create-business

# Create a Business

Take a raw idea to a business you can defend on every axis: who it is for, what job it does, why it is different, why it wins, what it costs, and why anyone would pay. This journey runs ten phases in sequence, looping back as evidence accumulates. It is interactive — the agent asks before every decision — and resumable: all state lives in `docs/` so you can stop and restart across sessions. The order is the point: demand before building, strategy before scale, price before product.

## Core Principle

**Earn your evidence before you spend your runway: demand before building, strategy before scale, price before product.** You can be wrong about your product in a week, or wrong about your business in a year — pick the week. This skill sequences the phases, asks the questions at every decision point, and records what you decide in `docs/`. The constituent skills carry the method — invoke them rather than improvising their frameworks.

## Journey Map

| Phase | Skill | Question it answers | Artifact |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | jobs-to-be-done | What progress is the customer really hiring us for? | Creates docs/CUSTOMER.md |
| 2 | mom-test | Is the job real, painful, and worth paying to solve? | Extends docs/CUSTOMER.md — GATE |
| 3 | design-sprint | Does the concept survive contact with five real customers? | Creates docs/EXPERIMENTS.md |
| 4 | lean-startup | What is the smallest MVP that tests the riskiest assumption? | Creates docs/PRODUCT.md; extends docs/EXPERIMENTS.md |
| 5 | good-strategy-bad-strategy | What is the one critical challenge, and how do we win? | Creates docs/STRATEGY.md |
| 6 | blue-ocean-strategy | Where is the uncontested space we can own? | Extends docs/STRATEGY.md |
| 7 | obviously-awesome | What are we, and why does that matter, in 30 seconds? | Creates docs/POSITIONING.md |
| 8 | hundred-million-offers | What makes this offer impossible to refuse? | Creates docs/OFFER.md |
| 9 | monetizing-innovation | What will people actually pay, and per what? | Extends docs/OFFER.md |
| 10 | crossing-the-chasm | Which single segment do we dominate first? | Extends docs/STRATEGY.md |

## Operating Rules

1. **Resume first.** Before anything else, read `docs/CREATE-BUSINESS-PLAN.md` and every artifact in the Journey Map. If the tracker exists, summarize the journey state in 3-5 lines and ask which phase to enter. Done when the user has confirmed an entry point. A journey with a tracker is resumed, never restarted.
2. **Intake on first run only.** No tracker: run the Intake below, then create `docs/CREATE-BUSINESS-PLAN.md` with every phase statused `pending | in-progress | awaiting-evidence | done | deferred: reason | skipped: reason`. Done when the tracker exists and the user has confirmed the phase plan.
3. **Phase entry.** Announce: what the phase does, the decision it forces, the artifact it produces, rough effort. Offer proceed / skip / defer — phases marked GATE may be deferred, never skipped. Mark the phase `in-progress` on proceed. Done when the user chose.
4. **Skill invocation and fallback.** Load the phase's skill and use it: each phase's Invoke line names the skill by slug — use that skill to run the phase. If it is not available, offer: `npx skills add wondelai/skills/<slug> --global`. If the user declines, run the phase from its Brief — the minimum viable method. State which mode you are in.
5. **In-phase decisions.** Ask every question under "Decide with the user" — with concrete options and your recommendation. Record the choice in the tracker's Key Decisions. A decision made silently is a defect.
6. **Phase exit.** Present the draft artifact content for sign-off before writing. On approval: write or extend the docs/ files, update the tracker (status, Key Decisions, Next Actions). Done when the files are written and the phase row shows `done`.
7. **Artifact discipline.** Read before writing; create a file only if missing, otherwise extend — add or update your sections, preserve everyone else's. Files are UPPERCASE in `docs/`. Every recommendation lands as a checkbox or a table row with owner and priority. See [references/artifact-templates.md](references/artifact-templates.md) when creating a docs/ file for the first time — create it from the full skeleton (all section headings), then fill the sections your phase names.
8. **The agent prepares and processes; only the human talks to customers.** Draft interview guides and score transcripts, then pause with status `awaiting-evidence` until the user returns with notes. Never simulate a customer — a role-played interview confirms whatever you hope is true.

## Intake

Ask these before creating the tracker (skip any already answered):

1. What is the raw idea, in one or two sentences? (seeds the job reconstruction in Phase 1)
2. Who do you imagine the customer is, and how do they solve this today? (feeds Competing Alternatives; a tight segment speeds Phases 7 and 10)
3. What customer access do you have — a list, a community, warm intros? (gates Phases 2-4; without access the human-only interview phases stall)
4. What evidence already exists — past interviews, a waitlist, sales, a prototype? (lets us fast-track or skip discovery already done)
5. Is this B2B or B2C — and if B2B, sales-led or self-serve? Is it a marketplace or network product? (routes optional predictable-revenue and cold-start-problem)
6. What is your runway and deadline? (sets phase depth and whether to defer strategy phases)
7. Is any product already built? (if so this may be the wrong journey — route to grow-business or improve-business)

Phase-skip heuristics: skip Phase 1 when a validated job statement with three dimensions already exists in CUSTOMER.md; skip Phase 3 when a working prototype has already been tested with 5+ target users; defer Phase 6 for a clearly-differentiated niche until the kernel is set; defer Phases 5-10 until Phase 2 returns real commitments — no strategy on unvalidated demand. Then create `docs/CREATE-BUSIN