plugins/startup-superpowers/skills/market-research/SKILL.md
Manages the founder's market understanding — running initial market research, updating findings, and answering questions about market size, customer segments, buying behavior, pricing benchmarks, and industry trends. Use when the conversation touches market size (TAM/SAM/SOM), who the buyers are and how they make decisions, what people typically pay, industry tailwinds or headwinds, or when the founder wants to understand the broader landscape their idea sits in.
npx skillsauth add davepoon/buildwithclaude market-researchInstall this skill globally with one command. Works with Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf.
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Help the founder understand the market they're entering — whether it's real, who's in it, how buyers behave, and what they expect to pay. This context strengthens interviews, sharpens hypotheses, and gives the founder a confident answer to "what's the market opportunity?"
Read startup/core.md to load project context (name, seed description, type of business — B2B or B2C — and all fields under ## Core).
Check if startup/market-research.md exists.
Load it for context. Infer intent from the conversation — don't ask "what do you want to do?" If the founder is:
last_updated in frontmatterstatus: needs-refresh in frontmatter and offer to re-run the full research or a targeted pass on specific sectionsweb-researcher agent (fast model) with a focused prompt about that market dimension; incorporate findings into the relevant section; save the full output to startup/research/{YYYY-MM-DD}-{topic-slug}-research.md with frontmatter date, topic, and source_skill: market-researchWhen updating the file, follow the format conventions:
version (number), last_updated (ISO date), type (b2b or b2c), and status (draft, complete, or needs-refresh)Market Research — {Project Name}Read before writing, propose before saving, get confirmation.
Load the reference file for the guided first-time workflow:
.claude/skills/market-research/references/initial-market-research.md
The reference file's instructions take over from this point.
Not every web question needs a subagent:
WebSearch / WebFetch (you, the main agent): single-fact lookups ("what does Pendo charge?", "is ACME still active?"), quick verification of a claim the founder made, one data point asked about in flow. Stays in conversation, no persistence needed.web-researcher: multi-source passes that benefit from an isolated context (scanning pricing across a whole category, surveying buyer-behavior signals across communities, structured landscape passes). Output is structured and gets saved to startup/research/{YYYY-MM-DD}-{topic-slug}-research.md for later reference.Rough rule: one fact in flow → inline. Multi-source or results-should-persist → dispatch.
development
Show drill-me learning progress — topics studied, cards due for review, weakest concepts, and what to study next. Use when the user asks what's due, how their learning is going, or for their drill-me status.
development
Teach the user a topic as an adaptive tutor — retrieval practice, spaced repetition with decay, and persistent memory in ~/.drill-me/. Use when the user wants to learn or be drilled on something, says "drill me on X", "teach me X", or wants to study a topic, a codebase, or a document.
development
Turn any codebase into evidence-grounded Markdown docs plus a machine-readable index.json. Every claim cites its source; never invents deployment steps.
tools
Assesses the current state of the startup project and recommends what to focus on next. Use when there is a need or a question from the user to understand what the next steps are or what to focus on next.