7-powers

7-powers is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills. It costs 233 tokens per session (2,631 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A business-strategy framework that names seven conditions that can give a company a lasting advantage over competitors. These include scale benefits, network effects, switching costs, branding, scarce resources, and distinctive processes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to assess a company's competitive position, examine claims about network effects or data advantages, compare competitors, or develop an investment thesis.
Why use it?
It helps separate a durable economic advantage from a vague claim that a company has a moat or strong brand. The framework tests whether the advantage creates customer value and is difficult to copy.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to assess a company's competitive position, examine claims about network effects or data advantages, compare competitors, or develop an investment thesis.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/7-powers
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 marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills --skill 7-powers
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 7-powers

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/7-powers/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/7-powers)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/7-powers"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/7-powers/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 7-powers

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/7-powers"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/7-powers.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 233 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,631 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 $0.00233 $0.02631
Opus 5 $0.00117 $0.01316
Sonnet 5 $0.00047 $0.00526
Haiku 4.5 $0.00023 $0.00263

Measured 12d ago against content hash aa62ef72e34d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

7-powers 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.

skills/7-powers/SKILL.md · 102 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 102 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

7 Powers

Hamilton Helmer's taxonomic framework for competitive advantage — distilled from the 2016 book 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy (Deep Strategy LLC) plus a decade of Helmer's post-book work at Strategy Capital, his co-research with Chenyi Shi on "Second Invention" and platform businesses, and ~8 podcast appearances (Acquired 2020 + 2022 + 2023, Invest Like the Best, 20VC, NFX, Venrock, Lenny's Podcast 2024).

This skill helps you think like Helmer, not just list the seven Powers. It's rigorous because Helmer is rigorous: Power is a strictly defined economic condition — Benefit + Barrier, tested against the 3 S's, expressed in cash flow — not a marketing metaphor. Applying the taxonomy loosely produces the exact confusion Helmer built the book to correct.

When this skill activates

Use this skill when the user is:

  • Analyzing whether a specific company has a real, durable moat (or which of the seven they have).
  • Stress-testing a founder's "we have network effects / data moat / brand" claim.
  • Doing a competitor teardown or investment thesis where the question is durability of returns.
  • Deciding which Power a business should aim to build given its stage (Origination / Takeoff / Stability).
  • Critiquing a strategy doc that gestures at "competitive advantage" without naming a specific mechanism.
  • Reading a business through Helmer's lens after a Rumelt-style diagnosis or a Martin-style cascade has surfaced "how do we win?"
  • Comparing two businesses on Power intensity rather than growth or revenue.

Do NOT use this skill when:

  • The user is pre-product/market-fit and still searching. Helmer is explicit that invention drives Power, but "planning rarely creates Power" — pre-PMF founders should be finding a market first. Suggest lean discovery / Rumelt's crux-finding instead.
  • The question is purely operational (throughput, hiring, ops excellence). Helmer specifically distinguishes operational excellence from Process Power — operational questions don't need the 7 Powers.
  • The user just wants a summary of the book. Give the book link (https://www.amazon.com/7-Powers-Foundations-Business-Strategy/dp/0998116319) and don't run the taxonomy.
  • The user wants brand/marketing strategy in general — Helmer's Brand Power is a narrow, durable willingness-to-pay premium, not general brand strategy.

Read the full file on GitHub · 102 lines

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 · 102 lines · 233 tokens per session scan A aa62ef72e34d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

7-powers is a skill published in the GitHub repository marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills (1 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 233 tokens to every session and 2,631 once invoked, about $0.0012 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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