Startup Builder

startup-builder-skill

Agent skills for the non-program half of shipping a product on Solana — the things a small team hits around the code.

Charter

The all-in-one support skill pack for startups building on Solana. Program work — Anchor patterns, CU optimisation, account layout — is covered well by solanabr/ai-kit and the packs it pins. This repo owns the startup-operations layer: positioning and pricing, launch, fundraising, go-to-market and growth, support and operations, and compliance-adjacent operations (pointing at solanabr/crypto-legal-skill for the legal lane rather than restating it).

Full charter, the gap analysis behind it, and the design constraints: issue #1.

Two constraints from that charter shape everything here:

• Skills stay off the always-on path. A top-level skill’s description is listed in every session and every subagent, so fan-outs of 100+ subagents multiply that cost. These load on demand, with detail behind links in references/.
• One SKILL.md per skill directory, routing-only descriptions, progressive disclosure.

The skills

Skill	Use it when
idea-sprint	Deciding what to build, or stress-testing an idea before any code. Interview → crypto-necessity gate → three candidates → score /15 → go/no-go. Output is a decision, not a brainstorm.
pitch-deck	You need slides — demo day, a VC meeting, a grant application, an accelerator form, a hackathon final. Detects the audience, checks the title spine (“but” or “therefore” between slides, a bridge from wedge to vision), writes speaking notes, then drills the hostile questions.
pitch-review	The deck, script or pitch video is about to go out. An answer key written first, an anonymized copy, three readers with no context (VC, buyer, judge), a rank against decks that raised, and the objections that repeat. Writes .claude/context/review.md.
hackathon	A submission is due. Track choice by crowdedness, a description a judge can skim in 90 seconds, scripts for the two videos Colosseum asks for (a 2–3-minute pitch and a demo of at most 3 minutes), and the grant follow-on when the track doesn’t land.
build-status	Before a deck, submission, grant or investor update. Records program IDs, upgrade authority, verified-build and audit state, what works today, and traction with the query behind each number into .claude/context/build.md.
positioning	Before the deck, site, docs intro or launch post. Writes the one-liner, ICP with disqualifiers, job to be done, three named alternatives with the dimension you beat each on, sourced proof points and words to avoid into .claude/context/positioning.md.
pricing	Deciding what an onchain product charges: fee surface, who pays, the floor-cost math (fees, rent, RPC, oracles), comparables pulled from public fee data, and the test that would prove the number wrong. Writes .claude/context/pricing.md.
market-sizing	Before the market slide, or when choosing where to enter. Ranks entry wedges by problem quality × how much each builds the vision, sizes the first one bottom-up with a source on every number, checks it against a named top-down figure, and keeps money already spent apart from money at risk. Writes .claude/context/market.md.
fundraising	After the deck lands: a crypto data room index (program IDs, authorities, audits vs deployed commit, onchain metrics with their queries), a diligence question bank with honest answers, monthly investor updates from the same metrics, and token-vs-equity framing routed to crypto-legal-skill. Writes .claude/context/data-room.md.
launch	Mainnet goes live on a date and the announcement has to wait for a transaction. Writes a runbook gated on the onchain event: legal gates via crypto-legal-skill, slip and abort rules, channel order, the Superteam and partner layer, and pre-staged copy including the “it slipped” message. Also runs as /launch.
incident-comms	Something is broken and users are asking. Severity set by onchain state, the three pre-written updates, an exploit track routed to crypto-legal-skill, a static HTML status page that stays up when the app is down, a user-facing postmortem, and a known-issue entry community-moderation can dedupe against.
ecosystem-bd	You want Jupiter, the wallets, the explorers, DefiLlama or a Superteam chapter to list, route or surface you. A dated map of what each surface requires, the readiness gaps to close in ai-kit first, diligence in both directions (inbound via counterparty-gate), the partner ask and the charter.

They chain through files in the project’s .claude/context/. Each skill writes one file, in a format its own references/ defines, and reads the others when they exist:

File	Written by	Read by
idea.md	idea-sprint	build-status, positioning, pricing, market-sizing, pitch-deck, pitch-review, hackathon, fundraising, launch, ecosystem-bd
build.md	build-status	idea-sprint, positioning, pricing, market-sizing, pitch-deck, pitch-review, hackathon, fundraising
positioning.md	positioning	idea-sprint, pricing, market-sizing, pitch-deck, pitch-review, hackathon, fundraising, launch, incident-comms
pricing.md	pricing	market-sizing, pitch-deck, pitch-review, fundraising
market.md	market-sizing	pitch-deck, fundraising
data-room.md	fundraising	—
review.md	pitch-review	—
launch.md	launch	incident-comms, ecosystem-bd
incidents.md	incident-comms	—
partners.md	ecosystem-bd	—

Run the producers first and the later skills get shorter: they pre-fill instead of re-interviewing you, and a deck, a data room and a launch post all quote the same numbers. build.md’s format is a contract other tools can write to as well: build-md-format.md.

Rendered decks and any graphic or marketing asset come out as HTML — one file, your own CSS. It renders anywhere, diffs in git, and the agent can design it directly.

Install

Copy the skills into your project’s skills directory. Copy the whole set: the skills link to each other’s format files (pitch-deck to build-status’s and pricing’s, for example), so a skill copied on its own keeps working but has dead links where it hands off.

git clone https://github.com/solanabr/startup-builder-skill
cp -r startup-builder-skill/skills/* .claude/skills/

Use .agents/skills/ instead of .claude/skills/ for Codex, Cursor, Copilot and other Agent Skills clients.

The layout is skills/<name>/SKILL.md at the repository root, which is what an upstream-folder fetch expects — so a kit can pin individual skills from here by name without vendoring the whole repo as a submodule.

Upstream dependencies

The interview, scoring and validation rubrics, the pitch structure, frameworks, templates and deck shell, and the hackathon submission guide and video scripts are vendored under each skill’s references/, rewritten from sendaifun/solana-new with attribution. The hackathon judging criteria and winners index are written from Colosseum’s own FAQ and announcement posts, linked inline.

What remains upstream is small and optional: the Superteam ideas dataset (one pinned JSON file, 240 entries), ColosseumOrg/colosseum-copilot (5,400+ past submissions, for crowdedness checks) and Anthropic’s frontend-design. Links are pinned or point at stable pages, so nothing has to be installed for the skills to work. Each skill’s references/upstream-packs.md gives the details.

Text adapted from solana-new, beingsmit/technical-product-gtm and jonathimer/devmarketing-skills keeps its MIT notice in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

Checks

python3 .github/scripts/validate.py (standard library only) checks what review used to:

• skill frontmatter
• relative links and anchors
• GitHub links pinned to a commit
• the charter’s hazard rules (#1): only .md, .html and LICENSE, no .mcp.json or settings, no download piped into a shell, no telemetry
• attribution against THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md
• README coverage of every skill and context file

CI runs it on every pull request, and a weekly job reports dead external links. A file other than Markdown or HTML needs an entry with a reason in the script’s ALLOWED_OTHER_FILES.