validate-market

validate-market is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from tamdogood/builder-essential-skills. It costs 129 tokens per session (2,633 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A written audit for deciding whether a project or idea can become a viable business. It examines customer demand, competitors—including existing workarounds—and possible openings.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to assess market fit, compare alternatives, decide whether to bootstrap or apply to an accelerator, and choose the next concrete validation step.
Why use it?
It helps prevent spending months building something people will not pay for. It separates real evidence, such as money or repeated use, from weak signals such as compliments or waitlists.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: allowed-tools in frontmatter, but also runs codex exec. Also seen: mentions subagents; names the AskUserQuestion tool; mentions Codex.

Good fit Use it to assess market fit, compare alternatives, decide whether to bootstrap or apply to an accelerator, and choose the next concrete validation step.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/tamdogood/builder-essential-skills/validate-market
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 tamdogood/builder-essential-skills --skill validate-market
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tamdogood/builder-essential-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 validate-market

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tamdogood/builder-essential-skills/validate-market/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tamdogood/builder-essential-skills/validate-market)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tamdogood/builder-essential-skills/validate-market"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tamdogood/builder-essential-skills/validate-market/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 validate-market

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tamdogood/builder-essential-skills/validate-market"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tamdogood/builder-essential-skills/validate-market.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 129 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,633 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Excessive Agency · line 176
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
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 $0.00129 $0.02633
Opus 5 $0.00064 $0.01316
Sonnet 5 $0.00026 $0.00527
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00263

Measured 11d ago against content hash a652d2044540, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

validate-market scanned grade A with 1 finding 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 11d 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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

- Live product: hit real endpoints (`curl` the landing page, any public directory or
skills/validate-market/SKILL.md · 193 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 193 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Validate a project / market

You are running a validation audit. The deliverable is one document that answers: is there a business here, who else is fighting for it, where are the openings, and what is the next concrete action. The audit exists to protect months of the founder's life, so honesty outranks encouragement everywhere.

Hard gate: no implementation. No code, no scaffolding, no renames, no site changes. The only output is the doc (plus its adversarial review). If the user asked for a doc in a specific place, put it there; otherwise default to docs/research/<slug>-market-viability-audit.md in a repo, or ./<slug>-market-viability-audit.md outside one.

Posture (non-negotiable)

  • Interest is not demand. Stars, waitlists, compliments, and "that's interesting" count for nothing. Behavior counts: money, panic when it breaks, unprompted return usage, someone building their workflow around it.
  • The status quo is competitor #1. The cheap workaround (copy-paste, a spreadsheet, a config file convention) beats every named startup in the competitor table. Always list it first and price what it costs the user today.
  • Take a position on everything. Never write "there are many ways to think about this" or "that could work". Say what will or won't work on the evidence you have, and name what evidence would change your mind.
  • Papercut vs bleeding wound. State plainly whether the pain is acute for a small population or mild for a large one, and which population is actually reachable.
  • Lead with the disconfirming evidence. The doc's first section after the verdict is the honest demand baseline, even (especially) when it is embarrassing.

Phase 0: Ground truth before opinion

Collect verifiable numbers before writing a single judgment. Do not skip this; it is what separates an audit from a vibe.

  • Repo: age, stars, forks, contributors (gh repo view <repo> --json stargazerCount,forkCount,createdAt,isPrivate).
  • Live product: hit real endpoints (curl the landing page, any public directory or stats API). Distinguish "deployed" from "used".
  • Any analytics, revenue, waitlist, install counts the user can show. Ask if not obvious.
  • Apply the bar: would anyone outside the project be upset if it disappeared tomorrow? Write the answer down. If it is "no", that fact dominates the whole doc and every recommendation must be downstream of fixing it.

Read the full file on GitHub · 193 lines

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. 11d ago First seen · 193 lines · 129 tokens per session scan A a652d2044540

Subscribe to this mod's changes

validate-market is a skill published in the GitHub repository tamdogood/builder-essential-skills (196 stars, last pushed 25d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 129 tokens to every session and 2,633 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

architecture-compass

Architectural thinking partner for an existing repository — scans the codebase, conducts a structured interview, agrees on current architectural state and recommended direction, and produces a shareable insights document. Scoped to one repository, module, or folder. Does not execute transformation — it orients. Use…

techygarg/lattice · 114 tokens

architecture-refiner

Facilitate a structured conversation to define architecture principles for a repository. Supports multiple architecture styles: clean architecture (default), hexagonal / ports & adapters, modular monolith, or custom. Produces a formal architecture document that the corresponding atom will use. Use when setting up a…

techygarg/lattice · 114 tokens

clean-code-refiner

Facilitate a structured conversation to define clean code principles for a repository. Produces a formal clean-code.md document that the clean-code atom will use as its override. Use when setting up coding standards, defining code quality rules, or when the user says 'setup clean code', 'define coding standards'…

techygarg/lattice · 84 tokens

ddd-refiner

Facilitate a structured conversation to define DDD guardrails for domain design within a repository. Produces a formal ddd-principles.md document that the domain-driven-design atom will use as its override. Use when setting up domain design principles, defining aggregate rules, or when the user says 'setup DDD'…

techygarg/lattice · 86 tokens

requirement-forge-refiner

Facilitate a structured conversation to define requirement standards for a project — epic and feature definitions, scenario structure, AC format, priority notation, status workflow, and naming conventions. Produces a formal requirement-standards.md that the requirement-quality atom reads via config resolution…

techygarg/lattice · 121 tokens

review-refiner

Facilitate a structured conversation to customize how the review molecule works -- atom loading rules, severity classification, report format, scope rules, insight capture, and health logging. Produces a formal review-standards.md document that the review molecule will use as its process configuration. Use when the…

techygarg/lattice · 92 tokens