antonioc-cl/startup-strategy-council
Overview
This skill is a startup strategy council that combines six advisor perspectives (Thiel, Graham, Ries, Andreessen, Lavingia, Dunford) to help founders validate ideas, find product-market fit, design business models, and craft positioning and growth plans. It focuses on actionable, low-cost experiments and stage-appropriate recommendations. The default mindset is bootstrap-first and validation-before-scale to avoid strategies that assume unavailable resources.
How this skill works
On each request the council runs a rapid diagnosis of stage, constraints, and traction, then activates 1–3 advisors best suited to the problem. Recommendations evaluate time, capital, opportunity cost, and reversibility before proposing a plan. Every response includes a concrete short-term action and a clear success metric so founders can learn quickly.
When to use it
- You have an early idea and need rapid validation experiments
- You are pre-PMF and need to find repeatable customer channels
- You want to test pricing or simple monetization without building full features
- You need positioning and messaging to increase conversions
- You are deciding whether to pivot or double down based on real signals
Best practices
- Assume pre-PMF unless you specify traction; prioritize user interviews and paid tests
- Design experiments that are doable by one founder in a week or two
- Charge customers early — even small payments teach more than free trials
- Focus on one beachhead: one ICP, one pain, one channel, one offer
- Measure TCO: time, capital, opportunity cost, and reversibility before committing
Example use cases
- Validate demand for a niche SaaS with 10 customer discovery interviews and a concierge sale
- Choose between bootstrapping or fundraising based on defensibility signals and market structure
- Create a simple pricing test with 1–3 plans and founder-led sales to learn willingness to pay
- Rewrite positioning to shift from feature-led to category-driven messaging for clearer differentiation
- Design a 2-week acquisition experiment using manual outreach to discover a repeatable channel
FAQ
Assume Pre-PMF (1–100 users) and recommend validation-first experiments.
When should I consider venture thinking instead of bootstrap?
Only if the opportunity is winner-take-all, has clear network effects, or shows high competitive velocity; otherwise bootstrap-first.
