Startup Design

Takes a startup idea through eight phases from intake to validation, producing organized markdown docs for market research, competitive analysis, business model, brand, product specs, financials, and experiments. Built with session interruption in mind: progress tracking lets you resume mid-process without losing work. The intake interview is unusually thorough, including deliberately uncomfortable questions about unfair advantages and what would make you quit. Offers a compressed fast track mode when time is tight. The research phase scales based on market complexity. Most valuable when you need structured thinking on a raw idea, less so if you already have customers or traction. Honest take: the framework is comprehensive but rigid, so be ready to follow the process or fork it.

skills.sh installs: 1.1K
GitHub stars: 1.3K
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add ferdinandobons/startup-skill --skill startup-design --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Startup Design

A structured, multi-phase skill that takes a startup idea from raw concept to validated design. It produces a complete set of markdown documents organized by domain, with built-in progress tracking so work survives session interruptions.

How It Works

The process has 8 numbered phases executed sequentially, plus a Pre-Flight Check (Phase 0.5) and a Customer Discovery gate (Phase 3.7). Each phase produces output files and updates the progress tracker. If a session is interrupted, resume from the last completed checkpoint.

PRE-FLIGHT → INTAKE → BRAINSTORM → RESEARCH → [Research Gate] → CUSTOMER DISCOVERY → [Interview Gate] → STRATEGY → BRAND → PRODUCT → FINANCIAL → VALIDATION

Modes

Full Mode (default): Execute all phases in order, including Pre-Flight and Customer Discovery. Best for thoroughly designing a startup from scratch.

SKILL.md on GitHub