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The GTM Co-Founder

The GTM Co-Founder Skill

by Shane O'Connor AIDevGTM/gtm-cofounder

An open-source set of go-to-market skills for solo technical founders — positioning, first users, launch and pricing, sequenced into a roadmap your agent works with you.

GitHub Docs
Featured Writing & Communication
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MIT
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Install

Install with the skills CLI

One command for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, Windsurf and dozens of other agents. Needs Node.js; the skill is fetched straight from AIDevGTM/gtm-cofounder.

$ npx skills add AIDevGTM/gtm-cofounder --skill strategy-and-roadmap

Run it in a terminal. The CLI finds the agents installed on your machine, asks which ones to add the skill to, and whether to install it into the folder you ran it from or for all your projects.

Other ways to install

  1. Open the skill on GitHub and download the folder that holds its SKILL.md.
  2. Put it at ~/.claude/skills/strategy-and-roadmap/, where Claude Code picks it up in every project.

No scripts or references next to it? Saving the SKILL.md alone as ~/.claude/skills/strategy-and-roadmap/SKILL.md works too.

Using another agent? Its personal skills folder
Codex
~/.agents/skills/
Cursor
~/.cursor/skills/
GitHub Copilot
~/.copilot/skills/
Gemini CLI
~/.gemini/skills/
Windsurf
~/.codeium/windsurf/skills/
OpenCode
~/.config/opencode/skills/
Open folder on GitHub

About

  • Interviews you once and writes a founder brief every other skill reads first
  • Reads your repo to pre-fill the brief from what you have actually shipped
  • Separates validated facts from assumptions and routes assumptions to user interviews
  • Produces a stage-aware Now / Next / Later roadmap that persists between sessions
  • 18 skills covering ICP, positioning, first 50 users, launch, pricing and founder-led sales
  • A review-the-work gate that stress-tests drafts as a skeptic before you ship
  • Self-contained markdown with zero dependencies; also usable by copy-paste

The GTM Co-Founder is a set of MIT-licensed agent skills that put go-to-market strategy inside the coding agent a technical founder already lives in. It is deliberately not a marketing-tactics or SEO pack: it covers the strategy half of GTM — who the product is for, why anyone would pay, and how to land the first users.

How it works

Two setup steps do the heavy lifting. `start-here` interviews you with five core questions and writes a founder-brief.md that every other skill reads first, so advice is about your ICP and your market rather than a textbook's. Run inside your project and it pre-reads the repo — README, recent commits, PR titles, open issues — to pre-fill the brief from what you have actually shipped. It also separates what you have validated with real users from what you are still assuming, and routes the assumptions back to the user-interview skill.

`strategy-and-roadmap` then turns the brief into a one-line diagnosis and a stage-aware plan split into Now, Next and Later, saved as gtm-roadmap.md. That file is the hub you return to each session, so you never reopen a dead chat wondering what to do. The skill is explicitly instructed to offer rather than impose: it will not start a task you have not picked, and anything you decline gets parked instead of resurfacing.

What is in the set

Skills are grouped by the problem they solve, roughly in the order a founder hits them:

  • Who it's for — who-is-this-for, talk-to-users
  • Say it so it lands — positioning-and-story, beyond-the-wrapper (for AI products fighting the "just a wrapper" charge), value-prop-that-converts, the-homepage
  • First users — time-to-first-value, first-50-users, launch-it, market-to-devs-sell-to-buyers, pricing, founder-led-sales
  • Keep it going — founder-led-content, know-if-its-working, market-scan
  • A gate, not a step — review-the-work, which makes the agent stop being the author and stress-test a draft as a skeptic before you ship it

Each SKILL.md is written with concrete thresholds rather than principles, decision trees for the calls that stall technical founders, and a checklist you can run in the next thirty minutes.

Provenance and installation

Built by Shane O'Connor from years of selling and advising developer tools, drawing on the work of Adam Frankl and Jakub Czakon. MIT-licensed and dependency-free — every skill is one self-contained folder of markdown, so you can also just copy a file into a chat window if you have never used skills before.

Install with npx skills add AIDevGTM/gtm-cofounder, add the Claude Code plugin marketplace (/plugin marketplace add AIDevGTM/gtm-cofounder), or clone the repository and copy skills/* into your agent's skills directory. Works with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf, Antigravity and any Agent Skills runtime.

Try it

Once installed, ask your agent something like:

"You are my GTM co-founder. Read my founder brief and give me an honest diagnosis: I have 300 GitHub stars, 40 signups, zero paying users, and I don't know whether to fix onboarding or go find a narrower ICP."

SKILL.md

The instructions your agent loads, as published by Shane O'Connor.

SKILL.md
name
strategy-and-roadmap
description
After the founder brief, turn it into an honest diagnosis and a prioritized, stage-aware GTM roadmap saved as docs/gtm-cofounder/gtm-roadmap.md. This is the hub the founder returns to every session to see where they are and the single next move. Use right after start-here, whenever the founder doesn't know what to work on next, wants a plan instead of a one-off task, or is drowning in disconnected tactics.

Strategy and roadmap (your plan)

A pile of tactics is not a go-to-market. This turns your brief into a diagnosis and a prioritized plan, and becomes the one place you come back to when you don't know what to do next.

Use this when: you've done the brief and don't want to guess which skill to pull, or a chat ended and you're staring at "what now," or you keep getting handed standalone tasks (do the homepage, make a content plan) that don't add up to a strategy.

The core idea

The other skills are moves. This is the game plan that decides which move, and when. It does three things:

  1. Diagnose. Read the brief honestly. Where are you actually strong? What is the single biggest thing standing between you and your next 10 users or your first dollar? Name one bottleneck, not five.
  2. Prioritize by stage. The right first move for a founder with zero users is not the right first move for one with 500 users and no revenue. Sequence the work to the stage you're actually at, and say out loud what to ignore for now.
  3. Persist. Write it to docs/gtm-cofounder/gtm-roadmap.md so it survives the chat. Next session you read the roadmap, not a dead thread.
How to run this (for the agent)
  • Read `docs/gtm-cofounder/founder-brief.md` first. If it does not exist, run start-here before this. Everything here keys off the brief.
  • Lead with a diagnosis, not a task list. Two or three sentences: here is what's working, here is the one bottleneck that matters most right now, and here is why.
  • Be willing to tell them to do almost nothing. If most of the brief is [assumption] and they've barely spoken to users, the honest roadmap is short: go talk to 10 users, come back. Do not pad it to look thorough.
  • Sequence into three horizons: Now (the one thing), Next (the two or three that follow), Later (parked on purpose, so it's off their mind). Map each item to a skill.
  • Offer, never impose. Present the roadmap and ask what they want to start with. Do not assign or begin a task they have not chosen. If they say no to something, move it to Later and drop it, do not resurface it next turn.
  • Write the plan, not a copy of the brief. docs/gtm-cofounder/gtm-roadmap.md is a separate, different document from docs/gtm-cofounder/founder-brief.md. The brief is the context; the roadmap is the short, decision-shaped plan you derive from it. Never re-save the brief's contents into the roadmap. If docs/gtm-cofounder/gtm-roadmap.md does not open with a one-line Diagnosis followed by Now / Next / Later, it is wrong.
Stage decides the first move

Use the brief's stage and evidence answers to pick the starting point. A rough guide, not a law:

Where they areThe bottleneck is usuallyStart with
Pre-users, mostly [assumption]You don't yet know who it's for or whether the pain is realtalk-to-users, then who-is-this-for
A few users, can't describe themFuzzy ICP, so nothing else can be sharpwho-is-this-for, then positioning-and-story
Users but the message is genericPositioning and homepage speak to no onepositioning-and-story, value-prop-that-converts, the-homepage
Good product, nobody arrivesDistribution: no first channel that worksfirst-50-users, then launch-it
Developers love it, nobody paysThe buyer vs user gapmarket-to-devs-sell-to-buyers
Growing but flying blindNo read on what's actually workingknow-if-its-working

When in doubt, the default first move for an early founder is almost always talk-to-users. Real evidence beats a clever plan.

The roadmap file

Save to docs/gtm-cofounder/gtm-roadmap.md in the founder's project (create the docs/gtm-cofounder/ folder if it does not exist), using gtm-roadmap.template.md in this repo. This is a distinct file from the brief and must contain the plan, not the founder's answers. Keep it short and living:

  • Diagnosis: the one bottleneck, in a sentence.
  • Now: the single next move, the skill it maps to, and what "done" looks like.
  • Next: two or three moves queued behind it.
  • Later: parked on purpose (things like the homepage or a content plan that are real but not yet).
  • Log: what got done and what was learned, so the plan improves instead of repeating.
Coming back to it (every session)

This is the fix for "the chat ended and I don't know what to do next." Start each session here:

  1. Read docs/gtm-cofounder/founder-brief.md and docs/gtm-cofounder/gtm-roadmap.md.
  2. Say where things stand and the one next move, in a sentence or two.
  3. Let the founder pick: do the next move, change priorities, or park something.
  4. After the work, update docs/gtm-cofounder/gtm-roadmap.md: move finished items to the log, promote the next one, capture what was learned.

You are not a menu of skills they have to operate. You're the co-founder holding the plan.

Your next 30 minutes
  • [ ] Make sure docs/gtm-cofounder/founder-brief.md exists. If not, run start-here.
  • [ ] Write a one-sentence diagnosis: the single biggest bottleneck right now.
  • [ ] Fill docs/gtm-cofounder/gtm-roadmap.md: one Now, a short Next, an honest Later.
  • [ ] Pick the Now move and open its skill. Just that one.
  • [ ] Next session, come back here first. Don't start from a blank chat.

---
Built from real dev-tool GTM experience, with frameworks from Adam Frankl (The Developer-Facing Startup) and Jakub Czakon (markepear.dev).
When a framework can't make the call, that's what a human is for: The DevTool GTM Company.

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