I Turned Business Books into Claude Code Skills

Every founder has a shelf of business books. The Mom Test, $100M Offers, Traction, The Lean Startup. You read them, nod along, highlight a few passages, and then... go back to building exactly what you were building before. The problem isn't the books. The frameworks are excellent. The problem is applying them honestly to your own situation. You have to be the analyst — on yourself — without flinching. And most of us flinch. So I built book-skills: an open-source collection of Claude Code skills that read your actual code, landing page, and business artifacts, then apply the book's framework with evidence — not vibes.

What Are Claude Code Skills?

Skills are structured instructions that Claude Code can invoke as slash commands. Think of them as specialized agents — each one encodes a specific framework and knows exactly what to look for in your project. When you install book-skills and type /mom-test, Claude doesn't give you generic advice. It reads your codebase, your marketing copy, your pricing page — and then holds all of it against The Mom Test's principles. Every critique comes with file paths, line numbers, and direct quotes.

The First Two Skills

The Mom Test (Rob Fitzpatrick)

The Mom Test teaches you to stop asking people if they'd use your product (everyone says yes) and instead ask about their past behavior. The skill applies this to your product:

Reads your code and marketing to understand what you've built
Identifies claims that won't survive contact with real customers
Finds where you're solving assumed problems vs. observed ones
Ends with a 7-day binary-signal experiment — not "do more research"

$100M Offers (Alex Hormozi)

Hormozi's value equation breaks down why people buy: Dream Outcome × Perceived Likelihood ÷ Time Delay × Effort & Sacrifice. The skill:

Scores each component of your offer
Audits Grand Slam components: naming, bonuses, guarantee, scarcity, urgency, price anchor
Names the single weakest link
Rewrites your offer with the fix applied

Why This Works Better Than Reading the Book Again

Three reasons: 1. Evidence over feelings. When you self-assess, you're biased. The skill quotes your own landing page copy back at you. "You claim X on line 47 of your homepage, but your codebase shows Y." That's harder to dismiss than a voice in your head saying "maybe I should rethink this." 2. Structured output. Every skill produces a specific format — not "some thoughts." A report with scores, citations, a diagnosis, and a single next action. You can act on it immediately or share it with a co-founder. 3. The hard part is the application. Reading The Mom Test takes 2 hours. Applying it properly — reading 50 files of your own code, cross-referencing marketing claims, identifying the riskiest assumption — takes much longer. The skill compresses that into a single invocation.

Installation

The easiest path is the Claude Code plugin system:

/plugins → Add Marketplace → https://github.com/sumitvairagar/book-skills

After installing, /mom-test and /100m-offers appear in your slash menu. More skills are coming — fastlane-millionaire, traction, hooked, and others.

What Makes a Good Book-Skill?

Not every book qualifies. The bar is:

The book gives a repeatable framework, not just stories
The framework needs to be applied to specifics (not generic advice like "be customer-obsessed")
The user can't easily do it themselves in 5 minutes — it requires reading many files and cross-referencing
The output has a clear shape — a structured report, not "some thoughts"

Books that pass this bar: The Mom Test, $100M Offers, Traction, Hooked, Crossing the Chasm, The Lean Startup. Books that don't: pure motivation books, memoirs (however great), frameworks too abstract to apply to artifacts.

The Philosophy

A few rules I hold for every skill in the repo:

One book, one skill. Don't blend frameworks.
No flattery. If the news is bad, the news is bad.
Binary signals over more research. Action items end with yes/no experiments.
Attribution. These are the authors' frameworks — buy the books.

Try It

If you're building a product and have Claude Code, install book-skills and run /mom-test on your project. The output might be uncomfortable — that's the point. The books already told you the framework. Now you have something that applies it without letting you off easy. → github.com/sumitvairagar/book-skills PRs welcome. If there's a business book with a framework you wish someone would just apply to your project, open an issue.

I Turned Business Books into Claude Code Skills — Here's Why