Business Idea Filter (BIF)
A Claude Code skill suite that pressure-tests business ideas against your own founder profile
and criteria — not a generic rubric. You brain-dump an idea; it interviews you where needed, runs
an adversarial office-hours stress test, fans out competitor and SEO research, scores the idea
against a weighted rubric tuned to your ambition tier, and ends with the one thing that matters
most: the single riskiest assumption, and the cheapest experiment to test it this week.
Scope: BIF evaluates the business opportunity — demand, distribution, defensibility,
founder-market fit, economics, durability. It does not plan architecture, tech stack, or
implementation. If a session drifts into "how to build it," the advisor names the boundary and
redirects. Dev planning is a different tool.
Why it's different
The same idea is a great bet for one founder and a terrible one for another. BIF keeps your
rubric and ambition tier (VC / bootstrapped / services) in a persistent profile, and every
evaluation is scored against that. A bootstrapper sees "some competition is a green flag"; a VC
sees "crowded unless there's a sharp wedge." Same idea, honestly different verdicts.
Install
/plugin marketplace add njcameron/bif # or your fork's owner/repo
/plugin install business-idea-filter@bif
/reload-plugins
The skills
| Skill | Role |
|---|
profiling-founders | One-time onboarding interview → persistent founder profile (your rubric lives here). |
validating-ideas | The lead advisor. Orchestrates the whole evaluation and produces the verdict. |
researching-competitors | Web subagent: prior art, the feature/product/company verdict, white space. |
analyzing-seo-landscape | Routes to the claude-seo toolkit for keyword opportunity + content angle. |
The adversarial office-hours stress test runs as a phase inside validating-ideas.
First run
- Set up your profile — say "set up my idea board" or invoke
profiling-founders. It asks
five spoken-style questions (track record, constraints, goal, unfair advantages, ambition tier),
optionally ingests your website, and writes a profile you can hand-edit any time.
- Validate an idea — say "is this worth building: …" or invoke
validating-ideas, then
brain-dump. You'll get a tier-framed verdict, a per-lens scorecard, the riskiest assumption, and
a concrete experiment to run this week.
Where your data lives
Your founder profile and one folder per idea live under ~/idea-board by default. Set the
IDEA_BOARD_ROOT environment variable to put them elsewhere (e.g. inside an Obsidian vault):
export IDEA_BOARD_ROOT="$HOME/Obsidian/MyVault/idea-board"
Each idea is a folder, not a file: the synthesized dossier.md, a machine-readable
scorecard.json, your verbatim brain-dump, and a quarantined evidence/ tree of everything the
research stages captured — so a verdict stays auditable months later. This data is yours and is
never part of the plugin repo.
Optional dependencies
BIF works without these, degrading gracefully — but they make it better:
-
Firecrawl — for ingesting your website during onboarding. Connect a Firecrawl MCP server, or
set FIRECRAWL_API_KEY. (Claude Code's built-in WebFetch is used automatically if available, so
this is rarely needed.)
-
claude-seo — for live keyword/SERP data in the SEO lens. Install the agricidaniel-seo
marketplace and the claude-seo plugin. Without it, the SEO lens gives a qualitative read only.
If you'd rather make claude-seo a hard, auto-installed dependency, add it to
plugins/business-idea-filter/.claude-plugin/plugin.json under a dependencies array and
allowlist its marketplace in .claude-plugin/marketplace.json via
allowCrossMarketplaceDependenciesOn. It's left optional by default so BIF doesn't force a
DataForSEO setup on everyone.
Security model
Anything fetched from the web (competitor pages, your own marketing site) is treated as data,
never instructions — a page that says "ignore previous instructions" is quoted to you, not
obeyed. Research runs in subagents, isolated from anything that writes your profile.
Attribution
The office-hours stress-test phase is adapted from the office-hours skill in
gstack by Garry Tan, used under the MIT License. It is a
derivative: the gstack runtime plumbing and the promotional coda were removed, and it was refit to
run as a dossier-writing phase. See plugins/business-idea-filter/LICENSE for full notices.
License
MIT — see plugins/business-idea-filter/LICENSE.
