TLDR: We'd rather have 50 tools that work really damn well, than 10,000 that might.
"Focus is about saying, 'No.' And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts." — Steve Jobs
🟢SkillStack waitlist is live at: skillstack.me
Preface
I'm not going to spend the first portion of this article explaining what Claude Code is, or why it's great, or go on some doomsday rant about how if you're not using it for 12 hours a day you're completely cooked and will be unemployed in 6 months.
If you're reading this, chances are you're fairly up to speed with everything that's going on. And if we're being honest, even if you're on the bleeding edge of the technology, you'll still have FOMO (when tech moves this fast everyone permanently feels like they're falling behind)
There have been some really interesting posts on here regarding Claude Code. Is it actually close to AGI and we just can't grasp what AGI means? Is pre-Claude Code to post-Claude Code a bigger leap than pre-ChatGPT to post-ChatGPT?
I don't know, I am not qualified to speak on it, and honestly, I don't spend any time thinking about it.
The Gap
I am a marketer, an entrepreneur. I spend all of my time looking for edges, gaps in the market, and arbitrage opportunities that others haven't spotted. So when the Claude Code stuff slid across my desk, I immediately knew there was a gap.
I didn't know how, I didn't quite understand the technology. Back then (a few months ago lol) it was almost exclusively used for writing actual code. But for some reason, I didn't reject it. I knew of some of the technology that was out, had friends using Cursor and the like, but I was exclusively focused on the AI tools that served me. At the time, I was really diving into maximizing JSON profiles for Claude.
But the Claude Code thing was different. It just felt big, even if I couldn't grasp why.
Fast forward a few months to the winding down of 2025 and that "why" made itself very clever.
The Shift
Right now, it just feels like the early days. Whether you've been using Claude Code since the week it came out, or still honestly have no idea how the hell it works - there's an unshakable feeling that the timeline shifted.
Opus 4.5 just felt like one of those moments. I'm sure if you go back in time to previous leaps in technology, even if most people couldn't describe how it worked, they knew something was up. Things were chattier at the office, your wife was asking if you should be worried at the dinner table.
Everyone knows something massive is happening, but most people (who aren't fully native with the technology) can't quite put their finger on it.
This Time, It's Different
There are developers right now, senior engineers with 10+ years of experience, building workflows in Claude Code that save companies 6 hours a day minimum. And the difference is:
For the first time since the AI doomsday conversations started, it is actual labour replacement. Not prompts or wrappers. These are systems that actually replace labour.
Direct competitors to Anthropic are making posts on X about how they're using Claude Code to build their businesses. Industry veterans are giddy on the timeline posting like they're in the early 2000s dev forums.
The "nothing ever happens" crowd was basically forced at gunpoint to start digging into these tools themselves.
And thus enters the opportunity that nobody else spotted:
So What Are Skills, Actually?
At their core, Skills are a file that allow you to download someone's brain onto your computer. The way they think, execute, and connect dots together.
Without getting into the actual technical details, the genesis of any Skill started with a person, who had a problem, and couldn't find an adequate solution for it. So, enabled by the technology of Claude Code, they were able to solve that problem from first principles.
Instead of identifying a problem and then searching for a solution that already exists, or a combination of different tools and techniques to formulate the solution, a person can create a solution from the ground up. Starting with the problem itself.
This is why we're seeing such insane innovation, and why time seems compressed. Builders have the ability to rapidly solve problems that, otherwise, didn't have a solution tailored its exact scope.
The Current State of Skills
And as it stands now, there are 10,000s of these skills on GitHub right now. Built by talented developers, indie hackers, and baby deer vibecoders alike.
And a lot of them are serious automations, workflows, and systems that are compressing the time it takes to complete tasks to a degree we haven't seen in a long, long time.
Automations that would take teams months to build previously, can be downloaded and implemented with a single npm command.
But the thing is:
Most of them suck.
90% of them are broken, unsafe, or so difficult to setup that you spend more time configuring them than actually using them.
They feel like the early days of vibecoding, where you spent more time yelling at the LLM to LISTEN TO ME STOP MAKING MISTAKES than actually "automating" anything at all.
The 10% That Actually Matter
And for the 10% of skills that are actually good (you know the ones I'm talking about), the builders create unmeasurable value.
How can you even measure the value of someone building a piece of code that can legitimately save you 3-4 hours a DAY?
Well I'll tell you how they're currently measuring them:
GitHub stars and X reposts.
There's a guilt in the builder community that "real developers give back." And I love it, to be perfectly clear. I do not want to posture as some capitalism extremist that thinks everything should have a monetary value attached to it. Open source is a gift.
But it's also created this expectation that work should be free.
And the fact that people are spinning up vibecoded slop SaaS that hardly works and "building in public" to $100k/month, but the guys creating quantum leaps in work output are just giving them away for free, to me, is an unmatched equation.
Again, am I saying they should NEVER be free, and EVERYONE must be paid every time they create something? Hell no.
But I am saying that mathematically speaking, the value created vs. value captured is completely broken.
Why There's No Good Option Right Now
There were marketplaces for "prompts" that blew up, but they're a race to the bottom on $2-5 prompts and never actually just work.
Gumroad has 10% fees, bans sellers, and is associated with scammy snake oil salesmen selling $27 AI generated PDGs.
GitHub stars don't pay the rent, and "sponsors" may be able to buy you a coffee every few weeks with payouts.
None of these are built for the agent economy. They simply do not match the value currently being created every single day.
To me, it feels like hearing everyone talk about how revolutionary peptides are, but you need to basically walk through a dark alley to get your hands on any.
And that's why we built SkillStack. The first legitimate, verified, high-quality marketplace for Claude Code Skills that actually work.
Let Me Be Transparent
Now, for the sake of not starting to sound preachy, let me offer you some fully transparent insight into the business.
Because at the end of the day, we're businessmen, not mission workers. So what's in it for us, right?
In business, the people who succeed the highest are usually the ones who connect the right dots.
The true, genuine innovators are rarely the ones who reap the benefits. Tesla died penniless.
But Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, you name it - the ones who simply spot gaps in the market and act on it - those are the ones that "succeed."
And the best part is that, in theory, if you connect two dots successfully, both dots benefit.
For Uber, drivers have a significantly easier time than if they were driving cabs, and riders get instant access to transportation.
For Airbnb, hosts get to make a decent side income by listing the homes they already live in, and guests get a more comfortable, spacious stay than being stuffed into a hotel.
(I'm not saying that's what it's like in practice. Give companies a few billion dollars in funding and they tend to get greedy. But the point stands).
The Gap We're Filling
Our gap was this:
Builders and marketers are, typically, very different people.
The guy spending 40 hours building an insane automation workflow probably has no idea how to write a landing page. Or run ads. Or build a funnel. And honestly, he doesn't want to learn anyway.
And the marketer who could sell ice to eskimos can't code their way out of a Google Sheet.
(Please don't "well, actually!" me. I know there are fringe cases. The exceptions aren't the rules, Karen).
So, you end up with revolutionary technology sitting in a GitHub repo, created by brilliant people who can't (or won't) distribute them...
And marketers who are spinning up GPT slop PDFs because they don't have the time or resources to build genuinely great products.
This gap - between "I built something amazing" and "people are actually buying and using it" - that's what we're filling.
To be clear, if you want to run Google ads to a free GitHub repo, be my guest. But this is capitalism, baby. People who pay, pay attention.
Why This Matters
So, aside from builders actually getting fairly compensated for their work, why else are we creating a paid marketplace?
- Free removes accountability entirely. You build it, you get your stars, you move on. The repo breaks with the next update, and unless you actively use the workflow or really care about the people, it'll probably stay that way
- When someone pays, maintenance matters more. Documentation matters more. It actually has to work
- Risk of refunds is the economics of caring about the product
- A paying ecosystem grows itself. Non-profit organizations have been fighting for years for higher salaries so they can actually incentivize talented people to create an impact'
Addressing The Inevitable
Before we continue, let me rip the bandaid off:
I am fully aware of the inevitable backlash this is likely to cause for certain people. We may seem greedy, like we're selling penny stocks to retirees. Trying to explain that we're building this platform to actually benefit builders is prone to falling on some deaf ears.
It's par for the course. We know our intentions, the people backing us know them too. We seek not to convince people of a "better way," but rather to just fill a gap we've observed needs to be filled.
TLDR
We'd rather have 50 tools that actually work than 10,000 that might. Quality over quantity, as they say.
So, What Did We Actually Build?
SkillStack is a curated marketplace for Claude Code skills, agents, and workflows.
Every upload gets verified by expertly trained AI models that scan for bugs, vulnerabilities, and to be honest, AI slop.
Creators set their price and get compensated for their work.
We handle the listing process, the product pages, the infrastructure, verification, and even the distribution (yes, we will actively invest in getting people to buy your product. But we'll touch on that in the next post).
We take a small percentage of the purchasing price, one time, no small print. Not sure what the exact figure is, we're still working that out with our accountants. But we'll get it as low as we realistically can.
Builders just get to build. Buyers just get to buy.
Who Is This For?
This is for the senior developer that got fed up seeing these half-assed attempts and decided to fix a problem the right way.
The GitHub repos with 12 stars and zero revenue, pissed that some of these half-working n8n automations are making a doctors salary just because the person selling them has an audience.
The vibe coder who tried to use 20 different tools they saw on their timeline, and ended up just doing the work manually after a few hours.
If you've built something great, come get paid for it.
If you want tools that actually work, come get them.
We Are Building The Rails for the Age of Agents.
The waitlist is live at:
We're working around the clock to get the platform live (and working really well) as soon as we can.
Stay posted for updates.
– Riley & Michael SkillStack Est. 2026