yc-early-pmf

yc-early-pmf is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from questflowai/investorskills. It costs 38 tokens per session (434 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An early-stage startup evaluation method based on Y Combinator principles, including talking to users, finding product-market fit, learning quickly, and spending carefully. Product-market fit means that a specific group of users clearly wants and keeps using the product.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for pre-seed and seed diligence, product-market-fit reviews, early startup advice, and judging whether a company is financially sustainable without new funding.
Why use it?
It helps distinguish genuine user demand from assumptions and exposes startups that are scaling before their product works. It also checks runway, meaning how long the company can keep operating with its available cash.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it for pre-seed and seed diligence, product-market-fit reviews, early startup advice, and judging whether a company is financially sustainable without new funding.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/questflowai/investorskills/yc-early-pmf
About the project

Investor Skills is an open-source library that organizes investing judgment—such as evaluating opportunities, managing risk, and acting under uncertainty—into structured, reusable instructions for people and AI finance agents. It is designed for studying and applying investment approaches, including inside Questflow and other agent tools. The catalogue includes portable skill packages from the library.

questflowai/investorskills · 1,849 stars · on GitHub · questflow.ai

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 questflowai/investorskills --skill yc-early-pmf
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/questflowai/investorskills

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 yc-early-pmf

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/questflowai/investorskills/yc-early-pmf/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/questflowai/investorskills/yc-early-pmf)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/questflowai/investorskills/yc-early-pmf"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/questflowai/investorskills/yc-early-pmf/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 yc-early-pmf

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/questflowai/investorskills/yc-early-pmf"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/questflowai/investorskills/yc-early-pmf.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 38 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 434 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 $0.00038 $0.00434
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.00217
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00087
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00043

Measured 9d ago against content hash f1c739b701c6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

yc-early-pmf 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 9d 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/yc-early-pmf/SKILL.md · 75 lines

What it actually says

YC Early PMF

Use this skill to apply Y Combinator-style judgment.

When To Use

Use this skill when the user asks for:

  • pre-seed/seed diligence
  • PMF diagnosis
  • early startup advice
  • YC-style company review
  • default alive vs default dead

Trigger phrases include YC, Y Combinator, Paul Graham, PMF, default alive, make something people want, talk to users.

Do Not Use When

  • Another investor skill fits the setup better.
  • Critical primary evidence is unavailable.
  • The user wants guaranteed returns or unbounded risk.
  • The request is generic chatter with no decision.

Inputs Needed

  • Company, startup, token, report target, or market context
  • Primary documents, product data, user/revenue evidence, or research materials
  • Time horizon, capital structure, and risk constraints
  • Valuation or round pricing if sizing/commitment is requested

Process

  1. Check whether users truly want the product.
  2. Assess founder speed of learning and shipping.
  3. Review burn, runway, and default-alive status.
  4. Reject companies scaling process before PMF.

Output Format

# YC Early PMF View: [Subject]

## Verdict
Promising Seed / Needs Users / Premature Scale / Default Dead / Pass

## Thesis

## Evidence

## Risks

## Action Plan

## Invalidation

## Missing Data

Guardrails

  • Do not force conviction without evidence.
  • Do not ignore incentives, structure, or liquidity/risk constraints.
  • Separate facts, assumptions, and judgment.
  • Do not present this as financial advice.

Questflow Use

In Questflow, this skill is best used as a specialized judgment module for research workflows, Fund theses, diligence, monitoring, and decision support.

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. 9d ago First seen · 75 lines · 38 tokens per session scan A f1c739b701c6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

yc-early-pmf is a skill published in the GitHub repository questflowai/investorskills (1,849 stars, last pushed 20d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 434 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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