build-options

founder-skills

Claude Code skills for founders and builders: validate whether a market is real, decide what to build, then spec and plan it — with cited research, an auditable decision matrix, and an implementation-ready PRD → task plan.

This repo is a Claude Code plugin marketplace hosting installable plugins, one per skill.

Install

/plugin marketplace add craigm26/founder-skills
/plugin install market-validation@founder-skills
/plugin install build-options@founder-skills
/plugin install prd@founder-skills
/plugin install tasks@founder-skills

Install any subset, or all for the full validate → build → spec → plan chain. Then just talk to Claude Code naturally — the skills activate on intent.

The chain

market-validation  →  build-options  →  prd  →  tasks  →  build
   (is it real?)       (what to build)   (spec)  (plan)   (execute)

Plugins

Plugin	What it does	Triggers
market-validation	Multi-angle web research with live-URL verification → cited evidence pack → Tufte HTML deck + PDF/PPTX → a build/integrate brief + workflow-atlas market map.	"is there a market for X", "validate demand for", "should I build X"
build-options	Divergent options → independent judge-panel weighted decision matrix → adversarial stress-test → a recommended build with kill criteria → Tufte matrix → hands to prd.	"what should I build", "what are my build options"
prd	Self-clarify the open questions, then generate a clear, actionable, implementation-ready Product Requirements Document.	"create a prd", "write prd for", "spec out"
tasks	Convert a PRD markdown file into a prd.json task plan — granular, machine-verifiable sub-tasks with acceptance criteria.	"convert prd", "create tasks", "prd to json"

Worked example

market-validation and build-options ship a worked example built around a fictional product, ShiftMate (a shift-swap marketplace for hourly workers), validated against the real, public shift-scheduling market. It's illustrative — see each plugin's references/example-shiftmate/.

Develop / test

Each plugin is self-contained. The two that ship tests:

cd plugins/market-validation && python3 -m pytest -q tests/
cd plugins/build-options     && python3 -m pytest -q tests/

Adding a new skill to this marketplace

Fastest — use the helper (scaffolds the plugin, registers it in this marketplace and the RobotRegistryFoundation cross-list, symlinks it into ~/.claude/skills/, and validates):

# import an existing skill from ~/.claude/skills/<name>, or scaffold a stub:
scripts/add-skill.sh <name> --desc "one-line description with triggers"
# other options: --from <dir>   --category <cat>   --no-cross-list

It prints the git commit && push commands to run for each repo (it never pushes for you). Re-running for an existing name is a no-op.

Manual equivalent:

1. Create plugins/<name>/ with SKILL.md at its root (plus optional assets/, references/, tests/).
2. Add plugins/<name>/.claude-plugin/plugin.json (name, version, description, author, homepage, license: MIT).
3. Add an entry to .claude-plugin/marketplace.json with "source": "./plugins/<name>".
4. Validate: claude plugin validate plugins/<name> --strict && claude plugin validate .
5. Commit + push. Installers update with /plugin marketplace update founder-skills.

License

MIT © 2026 Craig Merry. See LICENSE.