Guides the founder through designing and optionally building the simplest MVP or prototype that validates their current hypotheses. Use when the founder wants to build something to test assumptions, discusses what to build next, wants to interpret results from a live MVP, or is deciding whether the current approach is still right. Also use when a founder proposes something to build — the skill will check whether the proposed form is the simplest thing that generates honest signal. Also use when the founder wants cheap behavioral demand signal — a fake door (a not-yet-built feature or tier that logs real intent) or a small paid-traffic experiment to reach people they cannot reach by hand.
Use at the start of any conversation about a startup idea, product validation, founder strategy, or work inside a `startup/` workspace. Establishes file conventions, voice-input handling, subagent dispatch rules, and how to update each artifact safely. Activate before invoking any other startup-superpowers skill.
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.
Manages the founder's competitive landscape — discovering competitors, updating existing competitor files, adding new ones, and dispatching ad-hoc research. Use when the founder wants to explore competitors, do competitive research, update a competitor profile, or understand who else is solving their problem.
Manages the project's testable hypotheses — surfacing new ones, refining existing ones, updating status, reviewing the full set, and assessing hypothesis state based on evidence gathered so far. Use when the conversation touches assumptions, risks, what to validate, hypotheses, interview prep, assessing which hypotheses are confirmed or invalidated, reviewing overall hypothesis health, or when the user questions whether something about their idea is true.
Manages the founder's customer discovery interview lifecycle — drafting scripts tailored to a target segment, refining existing ones, managing script status, and analyzing interview transcripts to extract insights, review technique, and update hypothesis state. Use when the founder wants to prep for interviews, draft a discovery script, refine questions, change a script's status, analyze a completed interview (transcript, paste, or recollection), extract insights, or review how an interview went.
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.
Manages the founder's survey-based validation — crafting the right questions, deploying a survey to the internet, and analyzing results against hypotheses. Use when the founder wants to run a survey, create survey questions, validate hypotheses at scale, check how a survey is going, understand whether a survey is the right tool right now, or deploy a question set to get quantitative signal. Also bring this up if you believe that creating a survey to collect quantitative evidence may be useful at this point.