First Customer Finder — a skill for Claude Code, claude.ai, and Cowork

Give Claude your startup's URL. Get back a shortlist of evidence-backed potential first customers — each tied to a real public signal you can open and read — plus scores, suggested channels, drafted outreach openers, and a polished standalone HTML report.

Research-only by design: it defines your ideal customer profile, mines public discussions for pain and buying signals, verifies every source, and drafts openers. It never sends a message.

What you get

Ideal customer profile analysis (primary + adjacent ICP with disqualifiers)
Parallel public-signal research across five angles: explicit demand, pain, workarounds, switching, timing
Source verification — every prospect links to the original public page
Weighted 0–100 qualification score (pain, fit, timing, reachability, evidence quality)
Personalized outreach openers, grounded only in the cited source
A seven-day manual validation plan
A standalone HTML report (light/dark, print-friendly)

Sample first-customer report generated by the skill

Sample report (fictional demo data). The HTML report is generated on every surface: Claude Code saves it to outputs/ locally, Cowork and claude.ai offer it as a download from the run's outputs.

Install

Skills CLI (fastest):

npx skills add carolinacherry/claude-first-customer-finder-skill

npm installer (copies into ~/.claude/skills, respects CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR, --skills-dir to override):

npx --yes claude-first-customer-finder-skill

Claude Code plugin (this repo is its own marketplace):

/plugin marketplace add carolinacherry/claude-first-customer-finder-skill
/plugin install first-customer-finder@carolinacherry

Claude desktop app / Cowork: download first-customer-finder.zip from Releases, then Settings → Skills → Add → Upload a skill.

Manual:

git clone https://github.com/carolinacherry/claude-first-customer-finder-skill.git
node claude-first-customer-finder-skill/scripts/install.js

Use

Start a new session and ask naturally:

Find ten potential first customers for https://yourstartup.com

Modes: quick (5 prospects), standard (10, default), deep (20 + pain-pattern mapping), design-partners, b2b, community. Just mention one: "run it in b2b mode".

How long it takes

This is a deep-research skill, not a chat answer — it fetches and verifies real pages before anything reaches your shortlist. A standard run takes ~10–15 minutes in Claude Code and noticeably longer in Cowork (20–30+ minutes), where each new domain needs a fetch-permission click and agents stall until you answer. To speed things up:

Say "quick mode" — 5 prospects instead of 10 cuts the research roughly in half.
You can shrink scope mid-run: type "quick mode is fine — wrap up with what's verified" and it re-plans instead of finishing every search bucket.
In Cowork, answer permission prompts promptly and pick "Allow all for this website" so each domain only asks once.

The research fans out across parallel subagents in both Claude Code and Cowork (sequential elsewhere). On Cowork, expect per-domain permission prompts during source verification — choose "Allow all for this website" so each domain asks only once; research clusters on a handful of domains, so the prompts stop quickly. (Each prompt is the skill verifying a source at its original page rather than trusting a search snippet.)

Privacy & safety rules baked in

Public, intentionally shared professional/business information only
No login walls, paywalls, data brokers, scraped contact databases, or personal contact discovery
No targeting by sensitive traits
Prospects are labeled "potential customers based on public signals" — never claimed as interested or consenting
Outreach is drafted, never sent

Structure

.claude-plugin/
  plugin.json                        # plugin manifest
  marketplace.json                   # self-serve marketplace catalog
skills/first-customer-finder/
  SKILL.md                           # workflow hub
  references/research-framework.md   # query buckets, scoring rubric, outreach rules
  references/report-schema.md        # JSON contract for the report generator
  scripts/generate_report.py         # stdlib-only HTML report generator
scripts/install.js                   # npm installer

Credit

Inspired by codex-first-customer-finder-skill by Francesco Mistero — the Codex original. This is an independent rewrite for Claude: fresh skill text, a source-verification pass before qualification, parallel subagent research, and a new report design.

License

MIT

Claude First Customer Finder Skill

README