founder-sales

founder-sales is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from RefoundAI/lenny-skills. It costs 34 tokens per session (1,319 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to founder-led sales: selling a new product personally so early customers can build trust and provide feedback.

In plain words
What is it for?
Assessing sales readiness, improving the product pitch, designing an early sales process, and handling common personal barriers to selling.
Why use it?
It helps founders move from building the product to finding customers and learning whether the product meets a real need.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Good fit Assessing sales readiness, improving the product pitch, designing an early sales process, and handling common personal barriers to selling.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/founder-sales
About the project

Lenny Skills is a collection of product-management and engineering workflows for Claude Code and other AI agents, covering areas such as strategy, research, planning, shipping, growth, and hiring. Each skill gives an agent specialized guidance, frameworks, checklists, or templates for product work, and the catalogue contains many of these skills.

RefoundAI/lenny-skills · 1,321 stars · on GitHub

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 RefoundAI/lenny-skills --skill founder-sales
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/RefoundAI/lenny-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 founder-sales

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/founder-sales"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/founder-sales.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 34 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,319 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
  • Socket pass 18 Mar 2026
  • Snyk pass 15 Feb 2026
  • 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 $0.00034 $0.01319
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.00660
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00264
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00132

Measured 12d ago against content hash 4fc187502a3b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

founder-sales 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/founder-sales/SKILL.md · 82 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 82 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Founder-Led Sales

Master the art of personally selling your product to build trust and find product-market fit.

Help the user with founder-led sales using insights from 6 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.

How to Help

  1. Assess Readiness - Determine if you have enough product validation to start direct selling or if you are hiring a salesperson too early.
  2. Refine the Pitch - Help draft and iterate on the founder-led narrative and value proposition based on subject matter expertise.
  3. Sales Motion Design - Design a high-volume discovery and closing process tailored for early-stage feedback loops.
  4. Overcome Psychological Barriers - Address common hurdles like the fear of asking for money or managing introversion in a sales context.

Core Principles

Leverage Founder Status

Jen Abel: "And founder led sales is really, really, really important because in the very, very, very early days, when there is no brand equity, when there is no marketing engine running, when there is limited to no reference ability, the founder is the product, right? Because the product is still, could be abstract, could be an MVP or in it's really early formation. So the founder is the product."

Use your unique subject matter expertise and novel vision as the primary driver for sales because early products cannot yet sell themselves on features alone.

Treat Sales as a Discipline

Pete Kazanjy: "The thing that I just like to encourage founders and product managers and what have you is just don't be afraid of sales. There's a lot of people out there who would love to tell you a story that it's magical or like, "Oh, you've got to be a born seller," things like that and it's really not."

View sales as a learnable, operational discipline consisting of measurable behaviors rather than an innate talent or magical gift.

Make the Direct Financial Ask

Jason M Lemkin: "Work up your courage, and find how to ask for next steps and money. What would it take, Lenny? How can we get going on Riverside? What would it take?"

Read the full file on GitHub · 82 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 · 82 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A 4fc187502a3b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

founder-sales is a skill published in the GitHub repository RefoundAI/lenny-skills (1,321 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 1,319 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 2026-08-30.

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