Agent skills for startup founders
SKILL.md files for 0→1 founders shipping AI products in Cursor or Claude Code: validate, scope, sell, price, and raise without repeating yourself every prompt. Install once and your agent applies the right framework from discovery through early GTM and fundraising.
Validate & discover
Test ideas, measure PMF, and run continuous discovery before you over-build.
Measuring Product-Market Fit
Assess and achieve PMF with Sean Ellis surveys, retention signals, and scale-vs-iterate decisions. Frameworks from 46 product leaders on Lenny’s Podcast.
Opportunity Solution Tree
Structure continuous discovery with Teresa Torres’ OST: map a desired outcome to opportunities, solutions, and experiments. Prioritize problems before features.
AI Evals
Create and run AI evaluations for LLM products: rubrics, test cases, failure analysis, and Pass/Fail criteria. Treat evals as the product requirement doc for AI features.
AI Product Strategy
Decide where AI belongs in your product: strategic bets, build-vs-buy, and avoiding AI-for-AI’s-sake. Complements shipping-focused AI product engineering skills.
Scope & build
Cut scope to an MVP and ship with agentic coding workflows.
Scoping & Cutting
Scope MVPs and cut features ruthlessly before launch. Decide what ships now vs later when time and runway are constrained.
Vibe Coding
Build software with AI coding tools as a non-traditional developer: prompting patterns, iteration loops, and shipping working prototypes in Cursor or Claude Code.
AI Product
Ship LLM features to production: structured output, streaming, prompt versioning. Avoid demo-ware, context stuffing, unvalidated output.
Find Skills
Discover and install agent skills from the open ecosystem. Search skills.sh, verify quality, and install with npx skills when users need capabilities beyond your current setup.
Sell & price
Early sales motion and pricing before you have a full GTM team.
Founder Sales
Close your first customers before you have a sales team: discovery calls, objection handling, and early GTM motion for technical founders.
Pricing Strategy
Design pricing models, packaging, and willingness-to-pay research. Goes beyond landing-page CRO into monetization architecture for early-stage products.
Launch & grow
Ship your first release and get early traction.
Raise & pitch
Fundraising strategy, investor prep, and pitch materials.
Fundraising
Navigate fundraising strategy: whether to raise, investor relationships, pitch prep, and common founder mistakes. Distilled from Lenny’s Podcast guests.
Pitch Deck
Create or refine seed and Series A pitch decks with slide-by-slide narrative structure—not just bullet points. Story arc for investor presentations.
Related on AI UX Playground
Frequently asked questions
What are agent skills for startup founders?
Agent skills are SKILL.md instruction files that teach Cursor, Claude Code, and other coding agents how to run founder workflows (measuring PMF, scoping an MVP, writing a pitch deck, or preparing for fundraising) without you re-explaining the framework every session.
How do I install founder skills in Cursor?
Use npx skills add with the GitHub source shown on each skill page, or copy the SKILL.md into .cursor/skills/ in your project. Each skill page includes install commands and the full skill content.
Which founder skills should I install first?
Start with Measuring Product-Market Fit and Scoping & Cutting before you build. Add Vibe Coding or AI Product if you ship in code. Add Fundraising and Pitch Deck when you are actively raising.
How are skills different from prompts on this site?
Prompts are one-shot copy-paste instructions for ChatGPT or Claude chat. Skills persist in your coding agent and trigger automatically when relevant, which is better for repeated founder workflows like discovery, PRDs, and launch prep.