Marketing Mindset - Setup Guide¶
Source: skills.sh (28.8K installs) GitHub: axelfreeman/marketing-mindset (52⭐, MIT) Category: Marketing / Growth Strategy First Seen: Sep 2026 (repo created Sep 1, 2026) Quality Tier: 🟢 Production (Gen Agent Trust Hub Pass / Socket Pass / Snyk Pass)
Marketing Mindset is "the marketing OS for AI agents" by Axel Freeman - a 15-year hands-on B2B internet marketer. It is deliberately not another bag of CRO/SEO/copywriting tactics; it encodes how a working marketer decides, so an agent gives a real opinion instead of a template. Six principles (no stale sources, three-month horizons, user's right to make the first move, fast-testable hypotheses, marketing runs ahead of the product, marketing never works for free) plus client-stage playbooks, competitor-as-source-of-truth rules, and memorable heuristics. The README's adapter table lists Hermes (Nous) as a tested platform using SKILL.md, alongside Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, ChatGPT, Grok, and others.
Installation¶
npx skills add axelfreeman/marketing-mindset
For weaker or low-context models the publisher ships a compressed variant (SKILL.lite.md) with the same mindset condensed to essentials. A first-client gate script (scripts/first-client-gate.py) is included for evaluation.
Prerequisites¶
| Requirement | Details |
|---|---|
| No API keys | Fully self-contained skill - SKILL.md, principles, and playbooks |
| Hermes Agent | Reads SKILL.md natively; listed in the publisher's tested-models table |
| Optional: examples | examples/demo-transcript.md shows a worked example (SaaS for finance, 0 customers → sharp 3-month plan) |
What It Provides¶
| Capability | How It Works |
|---|---|
| Decision framework | Evaluates "should I do X to get Y" requests against the six principles instead of dumping tactics |
| Three-month horizon | Kills 2-year marketing cycles; every idea evaluated on a 90-day usefulness window |
| Client-stage playbook | First client by hand and free → 2-10 by copying competitors → scale |
| Competitor source of truth | Positioning and angles reverse-engineered from what competitors actually do |
| First-move doctrine | The user has the right to make the first move - bold or hacky first steps are not blocked |
| Exchange accounting | Every marketing action must trade for something; zero-exchange work is refused with the math spelled out |
| Heuristics | The McDonald's Burger (photograph the product better than it is), think like a cancer cell, the stop-list, the Despair Dividend |
Quick Start¶
- Install the skill (above)
- Trigger it with a decision question: "should we do X to get Y", "where do we get first customers", or "evaluate this positioning"
- The skill answers as a director-level marketer - honest feedback, three-month framing, concrete deliverables (competitor analysis, three outbound angles, sharper positioning)
- For a worked example, read
examples/demo-transcript.md - Pair with execution skills (cold-email, content-strategy) once the direction is decided
CorpusIQ Use Cases¶
- Positioning and launch work - sharpen CorpusIQ messaging, launch plans, and competitive angles with an operator's framework rather than generic LLM doctrine
- Outreach decision support - judge cold-outreach campaigns and affiliate programs against the exchange principle before burning sends
- Content angle selection - belief-bridge and help-first content angles stress-tested against the three-month usefulness window
- Growth experiment design - every hypothesis must be fast-testable by any teammate; the skill enforces the test design discipline
- Investor and partner decks - marketing claims and go-to-market narratives get the same honest due-diligence read the skill gives founders
Limitations / Verification¶
- Opinionated framework - the skill is one marketer's method, not a strategy library; it deliberately ships judgment, not templates
- Freshness dependency - principle 1 forbids learning from stale sources; the skill expects recent data to work from, which agents must fetch themselves
- B2B bias - strongest for services and B2B SaaS; consumer and marketplace dynamics get partial coverage
Security¶
All three skills.sh security audits pass (verified Sep 7, 2026):
| Audit | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Gen Agent Trust Hub | Pass |
| Socket | Pass |
| Snyk | Pass |
Related¶
- Content Strategy - Full Planning Framework Setup
- Revenue-Centric Design Skill - SaaS Conversion Playbook Setup
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