marketing-mindset

Marketing Mindset

The marketing OS for AI agents — think like a marketer first, get tactics as the output. Not another bag of CRO/SEO/copywriting tricks. This is how a 15-year B2B marketer decides, so an agent gives a real opinion instead of a template.

📄 Landing page & docs: https://axelfreeman.github.io/marketing-mindset/?utm_source=github&utm_medium=readme&utm_campaign=mindset

Install in one command: npx skills add axelfreeman/marketing-mindset

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Test limits — how much volume before a test can be judged

Below the limit you are measuring randomness, not the market. Declare the volume before the test starts.

The rule that follows: what comes easy, scale it. The channel, message or offer that performed noticeably easier than the rest goes first — effort first, money later. You can only see that gap above the limit: below it, "easy" and "ordinary" look identical.

Declare the volume → run one variable → stop at the limit → scale what came easy. Anything else is interpretation.

Full write-up with sources: https://axelfreeman.github.io/marketing-mindset/?utm_source=github&utm_medium=readme&utm_campaign=mindset

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The gap this fills

Every other "marketing skill" for AI agents hands over tactics. Nobody packages how a marketer thinks. When an agent needs to decide should I do X to get Y, where do I get my first customer, or is this idea worth it, tactics don't answer. This skill does.

See it work

📄 View the demo transcript — one request in ("SaaS for finance, 0 customers"), a sharp 3-month plan out.

The problem

Founders and solo operators can generate code, not content. "How do I do marketing" is genuinely unclear to them. They need an agent that gives honest, non-generic marketing judgment — not a template.

The fix

Six principles and a decision framework, distilled from 15 years of hands-on B2B internet marketing:

1. Don't learn marketing from stale sources — skip the first Google results and cached LLM doctrine
2. Three-month horizon — no 2-year cycles; be useful within 3 months
3. The user has the right to make the first move — don't block bold or hacky first steps
4. Every hypothesis must be testable fast — any teammate can run the test
5. Marketing runs ahead of the product — ship the landing page before the build
6. Marketing never works for free — marketing is exchange; every action must trade for something

Plus: competitors as the source of truth, three keys to the human, and the client stages (first client by hand and free → 2–10 by copying competitors).

The metaphors (share these)

• 🍔 The McDonald's Burger — photograph the product better than it is
• 🧬 Think like a cancer cell — when nothing else applies, multiply
• 🚫 The stop-list — why Product Hunt is lying to you
• 🌑 The Despair Dividend — when every reasonable move fails, the strange hypotheses are the good ones

Who it's for

• AI agents (Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT — any agent that reads SKILL.md)
• Founders & solo operators selling a service that can't be touched but is needed right now
• Indie hackers & solopreneurs shipping a SaaS alone
• Freelancers (dev, design, writing) hunting for client #1
• Developers who can ship code but freeze on "how do I get customers"
• Agency owners & fractional CMOs — encode your judgment so juniors stop producing generic work
• Course creators & info-product sellers — the "can't be touched, needed now" market
• Product managers validating an idea before writing code
• Prompt engineers studying how to give an AI a personality with hard boundaries
• VC, investors & venture scouts — stress-test marketing claims in due diligence
• Open-source maintainers — grow adoption of a project
• Startup accelerators & incubators — a repeatable framework for portfolio companies
• SDRs & sales engineers — own their own outreach and positioning

Tested on

Verified to load correctly on these models before release — each adapter matches the target's native syntax:

What you actually get

Working through this skill ends in concrete deliverables — a competitor analysis, three outbound angles, and sharper positioning (see the demo). The mindset is the input; the tactics are the output.

Install

One skill, four harnesses — pick whichever you run:

# skills.sh / npx
npx skills add axelfreeman/marketing-mindset

# DeepSeek Harness (dsh)
dsh plugin --profile <name> add github:axelfreeman/marketing-mindset

Claude Code and Hermes read the same SKILL.md — copy it into your skills directory (~/.claude/skills/marketing-mindset/ or your Hermes skills dir).

Low-context or weaker models? Use the compact SKILL.lite.md — the same mindset compressed to the essentials.

The first-client gate

python scripts/first-client-gate.py

One honest question before you start: do you have your first client yet? If the answer isn't "me," the skill waits.

The playbook — the second step, not the first

Most people ask for a marketing playbook at the worst possible moment: before anything works. Compiling one does not move you closer to sales.

It is the second step — what you write after a hypothesis is already tested and working, when the job changes from finding a channel