market-research

market-research is a skill for Claude Code from whawkinsiv/solo-founder-skills. It costs 50 tokens per session (2,604 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A market and competitor research guide for testing a business idea and estimating how much opportunity it may have.

In plain words
What is it for?
Sizing TAM, SAM, and SOM—the total, reachable, and realistically targetable parts of a market—analyzing competitors, validating demand, and estimating revenue from the bottom up.
Why use it?
It helps replace guesses with evidence about customer demand, competitors, market size, and potential revenue before you build.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: positional $N argument; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the solo-founder-skills plugin — 54 skills, 1 command shipped together

Good fit Sizing TAM, SAM, and SOM—the total, reachable, and realistically targetable parts of a market—analyzing competitors, validating demand, and estimating revenue from the bottom up.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/whawkinsiv/solo-founder-skills/market-research
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 whawkinsiv/solo-founder-skills --skill market-research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/whawkinsiv/solo-founder-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install solo-founder-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 54 skills, 1 command.

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 market-research

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/whawkinsiv/solo-founder-skills/market-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/whawkinsiv/solo-founder-skills/market-research.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 50 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,604 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 $0.00050 $0.02604
Opus 5 $0.00025 $0.01302
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00521
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00260

Measured 12d ago against content hash 0fd38ef40ba8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

market-research 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/market-research/SKILL.md · 270 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 270 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Market Research & Competitive Analysis

Markets matter more than ideas. This skill helps you evaluate whether your market is worth entering — and how to validate demand before you build.

Core Principles

  • A mediocre product in a great market beats a brilliant product in a dead one.
  • All market sizing is wrong. The goal is order-of-magnitude clarity, not decimal precision.
  • Competitors are evidence that demand exists. Zero competitors is a warning sign, not an advantage.
  • The best solo-founder markets have high pain, fragmented incumbents, and willingness to pay — not the biggest TAM.
  • Research is only useful if it changes a decision. Every analysis should end with a clear recommendation.

Early Validation: Before You Build Anything

Finding Your First 10 People to Talk To

Before doing market sizing, validate that real people have this problem.

Method 1: Cold Outreach (Fastest — 1-2 weeks)

  • LinkedIn: Search for your ICP's job title → send connection request with a note
  • Twitter/X: Search hashtags related to the problem → DM active posters
  • Reddit: Find niche subreddits → comment helpfully → DM engaged users
  • Email: Find company websites of target customers → reach out to founders/decision-makers

Cold outreach template:

Subject: Quick question about [problem area]

Hi [Name],

I'm researching how [ICP role] handles [specific problem]. I noticed you [signal that they have this problem — e.g., posted about it, work in relevant role, use a competing tool].

Would you be open to a 15-minute call this week? I'm not selling anything — just trying to understand the problem better before I build a solution.

Happy to share what I learn from the research as a thank you.

[Your name]

Method 2: Communities (Higher quality — 2-4 weeks)

  • Indie Hackers: Search for threads where your ICP discusses the problem
  • Facebook Groups: Search for niche groups (e.g., "Freelance Copywriters", "SaaS Founders")
  • Slack communities: Industry-specific channels, FounderPath, etc.
  • Discord: More engaged than most channels for technical audiences

Read the full file on GitHub · 270 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 · 270 lines · 50 tokens per session scan A 0fd38ef40ba8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

market-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository whawkinsiv/solo-founder-skills (243 stars, last pushed 16d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 50 tokens to every session and 2,604 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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