The testimonial-ask skill: get a quote you can actually use

Two things go wrong with testimonials. Most people never ask, because it feels needy. The ones who do ask so vaguely that they get back great to work with, which is warm, useless, and sells nothing to the next person deciding whether to hire you.

testimonial-ask writes the message, picks the moment to send it, and gives you the three questions that produce a complete quote: the situation before, what's specifically different now, and what they'd tell someone on the fence. It also covers the version where you draft the quote for them and let them edit, which gets far more replies because you've turned writing into a yes or no.

The skill is free and sits in our public freeskills repo. Nothing to wire up.

Three lines: grab the repo, make the folder Claude Code reads skills from, copy this one in.

Start a new session and it's live. That's the whole install. No API keys, no config.

Type /testimonial-ask. It asks when this person last said something good and how long ago you delivered, then it picks the moment and tells you which one it chose. Right after unprompted praise is the best one there is and almost everyone lets it pass. Two to four weeks after delivery produces the strongest quotes, because by then there's an actual outcome to point at.

Then it writes the ask, under 80 words, with an easy out built in, meant to be sent in the same thread you already talk in. Never a form link. It saves everything to ~/testimonials/ under the client's name, including the three questions, the follow-up line, and a permission status you update later. A good first result is a message you could send without editing.

If somebody messaged you this month saying it's working, that's the one to run first. Quote their words exactly, because the skill builds the draft only from things they really said.

When someone is busy or slow to reply, you write the quote and let them change it. It only works when it's built from things they actually said, so give the skill that material.

Replies come back long and out of order. That's a good problem. You may cut and reorder, you may not add.

Sixty seconds on what this skill does, written to be spoken rather than read.

1. 1Hook: there's a brand new free Claude skill that takes you from a client said thanks and you did nothing with it, to a quote on your site that closes the next person.
2. 2Mechanism: you tell it who the client is and the last good thing they said. It picks the right moment to ask, writes a message under 80 words with three specific questions in it, and gives you a second version where you draft the quote yourself so all they have to do is say yes. When the reply comes back long and messy, it cuts and reorders it into a short quote and a longer one, and writes the message that asks permission to use it.
3. 3Transformation: you stop being the person with no proof. The next time somebody's deciding whether to work with you, a real customer answers the question for you.
4. 4Close: the ask is free, one of 55 skills. If you need the client before you can ask them anything, Claude Code Club is 9 dollars a month. Link below.

Tonight: install it, pick the person who said something nice most recently, and send the ask in the thread you already have with them.