hierarchy-of-marketplaces

hierarchy-of-marketplaces is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from wdavidturner/product-skills. It costs 92 tokens per session (1,131 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A framework for growing a two-sided marketplace, where different groups—such as buyers and sellers—need each other. It recommends focusing on a very small market, making both sides happy, reaching saturation, and expanding only afterward.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan marketplace launches, choose an initial niche, sequence supply and demand growth, and decide when to expand into nearby markets or categories.
Why use it?
It helps avoid spreading effort across too many markets before any one of them works well. It shifts attention from total transaction value, often called GMV, to whether users stay satisfied and return.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it to plan marketplace launches, choose an initial niche, sequence supply and demand growth, and decide when to expand into nearby markets or categories.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/wdavidturner/product-skills/hierarchy-of-marketplaces
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 wdavidturner/product-skills --skill hierarchy-of-marketplaces
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/wdavidturner/product-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 hierarchy-of-marketplaces

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wdavidturner/product-skills/hierarchy-of-marketplaces/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/wdavidturner/product-skills/hierarchy-of-marketplaces)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/wdavidturner/product-skills/hierarchy-of-marketplaces"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wdavidturner/product-skills/hierarchy-of-marketplaces/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 hierarchy-of-marketplaces

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/wdavidturner/product-skills/hierarchy-of-marketplaces"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wdavidturner/product-skills/hierarchy-of-marketplaces.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 92 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,131 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 $0.00092 $0.01131
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.00566
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00226
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00113

Measured 12d ago against content hash ad31c9408d01, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

hierarchy-of-marketplaces 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/hierarchy-of-marketplaces/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.

Hierarchy of Marketplaces

What It Is

The Hierarchy of Marketplaces is a framework for building defensible marketplace businesses. The core insight: GMV is a vanity metric. Happy GMV is what matters.

Most marketplace founders race to grow GMV as fast as possible, spreading resources thin across markets and categories. This is backwards. The path to a dominant, profitable marketplace requires working through three levels in sequence:

  1. Focus - Constrain your market to a "thimble" and achieve minimum viable happiness
  2. Tip - Reach saturation in your focused market until it tips in your favor
  3. Dominate - Only then expand to adjacent markets and categories

The key shift: Move from asking "How do we grow GMV?" to asking "How do we make both sides of our marketplace so happy they retain?"

Response Posture

  • Apply the framework directly to the user's marketplace.
  • Never mention the repository, skills, SKILL.md, patterns, or references.
  • Do not run tools or read files; answer from the framework.
  • Avoid process/meta commentary; respond as a marketplace operator.

When to Use It

Use the Hierarchy of Marketplaces when you need to:

  • Launch a new marketplace and decide where to focus
  • Diagnose why growth is stalling despite increasing GMV
  • Decide when to expand to new markets or categories
  • Evaluate marketplace health beyond top-line metrics
  • Compete against incumbents with more resources
  • Raise funding and demonstrate real marketplace value
  • Choose between depth and breadth in your growth strategy

When Not to Use It

  • You're building a product without two-sided network effects
  • You have unlimited capital and no competition (rare)
  • The market has no potential for winner-take-most dynamics
  • You're optimizing a mature, already-dominant marketplace

Patterns

Detailed examples showing how to apply the framework correctly. Each pattern shows a common mistake and the correct approach.

Critical (get these wrong and you've wasted your time)

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 · 92 tokens per session scan A ad31c9408d01

Subscribe to this mod's changes

hierarchy-of-marketplaces is a skill published in the GitHub repository wdavidturner/product-skills (20 stars, last pushed 7mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 92 tokens to every session and 1,131 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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