marketplace-fundamentals

marketplace-fundamentals is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from martineserios/thebrana. It costs 33 tokens per session (1,582 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of marketplace-fundamentals, MIT.

Guidance for building a marketplace, a service that connects buyers with sellers. It covers how to attract enough participants, maintain quality, and keep the business working as it grows.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to diagnose whether supply or demand is the main constraint, improve the value offered to one side, and choose focused growth tactics such as a narrow location or category.
Why use it?
Marketplaces can fail when there are too few buyers or sellers, or when participants bypass the service. This guidance helps identify and address those problems.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: installed under .agents/ (shared by several agents).

Good fit Use it to diagnose whether supply or demand is the main constraint, improve the value offered to one side, and choose focused growth tactics such as a narrow location or category.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/martineserios/thebrana/marketplace-fundamentals
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 martineserios/thebrana --skill marketplace-fundamentals
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/martineserios/thebrana

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 marketplace-fundamentals

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/martineserios/thebrana/marketplace-fundamentals/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/martineserios/thebrana/marketplace-fundamentals)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/martineserios/thebrana/marketplace-fundamentals"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/martineserios/thebrana/marketplace-fundamentals/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 marketplace-fundamentals

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/martineserios/thebrana/marketplace-fundamentals"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/martineserios/thebrana/marketplace-fundamentals.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 33 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,582 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 100% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00033 $0.01582
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00791
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00316
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00158

Measured 12d ago against content hash 061cefc70162, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

marketplace-fundamentals 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.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to marketplace-fundamentals — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

.agents/skills/marketplace-fundamentals/SKILL.md · 88 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 88 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Marketplace Fundamentals

Build, bootstrap, and scale a self-sustaining ecosystem of buyers and sellers.

Help the user with marketplace fundamentals using insights from 7 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.

How to Help

  1. Diagnose the stage - Identify if the user is in the bootstrapping, liquidity-seeking, or scaling phase of their marketplace.
  2. Pinpoint the hard side - Help the user determine which side of the market (supply or demand) is the primary constraint and needs focus.
  3. Evaluate the value proposition - Assess if the platform offers a 10x improvement in convenience, price, or variety compared to traditional alternatives.
  4. Select a growth strategy - Recommend specific tactics like single-player mode, geographic constraints, or category niches to build density.

Core Principles

Nail the Value Exchange First

Benjamin Lauzier: "If you don't have product market fit, and if you don't have a good enough growth strategy for at least one side of your marketplace, just forget about all this marketplace stuff. Focus on this core exchange of value, go deep with one side of the marketplace and see if you can rely on some crutch, some hack for the other side for time being."

Before focusing on complex economic ratios, ensure the core transaction provides enough value to both sides to sustain a growth strategy. Identify the most difficult side of the market to acquire and concentrate early resources there.

Build Standalone Value

Ramesh Johari: "The moral is a marketplace business never starts as a marketplace business, because what we think of as a marketplace business is something which at scale is removing the friction of the two sides finding each other. But when you start, you don't have that scale."

Marketplaces struggle at low scale, so you must offer a high friction utility problem that provides value before critical mass is reached. This helps bootstrap the network by giving users a reason to join without existing liquidity.

Read the full file on GitHub · 88 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. 12d ago First seen · 88 lines · 33 tokens per session scan A 061cefc70162

Subscribe to this mod's changes

marketplace-fundamentals is a skill published in the GitHub repository martineserios/thebrana (3 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 33 tokens to every session and 1,582 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to marketplace-fundamentals, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.