What happened
Shane O'Connor released a free, open-source set of go-to-market (GTM) skills—markdown playbooks and decision frameworks—designed for solo technical founders building developer tools or AI products without funding or a commercial co-founder. The skills work with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf, Antigravity, and any agent supporting the Agent Skills spec, and can be used in three ways: pasted directly into ChatGPT or Claude, handed to an agent as a folder, or installed as auto-triggering skills. The pack draws on years of selling and advising developer tools, sharpened by work from Adam Frankl and Jakub Czakon, and tested by founders including Lubos (hey/api) and Thibault and Max (OpenStatus).
Why it matters
Solo founders often freeze on go-to-market strategy—positioning, pricing, landing first users, and telling their story—because their strength is engineering, not sales or marketing. This pack fills that gap by replacing generic advice with stage-aware frameworks grounded in real numbers and concrete next steps, rather than theory or tactics. It separates validated learning from assumptions and feeds unproven guesses back into user research, so the strategy gets truer over time instead of locked into an early guess. For founders with no team and no outside money, having a GTM co-founder in an agent they already use removes the isolation and the 2am doubt that keeps so many solo builders stuck.
What to watch
The pack is MIT-licensed, free, and open to contribution; O'Connor also offers paid human advisory through The DevTool GTM Company (pre-funding, very early stage) and QC Growth (seed through Series B, including a16z and Sequoia-backed companies) for founders who need a person in the trenches once frameworks alone are not enough. The core path starts with a 15-minute intake questionnaire that builds a founder brief, then a prioritized roadmap sequencing the skills (positioning, first users, launch, pricing), so founders have a single hub to return to each session instead of a dead chat.
Summaries like this, in your inbox every morning.
Solo technical founders often build something excellent but freeze on go-to-market because the sales, positioning, and business strategy half of the job is foreign to them. The problem is not just a lack of knowledge—it is isolation. There is no co-founder in the room at 2am to think through who the product is for, why anyone would pay, or why the launch got no traction. O'Connor's pack addresses this by embedding go-to-market frameworks directly into coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, and others) that founders already live in. Instead of asking a founder to take a course or read theory, the agent asks five core questions, builds a founder brief, and then sequences the work one move at a time—positioning, then first users, then launch, then pricing—with decision trees and real numbers, not principles. The frames are drawn from Frankl's and Czakon's published work on developer-tool GTM, then sharpened by actual founders who used them in the field. This approach separates what a founder has validated with real users from what they are still assuming, and feeds the unproven guesses back to a "talk to users" skill, so the brief stays accurate instead of ossifying an early guess. O'Connor also offers paid advisory for founders who need a human instead of or alongside the skills—The DevTool GTM Company for very early, often pre-funding founders, and QC Growth for seed through Series B teams.
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