my-first-million-idea-engine

my-first-million-idea-engine is a skill for Claude Code from jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills. It costs 98 tokens per session (839 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A business-idea generator and evaluation guide inspired by the My First Million podcast. It looks for opportunities in overlooked businesses, changing markets, customer needs, and existing spending.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to brainstorm startups, find unusual or ordinary cash-flow businesses, study successful founders, score ideas, and create execution plans.
Why use it?
It helps turn vague inspiration into ideas that can be checked against real buyers, budgets, and business models. It also reduces the chance of pursuing ideas with no clear customer or path to revenue.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the strategy-thinking plugin — 6 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to brainstorm startups, find unusual or ordinary cash-flow businesses, study successful founders, score ideas, and create execution plans.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/my-first-million-idea-engine
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 my-first-million-idea-engine
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install strategy-thinking, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 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 my-first-million-idea-engine

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/my-first-million-idea-engine"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/my-first-million-idea-engine.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 98 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 839 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 $0.00098 $0.00839
Opus 5 $0.00049 $0.00419
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00168
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00084

Measured 12d ago against content hash 15c76b1572f2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

my-first-million-idea-engine 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 12d 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.

my-first-million-idea-engine/SKILL.md · 92 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 92 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

My First Million Idea Engine

Use this skill to brainstorm, score, and shape business ideas in the spirit of the My First Million podcast. Do not impersonate Sam Parr or Shaan Puri. Use the show as inspiration for a practical idea-generation operating system.

Read references/source-map.md when the user asks where the framework comes from, wants source grounding, or wants to update the skill from new MFM episodes.

Core Principle

Great business ideas often hide in plain sight: weird businesses, boring markets, changing technology, audience arbitrage, niche pain, regulatory shifts, underpriced distribution, and people already making money in ways most founders ignore.

Idea Lenses

Apply these lenses to any trend, audience, market, or asset:

  1. Follow the money - Who is already paying? How much? How often? What budget does it come from?
  2. Find the weird winner - What odd, unsexy, or overlooked business is already doing serious revenue?
  3. Copy the mechanism, not the business - Extract the growth loop, pricing model, distribution wedge, or audience insight.
  4. Look for platform change - AI, marketplaces, creator platforms, regulation, search, and payments create new openings.
  5. Shrink the scope - Make the first version small enough for a founder to test quickly.
  6. Score the operator fit - A good idea for the wrong operator is still a bad bet.
  7. Name the wedge - Identify the first customer, first channel, first offer, and first proof point.

Workflow

  1. Ask for the user's context: skills, audience, assets, budget, geography, time, and risk tolerance.
  2. Generate 10 to 20 raw ideas using the lenses above.
  3. Cluster ideas into themes: cash-flow, media, software, service, local, AI, marketplace, community, or acquisition.
  4. Score the top ideas.
  5. Pick 1 to 3 winners.
  6. Turn each winner into a one-page execution plan.

Scoring

Score each idea 1 to 5:

  • Pain or desire intensity
  • Ability to reach buyers
  • Speed to first dollar
  • Gross margin potential
  • Founder unfair advantage
  • Competition angle
  • Expansion potential
  • Simplicity of first version

Read the full file on GitHub · 92 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 12d ago First seen · 92 lines · 98 tokens per session scan A 15c76b1572f2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

my-first-million-idea-engine is a skill published in the GitHub repository jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills (6 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 98 tokens to every session and 839 once invoked, about $0.0005 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 2026-08-31.

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