Startup Opportunity Hunter

Turn opportunity hunting from waiting for inspiration into a repeatable drill — four hunting grounds, why-now trigger, pick-and-shovel test, four kill gates.

When to use it

Sitting on an observation:

I keep getting nagged by the same friction, or I just saw a news headline / policy shift / new model capability that smells like an opportunity — I want the skill to tell me whether it is real.

Reading a fresh catalyst:

A big player just entered a market / a model just got cheap / a new regulation just dropped — I want to trace the causal chain and figure out whether this is tailwind or headwind, a trigger or a death knell.

Pick-and-shovel judgment:

I'm thinking about building a tool / platform / infrastructure — I want the skill to check whether this shovel is "everyone must buy no matter who strikes gold," or a reverse shovel that big players give away free or one that only pays out while prices stay high.

Brainstorming directions:

I'm hunting for a startup direction — I want the skill to shift me from "think up ideas" to "pick the right vantage point": which hunting ground to camp in, which question to press the catalyst on.

Culling my backlog:

I've stockpiled a few candidate ideas — I want to run the four kill gates on each and keep only the ones that survive.

Not for:

Deep death-risk review of surviving AI candidates → ai-startup-feasibility-check; writing business plans / pitch decks / competitor analysis → not triggered.

What it produces

Verdicts are binary — survive or kill, never a wishy-washy "maybe think more".

• Hunting-ground placement: puts your idea into one of the four grounds (daily personal friction / frontier capability shift / regulatory change / dirty work in unsexy industries), or calls out that it belongs to none
• why-now trigger test: forces a "who + right now + must pay for what" answer; if you can't produce one, you get a warning
• Four kill gates: real pain / defensible against big players / leverage direction / unit economics — run in sequence, later gates skipped once an earlier one fails
• Thin-slice suggestion (survivors only): one sentence on the smallest end-to-end real-world path to test
• AI-track handoff: for AI-domain survivors, actively suggests running ai-startup-feasibility-check for a structural death-risk review
• Never does: business plans, pitch decks, competitor reports

Prerequisites & boundaries

Prerequisite:

A concrete candidate (observation / friction / news / policy / new model capability) or a clear direction intent. Show up empty-handed with "find me an opportunity" — you'll get bounced back to name your hunting ground first.

Neighboring skills:

Task	Route to
Deep death-risk review of surviving AI candidates	ai-startup-feasibility-check

Not for:

• Business plans / pitch decks / competitor analysis
• Tech-stack selection for a project you've already committed to
• Generic industry trend reports unrelated to opportunity hunting

Subtle edges:

• Asks "is this change an opportunity?" → triggers; asks "how will AI reshape industry X?" as a broad trend discussion → doesn't
• AI survivor → actively hands off to ai-startup-feasibility-check; non-AI survivor → stops at the fast filter