founder-board

The Founder skill

Eleven Claude skills that test a business before you launch it. Free, MIT, no signup, no API key, nothing to connect.

skills/founder-board skills/founder-marketing skills/founder-cfo skills/founder-consumer skills/founder-launch skills/founder-pricing skills/founder-offer skills/founder-competitors skills/founder-brand skills/founder-ops skills/founder-plan

One of them is your board of directors, trained on the frameworks of Alex Hormozi, Peter Thiel and Steve Jobs. One is your marketing director. One is your CFO and finds your real profit margins. And one is the consumer panel: it spins up 100 buyer agents trained on your target customer and runs your business through 100 buyer scenarios.

So you know how to launch, how to market and how to actually make money, before you spend thousands of dollars finding out the hard way.

Install

Paste this repo link into Claude and say install skill:

https://github.com/Jakeschincariol/founder-skill

install skill

Or as a plugin, in Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add Jakeschincariol/founder-skill
/plugin install founder-skill@founder-skill

Claude Code namespaces plugin skills, so installed as a plugin they show up as /founder-skill:founder-board and so on. Copy the folders instead if you want plain /founder-board:

git clone https://github.com/Jakeschincariol/founder-skill.git
cp -r founder-skill/skills/founder-* ~/.claude/skills/

Project-local instead of global: copy the same folders into your repo's .claude/skills/. No Claude Code at all? Paste any single SKILL.md at the top of a chat and it runs as a mode. You lose the sub-agents and the Python tools, but the method works.

The tools need Python 3.8 or newer. Nothing to pip install.

The eleven

How to use it

Run them in this order. Each one reads what the others wrote, in a founder/ folder in your project.

board -> competitors -> consumer -> pricing -> offer -> cfo -> marketing -> brand -> ops -> launch -> plan

An example: a matcha café in Toronto, iced matcha lattes at $6.50 a cup. (Every input is in the example files in this repo, so you can run the tools on it.)

1. /founder-board writes founder/idea.md from what you told it and puts it in front of three board members. Each scores it, lists the risks and votes: fund, fund if, or pass. The conditions become a checklist for the rest.
2. /founder-competitors maps the matcha bars and coffee shops within walking distance, what they charge for a latte and what their reviews complain about.
3. /founder-consumer builds the target customer (urban professionals, 24 to 38, who buy coffee most days), deals 100 buyer cards across income, habits and objections, and runs one sub-agent per buyer. Back comes who buys, who passes, the reasons in their words ("my coffee place is closer", "$6.50 is steep for a drink") and what would flip a no.
4. /founder-pricing reads the panel's four price answers per buyer into a price range and checks $6.50 against it and against the competitors.
5. /founder-offer answers the top objections with the offer (a launch-week price, a loyalty card) and re-runs a quick panel to see if the buy rate moves.
6. /founder-cfo runs the unit economics. With the example numbers: each cup leaves $4.76 after its own costs, break-even is 186 cups a day, the profit margin at the planned 383 cups a day is 38%, year 1 makes $93,926 on operations after a slow ramp, the $25,280 startup spend is earned back in month 8, and the founder needs $34,092 in cash before it pays for itself.
7. /founder-marketing, /founder-brand, /founder-ops and /founder-launch turn it into a 30-day campaign, a name and a look, the suppliers and routines, and a dated launch that starts with a pop-up to test real buyers.
8. /founder-plan compiles founder/business-plan.md. Its verdict is computed, not written: Profitable only if every unit earns money, year 1 makes a profit, break-even fits capacity and enough of the panel buys.

You can also run any one on its own. /founder-consumer --quick on an idea you are only thinking about is a good way to find out if you should.

The tools

Four of them, all standard-library Python. None touch the network.

python3 skills/founder-cfo/unit_economics.py founder/numbers.json --out founder/cfo.md   # margins, break-even, year 1
python3 skills/founder-consumer/panel.py init --customer founder/customer.json --pitch founder/pitch.md
python3 skills/founder-pricing/van_westendorp.py founder/panel/answers --price 6.50       # the acceptable price range
python3 skills/founder-plan/compile.py --dir founder                                     # the plan and its verdict

unit_economics.py reads one JSON (example: skills/founder-cfo/example.json) and reports contribution, break-even, the margin at plan, year 1 by month, cash needed, payback and three what-ifs. Every number traces to an input; a missing field is an error, never a guess.

panel.py deals persona cards from your target customer (same seed, same cards), writes one brief per buyer, checks the answers and tallies them. It never answers for a buyer.

van_westendorp.py reads four price answers per buyer (from the panel, or a CSV from a real survey) and finds the points of marginal cheapness and expensiveness, the optimal and the indifference price.

compile.py assembles the plan and computes the verdict.

python3 -m unittest discover -s tests -v

Fine print

The board applies published frameworks. It is not those people. The three lenses are short summaries, in our words, of ideas from $100M Offers by Alex Hormozi, Zero to One by Peter Thiel with Blake Masters, and Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs. The board never speaks as them, quo