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Agent Skill Marketplace

The pain of building AI agents from scratch when most capabilities (web scraping, data extraction, API integration) are repeatedly reimplemented across thousands of projects.

App Concept

  • Marketplace of pre-built, tested agent "skills" that handle common tasks like browser automation, file processing, API orchestration, and data validation
  • Each skill comes with standardized input/output schemas, comprehensive test coverage, and performance benchmarks
  • Visual skill composer where you drag-and-drop capabilities to build custom agents without writing integration code
  • Built-in skill testing sandbox where you can validate behavior against your specific use cases before integration
  • Automatic version management and dependency resolution across skill combinations

Core Mechanism

  • Community-contributed skill library with quality scoring based on reliability, performance, and usage metrics
  • Standardized skill interface following a protocol (inspired by MCP - Model Context Protocol) that ensures compatibility
  • Visual workflow builder with real-time preview of agent behavior across skill chains
  • Built-in skill analytics showing execution time, success rate, and cost per invocation
  • Skill versioning system with automated regression testing when dependencies update
  • Revenue sharing model where skill creators earn based on usage metrics and quality ratings

Monetization Strategy

  • Free tier for public skills with usage limits (100 executions/day)
  • Developer tier ($49/mo) for private skill development and unlimited public skill usage
  • Team tier ($199/mo) for private skill libraries, priority support, and advanced analytics
  • Enterprise tier (custom pricing) for on-premise deployment and SLA guarantees
  • Transaction fee (5%) on marketplace sales for premium/commercial skills
  • Skill certification program ($299 one-time) for verified, enterprise-ready capabilities

Viral Growth Angle

  • "Show HN" moment when developers share complex agents built in minutes vs days of custom coding
  • Skill creators showcase earnings, creating FOMO for other developers to contribute
  • Integration showcase where companies share how they reduced agent development time by 10x
  • Weekly "Featured Skill" highlighting creative solutions drives recurring engagement
  • GitHub Action integration auto-suggests relevant skills based on repository analysis

Existing projects

  • Claude Skills - Anthropic's newly launched skill system (announced today!)
  • GPT Store - OpenAI's GPT marketplace but limited to ChatGPT ecosystem
  • LangChain Hub - Prompt and chain templates, not executable skills
  • Inkeep Agents - Agent builder (on HN today) but focused on customer support
  • Zapier - Workflow automation but not AI-native
  • n8n - Workflow automation, starting to add AI capabilities

Evaluation Criteria

  • Emotional Trigger: Be indispensable - developers want to ship agents faster and focus on unique value
  • Idea Quality: Rank: 10/10 - Directly inspired by Claude Skills launch today; massive market timing advantage
  • Need Category: Integration & Acceptance Needs - seamless integration with existing systems and user-friendly interfaces
  • Market Size: $2B+ addressable market as every company building AI agents needs reusable components
  • Build Complexity: High - requires skill protocol design, marketplace infrastructure, and sandbox execution environment
  • Time to MVP: 10-12 weeks with AI coding agents for basic marketplace and 20-30 seed skills
  • Key Differentiator: Open marketplace with standardized protocol vs vendor-locked ecosystems; focuses on composability and testing