april-dunford-voice

april-dunford-voice is a skill for Claude Code from jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills. It costs 0 tokens per session (3,312 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing guide for positioning and sales content in an April Dunford-inspired consulting voice. Positioning explains who a product is for, what problem it solves, and why it is a better choice than alternatives.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to write positioning statements, differentiated-value arguments, sales pitches, and educational marketing content.
Why use it?
It helps turn vague product claims into clear, differentiated arguments. It also provides a repeatable structure for explaining positioning and sales pitches.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the voice-dna plugin — 34 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to write positioning statements, differentiated-value arguments, sales pitches, and educational marketing content.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/april-dunford-voice
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 jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills --skill april-dunford-voice
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install voice-dna, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 34 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 april-dunford-voice

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/april-dunford-voice/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/april-dunford-voice)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/april-dunford-voice"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/april-dunford-voice/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 april-dunford-voice

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/april-dunford-voice"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/april-dunford-voice.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,312 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. 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 $0.00000 $0.03312
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.01656
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00662
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00331

Measured 3d ago against content hash aaad90e7db4d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

april-dunford-voice 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 3d 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.

april-dunford-voice/SKILL.md · 172 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 172 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

April Dunford Voice DNA

April Dunford is the positioning authority for B2B software. Twenty-five years running marketing at startups, seven of them acquired, then a consulting practice built on one repeatable methodology. The voice is a working consultant explaining something for the fiftieth time and still finding it interesting: a war story with real numbers, a clean definition, a component list, and a warning about the thing everyone gets wrong. It is never inspirational and never vague. Ground every output in references/voice-corpus.md (verbatim excerpts) and references/source-map.md (sources and refresh notes).

Voice DNA

Cadence and rhythm

  • Conversational expository prose. Sentences run 12 to 25 words and vary a lot. She writes the way she talks on stage.
  • Structure is stable: hook or war story, then "here is what people get wrong", then the definition, then the components, then how to run it.
  • Section headers do a lot of the work. Each one is a claim in itself: "A Positioning Statement Can't Help You", "Status Quo Wins One Deal in Four".
  • She asks the reader's question out loud, then answers it. "So what is it, and more importantly, how do we DO it?"
  • Long-form is her native length. A blog post runs 900 to 2000 words. She does not compress into aphorisms.

Hook patterns

  1. The war story with a number - open on a specific past job. "I talked to 100 customers. 94 didn't even know they had it. 6 had transformed their business with it."
  2. The mistake call-out - "The most common positioning mistake I see startups make is..."
  3. The two-things-confused frame - name two ideas people conflate and separate them. Positioning vs strategy vs vision. Storytelling vs positioning.
  4. The heretical negative - state that a beloved artifact is useless. "I believe this exercise is not only pointless but potentially dangerous."
  5. The definition - give the clean one-sentence definition and then admit it sounds complex.
  6. The analogy from outside business - the opening scene of a movie, a specific film, a specific line of dialogue.

Read the full file on GitHub · 172 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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. 3d ago First seen · 172 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A aaad90e7db4d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

april-dunford-voice is a skill published in the GitHub repository jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills (6 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 3,312 tokens. 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 2026-09-09.

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