Companion skill
It runs the frameworks. It does not explain them.
A Claude skill trained on every framework in the book. Bring it your actual venture and it applies the Brand OS to your situation, rather than handing you advice built for someone else's business.
Free. 26 KB. Works on Free, Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans.
It asks before it answers
On the first turn it asks what you are building, what stage you are at, and what is actually stuck. That is deliberate. Confident generic advice is the thing it exists to prevent, and it cannot be specific until it knows those three things.
Capabilities
What it can do for you
Bring it your specific venture and your real positioning problem. The output should be something you could not have written alone.
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Run the Niche Ladder
Work the full ladder for any venture and find the specific, ownable position a well-resourced competitor has not claimed.
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Five Message Experiment
Draft and stress-test all five frames before they go live, so the content calendar follows the winning angle.
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Stress-test your positioning
Hand over your statement and have it attacked for vagueness, competitor overlap and customer specificity.
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Map your Content Triangle
Find your ten pillar ideas, build the derivative pipeline, and organise a calendar around compounding rather than frequency.
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Diagnose your funnel
Walk every stage of the Bootstrapped Funnel to find where qualified visitors drop off, then fix the proof and the friction.
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Plan a launch
Work the 30-day pre-launch sequence, build the narrative, brief your allies, and structure the 72 hours after it goes live.
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Build your Distribution Stack
Audit your channels, name your best performer and your biggest gap, and get a concrete 30-day plan per tier.
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Draft a partnership pitch
Use the four-section structure from the Partnership Playbook. Value first, specific, worth opening.
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Apply any framework
It knows the principles well enough to apply them to situations the book does not cover explicitly.
Honest limits
What it is not
- A replacement for your own strategic thinking
- A ghostwriter whose output you publish without reading
- A source of generic marketing advice disconnected from your situation
- A substitute for your founding context, your customers, or your lived experience of the problem
- A shortcut around the positioning work. It needs your input to produce anything real
- Most useful before you have worked through Parts I and II
Coverage
Frameworks it knows
- The full Brand OS: Signal, Story, System, Scale, Soil
- The Niche Ladder
- Five Message Experiment
- The Content Triangle
- Distribution Stack, four tiers
- The Bootstrapped Funnel
- The Proof Ladder
- The Loyalty Loop
- The Partnership Pyramid
- The Engagement Ladder
- Personal Brand Bridge
- Four Story Types
- Five Founder Archetypes
- The Lean Stack
- Voice Preservation Protocol
- The 30-Day Launch Playbook
- The Credibility Stack
- All 14 chapter exercises
Installation
Five minutes, no technical knowledge
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01
Turn on code execution
Sign in at claude.ai, click your profile picture in the bottom-left corner, open Settings, then Capabilities, and switch on Code execution and file creation. Skills do not appear until this is on. On Team or Enterprise, the organisation owner enables Code execution and Skills first.
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02
Open the Skills page
In the sidebar, go to Customize, then Skills. You should see the built-in skills: Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, Word. That list is how you know you are in the right place.
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03
Upload the file
Click Upload skill, choose bootstrapped-brand.skill, and wait a few seconds. Check the toggle next to it is switched on. If it uploaded but the toggle is off, the skill never loads.
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04
Test it
Start a new conversation and send: I read The Bootstrapped Brand and I want to work on my positioning. It worked if Claude asks you three questions about your venture before giving any advice.
Using it in Claude Code
If you work in the terminal, skip the upload. The .skill file is a zip archive, so unzip reads it directly.
# personal, available in every project unzip bootstrapped-brand.skill -d ~/.claude/skills/ # or scoped to one project unzip bootstrapped-brand.skill -d .claude/skills/
When it does not work
Still stuck? Write to inquiry@bootstrappedbrand.com and say which plan you are on and what you saw on screen.
Email inquiry@bootstrappedbrand.com- I cannot find the Skills page.
- Code execution is still off. Settings, then Capabilities, then Code execution and file creation. Skills does not appear until it is on.
- The upload failed, or the file is greyed out.
- Rename bootstrapped-brand.skill to bootstrapped-brand.zip and upload again. Same file, different extension. Check your browser did not unzip it on download.
- The skill did not load in my conversation.
- Confirm the toggle is on, then start a new conversation. Skills load at the start of a chat, so switching one on mid-chat does nothing for that chat.
- It is asking me questions instead of answering.
- That is correct behaviour. Answer the three questions and the advice comes back about your venture rather than about ventures in general.
No Claude account?
Every prompt the skill runs is written out on the prompt library page. Copy one into whatever tool you already use.