Cold Start Problem — Network Effects Playbook Skill for Muse
Launch products that need users to be worth anything
- What
- Launch products that need users to be worth anything
- Cost
- Free
- Needs
- nothing to install — just your product idea and whatever you know about your target users today. Fetch the SKILL.md plus the references/ folder (case studies, atomic-network, hard-side, and tipping playbooks).
- Install
- Copy the installer prompt below into your Muse — your agent does the rest.
Distills Andrew Chen's *The Cold Start Problem* into an actionable launch-and-growth playbook for networked products — marketplaces, social apps, messaging, collaboration tools: it scores your launch plan 0-10, then walks you through the five stages (cold start, tipping point, escape velocity, hitting the ceiling, the moat), with atomic-network scoping, the hard-side-first principle (solve for sellers/creators/organizers before the easy side), tipping playbooks (invite-only, paid launch, seeding), and an eight-mistake diagnostic with fixes. Discovered via skills.sh. Honest note: this is a strategy framework drawn from a book, not a plug-and-play growth tool — it gives you sharp questions and scored answers, not users; examples and case-study references live in the repo's references/ folder, fetch them too. Skill Harbor never reviews the code, review it yourself before use. Not verified.
Curated by Skill Harbor — free, open-source skill (MIT) by @wondelai.
Version:
Install
Prerequisites: nothing to install — just your product idea and whatever you know about your target users today. Fetch the SKILL.md plus the references/ folder (case studies, atomic-network, hard-side, and tipping playbooks). Install "Cold Start Problem — Network Effects Playbook Skill for Muse" for me. Scores my launch plan 0-10 and coaches me through launching and scaling a networked product (marketplace, social app, messaging, collaboration): atomic-network scoping, solving the hard side first, tipping playbooks, and diagnosing stalled growth — distilled from Andrew Chen's "The Cold Start Problem". Repository: https://github.com/wondelai/skills 1. Fetch the SKILL.md file (and its references/ folder) from the skill folder "cold-start-problem" in the repository into a temporary folder and summarize what it does in one or two sentences. 2. Safety check: review the SKILL.md and any bundled files for anything suspicious (unexpected network calls, shell commands, credential harvesting). This repo should contain zero secrets in code, credentials only via the secure vault, allowed hosts declared in the SKILL.md. Verify that holds here; STOP on any red flag and tell me. 3. Install it as a skill: copy SKILL.md and its helper files into the agent's skills directory, in a folder named "cold-start-problem". 4. Verify with no network calls: frontmatter valid, files in place. 5. Report what was installed, where, and what I still need to do myself (e.g. describe my product and its two sides so the first plan can be scored). GitHub is optional: if I have a GitHub account or the gh CLI, you may use it; otherwise public access is fine. Rules: don't touch anything outside the temp folder and the install target. If anything looks off, stop and ask me.
Questions
How do I install a build?
Every product page includes a copy-paste install prompt. Paste it into your Muse and it sets the build up for you — no manual configuration.
Where does my money go?
Straight to the seller. Skill Harbor never processes payments: checkout happens on the seller’s own page, usually Stripe.
What does the ✓ next to a creator’s name mean?
It means we confirmed the identity of the person behind the listing. It says nothing about the code itself — always check a build before installing it.