The first-product skill: one guide you can sell tonight

You've been good at something for years. There's still nothing on the internet with your name on it that a person can buy for $27.

Usually the reason is that the thing you're planning is too big: a course, a membership, a book. The first-product skill goes the other way. It takes one thing you know how to do, interviews you for about four questions, confirms the chapter list with you, and then writes the actual guide. It skips the outline and writes the real 20 to 40 pages, saved as a clean file that converts to PDF without breaking, plus the title, pitch, price, and bullets for the product page.

You'll find it among the 55 free skills in our freeskills repo. You finish the sitting owning something, which is a different feeling than finishing a planning session.

Every skill is a folder Claude Code loads at startup. These three lines put this one there and turn it into a slash command.

Restart Claude Code, or just open a new session, and the command is there. That's all the setup there is. No API keys, nothing to configure.

Type /first-product. It pulls what it can from your profile, then asks for what's missing: what you know how to do, who it's for, and what changes for them. After that it asks about your angle, the three to five lessons you'd teach someone starting from zero, a writing sample so it matches how you write, and your price. If you don't know the price it picks one and tells you why in a line.

Then it shows you a chapter list. That's the one checkpoint in the whole run, so read it properly. Say yes and it writes the entire guide in one go without stopping to check in.

A good first result: two files in ~/guides/, one being the guide itself and one being the listing copy plus a checklist of what's left. That checklist is honest about the parts a skill can't touch, like making the storefront account and connecting a payment account. Your next move is converting the guide file to a PDF, because everything after that waits on the PDF existing.

Best starting point is the thing you end up explaining to every single client or friend who asks. Give it that.

The skill asks for a writing sample. Hand it one up front and the whole guide comes back sounding like you.

If the guide is already written and it's the listing that's stopping you, ask for that piece on its own.

Here's what this does to the product you keep meaning to make, said out loud.

1. 1Hook: you can have a 20 to 40 page guide written tonight without being a writer. Tell this free Claude skill what you already know.
2. 2Step 1: you tell it what you know, who it's for, and the three to five things you'd teach a beginner.
3. 3Step 2: it turns those lessons into a chapter list and shows it to you first, so a wrong structure gets caught before a single chapter is written.
4. 4That pause is the whole point.
5. 5Step 3: you say yes, and it writes the whole guide in one pass.
6. 6The guide is not the last thing it writes.
7. 7Step 4: it writes the title, the pitch, and the price.
8. 8Transformation: you stop having an idea for a product and start having a product. The next thing you do is upload a file, not plan another one.
9. 9Close: it costs nothing, and there are 55 of them in that repo. Getting people to actually buy it is the part we work on inside Claude Code Club, $9 a month. Link below.

Tonight: run it on the one thing you already explain over and over, and accept the chapter list it gives you unless something's genuinely wrong. The guide gets written while you're still in the mood to write it.