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/heyparsadev/claude-idea-validator/idea-stage/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/heyparsadev/claude-idea-validator/idea-stage)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/heyparsadev/claude-idea-validator/idea-stage"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/heyparsadev/claude-idea-validator/idea-stage/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 idea-stage

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/heyparsadev/claude-idea-validator/idea-stage"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/heyparsadev/claude-idea-validator/idea-stage.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 228 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,575 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan C 1 finding. 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 $0.00228 $0.02575
Opus 5 $0.00114 $0.01288
Sonnet 5 $0.00046 $0.00515
Haiku 4.5 $0.00023 $0.00258

Measured 9d ago against content hash 9224ee29b66f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade C, and why

idea-stage scanned grade C with 1 finding 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 9d 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.

Hidden instructionshighPrompt injection

Directives inside HTML comments, invisible characters or bidirectional overrides are read by the model and not by the person reviewing the file.

description: This skill should be used when a founder wants to validate, pressure-test, or kill a startup/product idea before building it — sharpening a hunch into a testable hypothesis, red-teaming it, sizing the market
founder-playbook/skills/idea-stage/SKILL.md · 120 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 120 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Idea Stage — validate before you build

Implements Chapter 3 of The Founder's Playbook: Building an AI-Native Startup (Anthropic, 2026).

The entire stage answers one question: is this worth building? It ends at problem–solution fit — qualitative evidence, primarily from real human conversations, that a real problem exists for real people and that the proposed solution addresses the problem discovery revealed, not the one originally assumed.

The book's core warning drives every rule below: agentic coding collapsed the distance between "I have an idea" and "I have a product," and AI research gave confirmation bias an engine. 42% of startups failed by building something nobody wanted — before AI made building nearly free. This skill exists to keep sense-making ahead of building.

Prime directives — never violate these

  1. Evidence is graded; grade D never passes a gate. Every claim entering the workspace gets a grade (A/B/C/D) and a source. See references/evidence-ledger.md. An exit criterion answered only by AI reasoning is not answered.
  2. Never invent a user, a quote, an interview, or a number. Simulated personas may be used to rehearse interviews; they are labelled [SIMULATED], graded D, and can never satisfy a gate. If a figure cannot be sourced, write no data found.
  3. A prototype is a conversation prop, never evidence. Its existence proves nothing about demand. Reactions from real humans holding it are the evidence.
  4. Disconfirming evidence gets equal airtime. Every research step must produce both the case for and the case against, and the case against is written first.
  5. No production code in this stage. The only build allowed is the single-interaction throwaway prototype at step 9. If the founder wants to start building sooner, say so plainly and point at the gate.
  6. Kill criteria are written before research starts, not after (step 0). Falsifiability first, or the whole exercise becomes theater.

Language

Read the full file on GitHub · 120 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 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. 9d ago First seen · 120 lines · 228 tokens per session scan C 9224ee29b66f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

idea-stage is a skill published in the GitHub repository heyparsadev/claude-idea-validator (2 stars, last pushed 28d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 228 tokens to every session and 2,575 once invoked, about $0.0011 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it C with 1 finding (hidden instructions). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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