Marketing Mindset

The marketing OS for AI agents — think like a marketer first, get tactics as the output. Not another bag of CRO/SEO/copywriting tricks. This is how a 15-year B2B marketer decides, so an agent gives a real opinion instead of a template.

📄 Landing page & docs: https://axelfreeman.github.io/marketing-mindset/

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Test limits — how much volume before a test can be judged

Below the limit you are measuring randomness, not the market. Declare the volume before the test starts.

Channel	Minimum volume before a verdict	What it tells you
Cold email — deliverability/wording smoke test	50–100 sends	Whether the email lands and reads plausibly. Not whether the offer works.
Cold email — reply-rate test	~1,500–2,000 sends per variant	Whether one variant genuinely beats another instead of a quiet week.
Cold email — subject line / open-rate test	100–500 sends per version	How the subject performs (opens are frequent).
Landing page smoke test	100–200 targeted visitors	Whether the promise produces interest (≈30 leads at 15% capture from 200 cold visitors).
Strict A/B test	~10,000 visitors per variation, ≥300 conversions	Statistical significance — usually out of reach for a startup's first tests.
Paid ad	Spend gate of 1–3× target CPA, 48–72 hours	Keep / re-hook / kill. Never judge during the learning phase.
Cold calls	Volume until a repeatable pattern appears in one segment	Whether the script survives real conversations.

The rule that follows: what comes easy, scale it. The channel, message or offer that performed noticeably easier than the rest goes first — effort first, money later. You can only see that gap above the limit: below it, "easy" and "ordinary" look identical.

Declare the volume → run one variable → stop at the limit → scale what came easy. Anything else is interpretation.

Full write-up with sources: https://axelfreeman.github.io/marketing-mindset/

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The gap this fills

Every other "marketing skill" for AI agents hands over tactics. Nobody packages how a marketer thinks. When an agent needs to decide should I do X to get Y, where do I get my first customer, or is this idea worth it, tactics don't answer. This skill does.

See it work

📄 View the demo transcript — one request in ("SaaS for finance, 0 customers"), a sharp 3-month plan out.

The problem

Founders and solo operators can generate code, not content. "How do I do marketing" is genuinely unclear to them. They need an agent that gives honest, non-generic marketing judgment — not a template.

The fix

Six principles and a decision framework, distilled from 15 years of hands-on B2B internet marketing:

1. Don't learn marketing from stale sources — skip the first Google results and cached LLM doctrine
2. Three-month horizon — no 2-year cycles; be useful within 3 months
3. The user has the right to make the first move — don't block bold or hacky first steps
4. Every hypothesis must be testable fast — any teammate can run the test
5. Marketing runs ahead of the product — ship the landing page before the build
6. Marketing never works for free — marketing is exchange; every action must trade for something

Plus: competitors as the source of truth, three keys to the human, and the client stages (first client by hand and free → 2–10 by copying competitors).

The metaphors (share these)

• 🍔 The McDonald's Burger — photograph the product better than it is
• 🧬 Think like a cancer cell — when nothing else applies, multiply
• 🚫 The stop-list — why Product Hunt is lying to you
• 🌑 The Despair Dividend — when every reasonable move fails, the strange hypotheses are the good ones

Who it's for

• AI agents (Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT — any agent that reads SKILL.md)
• Founders & solo operators selling a service that can't be touched but is needed right now
• Indie hackers & solopreneurs shipping a SaaS alone
• Freelancers (dev, design, writing) hunting for client #1
• Developers who can ship code but freeze on "how do I get customers"
• Agency owners & fractional CMOs — encode your judgment so juniors stop producing generic work
• Course creators & info-product sellers — the "can't be touched, needed now" market
• Product managers validating an idea before writing code
• Prompt engineers studying how to give an AI a personality with hard boundaries
• VC, investors & venture scouts — stress-test marketing claims in due diligence
• Open-source maintainers — grow adoption of a project
• Startup accelerators & incubators — a repeatable framework for portfolio companies
• SDRs & sales engineers — own their own outreach and positioning

Tested on

Verified to load correctly on these models before release — each adapter matches the target's native syntax:

Model	File to use
Claude Code	SKILL.md → .claude/skills/marketing-mindset/
Cursor	.cursorrules
Codex	AGENTS.md + SKILL.md
ChatGPT (Custom GPT)	paste SKILL.lite.md as instructions
Grok / xAI	SKILL.md (system prompt)
Qwen (qwen3)	SKILL.lite.md
DeepSeek (V3 / Flash)	SKILL.lite.md
Llama (Meta)	SKILL.md
Mistral	SKILL.md
Gemini	SKILL.md
Hermes (Nous)	SKILL.md

What you actually get

Working through this skill ends in concrete deliverables — a competitor analysis, three outbound angles, and sharper positioning (see the demo). The mindset is the input; the tactics are the output.

Install

One skill, four harnesses — pick whichever you run:

# skills.sh / npx
npx skills add axelfreeman/marketing-mindset

# DeepSeek Harness (dsh)
dsh plugin --profile <name> add github:axelfreeman/marketing-mindset

Claude Code and Hermes read the same SKILL.md — copy it into your skills directory (~/.claude/skills/marketing-mindset/ or your Hermes skills dir).

Low-context or weaker models? Use the compact SKILL.lite.md — the same mindset compressed to the essentials.

The first-client gate

python scripts/first-client-gate.py

One honest question before you start: do you have your first client yet? If the answer isn't "me," the skill waits.

Spread the word

If it works, star it and share it. The network effect compounds.

More from the framework

• competitor-xray — competitor research that ends in a copy-list, not a report
• inbox-audit — will your email reach the inbox? Free DNS audit + paste-ready fixes
• agent-stack-starter — self-hosted AI marketing stack, one job live on day one

Stay updated

Axel Freeman ships releases and improvements to this repo regularly. If this clicks, watch the repo (and star it) — that's how you get each new release and update automatically.

The roadmap is long — active development is planned for at least the next 6 months, so there's a steady stream of updates coming.

Getting first customers is hard — and most marketing advice is generic. Get weekly non-generic teardowns:

• 📣 Telegram: @axelfreeman
• 🐙 GitHub: @axelfreeman

Keywords

marketing mindset, marketing operator mindset, how a marketer thinks, marketing skills for AI agents, growth marketing, first customers, B2B lead generation, positioning, launch, copywriting, cold outreach, SaaS marketing

A note on "growth hacks" and "embellishing"

"Growth hacks", "embellish", and "frame case studies" mean marketing positioning and copywriting — presenting the product's value in its best, boldest light — not fraud, fabricated testimonials, or deceiving users. Bold marketing, always legal.

Author

Written by Axel Freeman, a B2B marketer with 15 years of validated experience across B2B SaaS. Not a content farm — the operator's own method.

License

MIT