Startup Skill

Startup Skill's honest pitch is a posture, not a feature list. Every idea-checking tool on the market tends to flatter you; this one tries to destroy the idea first and only lets it through if it survives 8 phases of structured attack. The scoring is tuned to reject, not approve, and the tool says so plainly — its homepage example returns 2.8/10 and NO-GO. That matters more than it sounds, because the failure mode founders actually experience isn't a lack of information, it's 12-18 months of building before admitting the idea was flawed. The confidence tagging is the second real differentiator. Every data point is labelled [Data], [Estimate] or [Assumption], so when the market research report quotes a $890M TAM at 8% growth in a mature category, you can see whether that number is sourced or inferred. Most AI research output presents all three as if they were equally solid. Mechanically, the 8 phases run: intake and founder-market fit with constraint mapping; brainstorm generating 5-8 idea variations to break fixation on a single approach; market research across 11 parallel agents in 4 sequential waves with real web data cross-referenced; strategy covering Lean Canvas, competitive battle cards, Dunford positioning and Value Proposition Canvas; brand (mission, vision, tone of voice); product (MVP definition, feature prioritization, JTBD analysis); financial (revenue model, projections, break-even with tagged confidence); and validation (experiments, risk matrix, go/no-go scorecard, 30-day action plan). Delivery is the part people underrate. Results are files on your machine, not a chat log that scrolls away — shareable with a co-founder, presentable to an investor, usable as the spine of a pre-seed data room. Code and methodology are on GitHub under MIT, with no signup and no data collection, so nothing about your idea leaves your machine beyond the Claude calls the plugin itself makes. Where it falls short: it's one-shot. You get the verdict, the files and the 30-day plan, and then you're on your own — there's no ongoing mentoring, no human to argue with, no shared workspace where a team comments on the outputs, and no GUI or web dashboard if you don't want to live in a terminal. Cowork users can upload the individual .skill files (startup-design, startup-competitors, startup-positioning, startup-pitch) for a narrower deep dive, which is a reasonable workaround but not a substitute for a strategist. Fit: technical founders who can build fast and need the business case pressure-tested first; first-time founders without advisors who can't justify a $5K-$100K consultant; pre-revenue founders about to quit a job; indie hackers running several ideas through in the same week. Not a fit: non-technical founders, teams that need a multi-user workspace with permissions, and anyone who wants encouragement rather than a rejection-tuned score.