Agent skill · magnus919
yc-weekly-growth-compass
Paul Graham's "Startup = Growth" framework as an operational tool. Computes
What it needs
About 5k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
Weekly Growth Compass "If there's one number every founder should always know, it's the company's growth rate. That's the measure of a startup. If you don't know that number, you don't even know if you're doing well or badly." — Paul Graham, "Startup = Growth" (September 2012) This skill operationalizes Y Combinator's core growth philosophy into a repeatable weekly practice. The growth rate is not just a metric — it's a compass for every decision a founder makes. When to Load Trigger Example --------- --------- "What's my growth rate?" Routine founder check-in "Are we growing fast enough?" Trajectory anxiety "Should we prioritize feature X or growth Y?" Decision framing "Where will we be in a year?" Projection/planning "How does our growth compare to YC benchmarks?" Benchmarking "Is this initiative worth doing?" Growth compass check "How long to double our revenue?" Milestone planning How to Use Quick Rule of Thumb (No Script) YC's empirical benchmarks, based on measuring thousands of startups: Weekly Growth Annualized YC Assessment -------------- ------------ --------------- 1% 1.7x Concerning — haven't found product-market fit 2% 2.8x Below average — need significant acceleration 5% 12.6x Good — solid trajectory, keep pushing 7% 33.7x Very good — exceptional progress 10% 142.0x Outstanding — rare breakout trajectory The inflection point: 5-7% weekly is the target zone YC coaches for. Growth Compass Exercise (No Script) Use this heuristic for any strategic decision: 1. State your target weekly growth rate (e.g., "7%") 2. For any proposed initiative, ask: "Does this serve our target growth rate?" 3. If yes → do it. If no → defer or drop it. 4. At end of week, measure actual growth. If you missed target, something else matters more than the thing you did. This transforms the bewildering complexity of startup building into a single optimization problem, exactly as Graham intended. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills magnus919/yc-weekly-growth-compass