Claude Code Skills for Founders Building B2B SaaS

Source: github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills (Corey Haines, MIT licence, 41.4k stars, 48 skills)

This is the same repo covered in the general skill directory lead mag, reframed specifically for a solo or small-team B2B SaaS founder who is doing their own marketing without a dedicated team. Not every one of the 48 skills matters equally at this stage. This playbook picks out the ones that matter most for a founder, in the order a founder would actually need them, and explains why each one earns its place before the business has a marketing hire.

Honest note: this lead mag accurately sources the real skill names and trigger descriptions from the repository README. The full step-by-step instructions inside each individual skill file require installing the repo directly, since GitHub does not serve raw file content without a clone.

Why this repo suits a founder specifically

A founder doing their own marketing has a specific constraint most marketing resources ignore: no time to learn a new framework for every task, and no team to hand work off to. What this repo gives a founder is not a course to study, but 48 pre-built workflows an AI coding agent already knows how to run the moment it recognises the task, triggered just by describing what you need in plain language.

The repo is also built around a single foundational context file (product-marketing) that every other skill checks before doing anything. For a founder this means you explain your product, your audience, and your positioning exactly once, and every other skill (copywriting, SEO, ads, pricing) inherits that context automatically instead of you re-explaining your business every time you ask for something.

Before touching any other skill, set up the one file everything else depends on.

The product-marketing skill

From the README, verbatim trigger: "When the user wants to create or update their product marketing context document." This is the skill every other skill checks first.

For a founder, this is the highest-leverage five minutes in the entire repo. Run this skill once at the very start, before generating a single piece of copy, a single ad, or a single landing page. It captures your product, your audience, and your positioning in one document that every other skill then reads automatically.

Skip this step and every other skill in the repo produces generic output, because it has no context about your actual business to draw from. Do this step and every subsequent skill produces output that is actually about your company.

Install just this skill first

npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills --skill product-marketing -a claude-code

Run it, answer its questions about your product, then move on to installing the rest of the repo.

Once your context file exists, these are the skills a founder pre-launch or pre-revenue reaches for first: figuring out who to sell to, what to say, and where the first customers will actually come from.

Customer research and positioning

customer-research: "When the user wants to conduct, analyze, or synthesize customer research." Run this before writing any copy. A founder's biggest early risk is writing confidently about a problem they have only guessed at.

marketing-psychology: "When the user wants to apply psychological principles, mental models, or behavioral science to marketing." Useful once you have real customer language to apply these principles to, not before.

offers: "When the user wants to design, construct, or improve an offer, the thing they actually sell, including value framing." For an early-stage founder, getting the offer right often matters more than getting the copy right. A weak offer described perfectly still does not convert.

First copy and first site

copywriting: "When the user wants to write, rewrite, or improve marketing copy for any page, including homepage, landing pages, and more." This is where most founders start, and it is correctly positioned as something to run only after product-marketing and customer-research exist.

site-architecture: "When the user wants to plan, map, or restructure their website's page hierarchy, navigation, URL structure, or internal linking." Worth running once, early, before you have accumulated pages you later have to restructure.

pricing: "When the user wants help with pricing decisions, packaging, or monetisation strategy." A founder should revisit this skill at every major stage, not just once at launch, since pricing decisions compound.

Finding the first customers

prospecting: "When the user wants to find, qualify, and build a list of prospects to reach out to across B2B SaaS or general B2B contexts."

cold-email: "Write B2B cold emails and follow-up sequences that get replies." Pairs directly with prospecting: build the list, then write the sequence that gets replies from it.

directory-submissions: "When the user wants to submit their product to startup, SaaS, AI, agent, MCP, no-code, or review directories for visibility." Low-effort, genuinely useful early distribution channel that founders often skip because it feels beneath the effort, despite being one of the cheapest visibility wins available pre-launch.

Once there is a product live and early users, the priority shifts from finding any customers to converting the visitors you already have and understanding what is actually working.

Conversion optimisation

cro: "When the user wants to optimise, improve, or increase conversions on any marketing page or form, including homepage, landing pages, and forms."

signup: "When the user wants to optimise signup, registration, account creation, or trial activation flows."

onboarding: "When the user wants to optimise post-signup onboarding, user activation, first-run experience, or time-to-value."

For a founder, these three run in sequence: get someone to the page (cro), get them to sign up (signup), then get them to actually experience value fast enough that they stick around (onboarding). Running cro without fixing a broken onboarding experience just gets you more people who sign up and leave.

Measurement before scaling anything

analytics: "When the user wants to set up, improve, or audit analytics tracking and measurement." A founder should run this before spending meaningfully on ads or content, since without proper tracking there is no reliable way to know what is actually working.

ab-testing: "When the user wants to plan, design, or implement an A/B test or experiment, or build a growth experimentation programme." Genuinely useful once there is enough traffic for a test to reach significance; running this too early on very low volume wastes the effort.

SEO for a founder with no content team

seo-audit: "When the user wants to audit, review, or diagnose SEO issues on their site." Run this once your core pages exist to catch cheap technical fixes early, before they compound.

ai-seo: "When the user wants to optimise content for AI search engines, get cited by LLMs, or appear in AI-generated answers." Increasingly relevant given how much B2B research now happens through AI assistants rather than traditional search, and cheap to address early since it mostly means writing clearly and citably rather than a separate large content investment.

competitors: "When the user wants to create competitor comparison or alternative pages for SEO and sales enablement." One of the highest-leverage page types a solo founder can build, since comparison searches carry strong buying intent and this skill produces both an SEO asset and a sales asset from one page.

Once there is consistent revenue and the product has real usage data, a founder can layer in paid acquisition, retention mechanics, and the operational side of a growing pipeline.

Paid acquisition without a paid media team

ads: "When the user wants help with paid advertising campaigns on Google Ads, Meta (Facebook/Instagram), LinkedIn, Twitter/X, and more."

ad-creative: "When the user wants to generate, iterate, or scale ad creative, including headlines, descriptions, primary text, or full ad sets."

For a founder, only start here once analytics and cro are already in place; paid traffic hitting a page that does not convert or that you cannot measure is money spent with no learning attached.

Retention becomes as important as acquisition

churn-prevention: "When the user wants to reduce churn, build cancellation flows, set up save offers, recover failed payments, or otherwise fight retention loss." For a subscription SaaS founder, fixing a leaky retention bucket is often cheaper and faster than acquiring replacement customers.

paywalls: "When the user wants to create or optimise in-app paywalls, upgrade screens, upsell modals, or feature gates." Directly connects new usage data to expansion revenue from existing accounts.

referrals: "When the user wants to create, optimise, or analyse a referral programme, affiliate programme, or word-of-mouth strategy." Works best once you have customers who are genuinely happy, which is why it belongs later in the sequence rather than at launch.

The operational and pipeline layer

revops: "When the user wants help with revenue operations, lead lifecycle management, or marketing-to-sales handoff processes." Becomes relevant once lead volume is high enough that manual handoff between marketing and sales starts breaking down.

sales-enablement: "When the user wants to create sales collateral, pitch decks, one-pagers, objection handling docs, or demo scripts." Useful the moment a founder starts doing any kind of sales call, even informally, since it turns ad hoc pitching into something documented and repeatable.

launch: "When the user wants to plan a product launch, feature announcement, or release strategy." Reusable indefinitely; every new feature is a small launch and this skill scales down as well as up.

The remaining skills from the repository, useful for a founder but situational rather than sequential: reach for them when the specific need arises rather than working through them in order.

Content and lifecycle

content-strategy, programmatic-seo, and schema for founders investing seriously in organic content as a channel. emails and sms for lifecycle communication once there is a customer base large enough to segment. social and video for founders building a personal or company presence on social platforms. copy-editing for refreshing existing pages rather than writing new ones. image for generating and optimising visual assets without a designer.

Growth and community

free-tools for founders who want a standalone lead-generation asset (a calculator, a small tool) separate from the core product. co-marketing and influencer-marketing for partnership-driven growth once the product has enough traction to be an attractive partner. community-marketing for founders building an owned audience around the product rather than only paid or organic acquisition. lead-magnets for structured email capture. public-relations once there is a genuine story worth pitching to press. competitor-profiling for deeper one-off competitive research beyond the comparison pages already covered in Stage 2. aso specifically for founders with a mobile app component.

Strategic and planning skills

marketing-ideas for a founder who is out of ideas and needs a prompt (the README notes this skill contains 140 SaaS marketing ideas). marketing-plan for building a full plan to share with an advisor, investor, or new hire. marketing-council for getting multiple expert perspectives on a specific decision, described in the README as a simulated board of advisors. marketing-loops for founders who want a recurring, self-running workflow rather than a one-off task, useful once you have identified something worth automating on a schedule.

Install commands and the founder-specific sequencing for the entire repo.

Install everything, or install by stage

# Install the entire repo at once
npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills -a claude-code

# Or install just the Stage 0 and Stage 1 skills to start
npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills --skill product-marketing customer-research offers copywriting site-architecture pricing prospecting cold-email directory-submissions -a claude-code

# List every skill in the repo before deciding
npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills --list

# Claude Code plugin method (installs everything as one bundle)
/plugin marketplace add coreyhaines31/marketingskills
/plugin install marketing-skills

The founder sequence, stage by stage

Stage 0, before anything else: product-marketing.

Stage 1, pre-launch and first customers: customer-research, marketing-psychology, offers, copywriting, site-architecture, pricing, prospecting, cold-email, directory-submissions.

Stage 2, early traction and conversion: cro, signup, onboarding, analytics, ab-testing, seo-audit, ai-seo, competitors.

Stage 3, scaling acquisition and protecting revenue: ads, ad-creative, churn-prevention, paywalls, referrals, revops, sales-enablement, launch.

Situational, as needed: content-strategy, programmatic-seo, schema, emails, sms, social, video, copy-editing, image, free-tools, co-marketing, influencer-marketing, community-marketing, lead-magnets, public-relations, competitor-profiling, aso, marketing-ideas, marketing-plan, marketing-council, marketing-loops.

The honest caveat that applies throughout: this sequencing is a reasonable default for a typical B2B SaaS founder, not a rule. A founder whose growth is content-led from day one should pull content-strategy and seo-audit forward into Stage 1. A founder selling into enterprise from the start should pull sales-enablement and revops forward as well. Use the stages as a starting scaffold, not a fixed order.