Startup Superpowers

Validate before you build. Local-first, file-based, founder-friendly.

A local-first idea-validation co-pilot for Claude Code. It guides founders through the messy early work of figuring out whether an idea has legs — competitors, market, hypotheses, interviews, surveys, and an MVP — and keeps every artifact as plain markdown in your project, yours to read, edit, commit, and share.

Plugin demo

🧭 What is Startup Superpowers?

A Claude Code plugin that turns idea-validation work into a conversation with a thoughtful co-founder — one that takes notes, runs research in the background, and never loses track of what you decided three weeks ago.

It is opinionated about evidence before commitment: discover competitors before sizing the market, write down hypotheses before doing interviews, run interviews before designing surveys, learn from real conversations before building an MVP.

Key features:

Seven skills, one workflow — /whats-next, /competitors, /market-research, /hypotheses, /interviews, /surveys, /mvp. Use them through a guided plan or à la carte.
All state on disk — every artifact is a markdown file under startup/ in your project. No accounts, no database, no SaaS lock-in.
Bias-isolated subagents — interview analysis, hypothesis assessment, and plan recommendations each run in their own subagent, so they reason on the files, not on your in-chat enthusiasm.
Evidence → next move — every hypothesis assessment yields the smallest observable next validation action, biased toward a real user-facing step instead of yet another research backlog.
Voice-first founder input — designed for thinking out loud. Dump unstructured thoughts; the agent organises them into structured artifacts.
Obsidian-friendly graph — all artefacts have frontmatters for filtering, and include links, e.g. hypotheses link to supporting interview statements via [[slug]]. Browse the evidence trail in any markdown editor.

🛠 Installation

It is recommended to have a new repository/folder per idea you want to explore — the idea can grow into an MVP, and the prototype's code will live naturally in that workspace. The plugin keeps its artifacts in the startup/ subdirectory once initialised.

Pick the instructions for your client:

Claude Code CLI

# 1. Add the marketplace (one-time, global)
/plugin marketplace add SergeiGorbatiuk/startup-superpowers

# 2. Create a workspace folder for your idea (in your shell)
! mkdir my-new-idea && cd my-new-idea

# 3. Install the plugin for this project (local scope recommended)
/plugin install startup-superpowers@startup-superpowers

# 4. Apply changes
/reload-plugins

# 5. Kick things off
/whats-next

On first run the agent will ask about your idea and set everything up. After that, /whats-next is your home base — run it any time you want to know where your project stands and what to focus on next.

Claude Desktop App

Only work in the Code tab of the app.

1. Add the marketplace (one-time):

Open the Code tab.
Click the "+" icon by the chat input → "Plugins" → "Manage Plugins".
Under "Personal Plugins" click "+" (Add plugin) → "Create Plugin" → "Add Marketplace".
In the URL field paste SergeiGorbatiuk/startup-superpowers, then click "Sync".

On certain app versions the interface does not clearly indicate success or failure of this step. To verify: click "+" under "Personal Plugins" again, then "Browse plugins". You should see startup-superpowers in the "Code" tab of the Directory window.

2. Create a workspace folder for your idea (in your shell, file manager, or however you usually do it):

mkdir my-new-idea
cd my-new-idea

Then open this folder in the Desktop app.

3. Install the plugin for this project:

In the Code tab, click the "+" icon by the chat input → "Plugins" → "Add plugin".
In the window that opens, navigate to the "Code" tab — you should find the "Startup superpowers" plugin there. If you can't find it, go back to step 1 and verify the marketplace installation.
Click the "+" to install globally, or click the card and choose "Install for this project" from the dropdown (recommended).