engineer-to-founder

engineer-to-founder is a skill for Claude Code from LeadMagic/gtm-skills. It costs 59 tokens per session (4,215 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for engineers moving into startup founder work, including customer interviews, positioning, demos, sales, hiring, and deciding whether to leave a job. It explains the shift from building software alone to running a company.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for customer discovery, explaining product value without listing features, improving founder-led sales, hiring an early team, and turning a side project into a company.
Why use it?
It helps technical founders handle the business and people responsibilities that coding skills do not cover. It reduces the risk of focusing only on the product while neglecting customers, sales, hiring, or company decisions.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: positional $N argument; mentions Claude Code; mentions Codex.

Part of the gtm-skills plugin — 196 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it for customer discovery, explaining product value without listing features, improving founder-led sales, hiring an early team, and turning a side project into a company.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/leadmagic/gtm-skills/engineer-to-founder
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 LeadMagic/gtm-skills --skill engineer-to-founder
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/LeadMagic/gtm-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install gtm-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 196 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 engineer-to-founder

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/leadmagic/gtm-skills/engineer-to-founder/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/leadmagic/gtm-skills/engineer-to-founder)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/leadmagic/gtm-skills/engineer-to-founder"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/leadmagic/gtm-skills/engineer-to-founder/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 engineer-to-founder

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/leadmagic/gtm-skills/engineer-to-founder"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/leadmagic/gtm-skills/engineer-to-founder.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 59 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,215 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00059 $0.04215
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.02107
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00843
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00421

Measured 5d ago against content hash d81d3d0fab10, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

engineer-to-founder 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 5d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/check-output.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/founder-led/engineer-to-founder/SKILL.md · 358 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 358 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Engineer to Founder

Overview

The best companies are built by engineers who became founders — Stripe, GitHub, Zapier, Notion, Figma, Vercel. But being a great engineer doesn't automatically make you a great founder. The transition from IC to CEO requires learning to sell, hire, fire, fundraise, and stare at existential risk without flinching. The mistake: thinking "I'll just build a great product and everything else will figure itself out." This skill covers the complete engineer-to-founder transition: when to quit your job, how to build and sell simultaneously, hiring when you've only ever coded alone, and the mental models that separate engineers who become successful founders from those who stay engineers with side projects.

When to Use

Trigger phrases: "engineer becoming founder", "technical founder", "IC to CEO", "developer starting a startup", "should I quit my job to start a company", "learning to sell as an engineer", "solo developer startup", "how to hire as a technical founder", "indie hacker to startup", "side project to company"

Authoritative Foundations

Patrick Collison (Stripe) — Speed as Strategy

"Move fast. If you're not embarrassed by your first version, you launched too late." Stripe's early advantage wasn't technology — it was speed of execution. They shipped faster than incumbents could respond.

Paul Graham — Maker's Schedule vs. Manager's Schedule

Engineers work in half-day blocks. Meetings destroy deep work. As you become a founder, you'll be pulled toward manager's schedule. Protect maker time ruthlessly. The best technical founders still code.

DHH (37signals/Basecamp) — Profitable From Day 1

"You don't need VC. You don't need to be a unicorn. Build something people pay for. Charge from day 1. Profitability is the ultimate moat."

Pieter Levels — Build in Public

"12 startups in 12 months. Most failed. A few made millions. The ones that worked? I built them in public, got feedback from day 0, and iterated fast."

Read the full file on GitHub · 358 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 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. 5d ago First seen · 358 lines · 59 tokens per session scan A d81d3d0fab10

Subscribe to this mod's changes

engineer-to-founder is a skill published in the GitHub repository LeadMagic/gtm-skills (48 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 59 tokens to every session and 4,215 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-09-03.

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