validate-market
Run an honest market-fit and viability audit of any project or idea and produce a decision doc, not code. Use when someone asks "is this viable as a business", "audit the market fit", "make the case and compare to competitors", "should I apply to YC or bootstrap", or wants to validate a project, product, or market before investing more time. Gathers verifiable traction data first, researches the competitive field, gets an independent cold read, writes a doc with pre-committed pass/middle/kill criteria and a concrete week-1 assignment, then hardens it with an adversarial review loop.
npx skills add tamdogood/builder-essential-skills --skill validate-market --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# 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 "t
- Posture (non-negotiable)
- Phase 0: Ground truth before opinion
- Phase 1: Problem and wedge
- Phase 2: Landscape research
- Phase 3: Premises
- Phase 4: Independent cold read
- Phase 5: Write the doc
- Rigor checklist for the pre-committed criteria
- Phase 6: Adversarial review loop
- Closing
What does the validate-market skill do?
Run an honest market-fit and viability audit of any project or idea and produce a decision doc, not code. Use when someone asks "is this viable as a business", "audit the market fit", "make the case and compare to competitors", "should I apply to YC or bootstrap", or wants to validate a project, product, or market before investing more time. Gathers verifiable traction data first, researches the competitive field, gets an independent cold read, writes a doc with pre-committed pass/middle/kill criteria and a concrete week-1 assignment, then hardens it with an adversarial review loop.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add tamdogood/builder-essential-skills --skill validate-market --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From tamdogood/builder-essential-skills, a repository with 90 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.