Agent Skills: Gaia Product Discovery

Gaia Product Discovery

Scope and when to use

Use this skill to scan the market and surface ONE buildable, monetizable consumer bet. Scope is one-off + IAP/IAG monetization; B2B seat-based SaaS is out of scope and auto-renewing passes are red-lined unless an explicit in-scope decision is recorded.

Use when:

• a consumer-product goal needs trend, demand, and competitor evidence
• an opportunity must be sized net-of-fee before any concept work begins
• the coordinator needs a GO / NO-GO / PIVOT call backed by money signals

Do not use when:

• a concept is already selected and only needs shaping (use ideation)
• the product is B2B seat-based SaaS

Required inputs

• product goal, constraints, monetization lane, and success bar
• access to market-intel tools and store/charts data (or named proxies)
• prior-title priors when this is a sequel/follow-on (payer base, CRM, tooling)

Owned outputs

• an Opportunity Thesis: who, what job, why now, why pay, why us
• unit-economics model v0 (all inputs flagged assumption-vs-measured)
• the GO / NO-GO / PIVOT call with pre-registered demand thresholds

Core workflow

1. Scan trends across market-intel (Sensor Tower / AppMagic / data.ai), store charts, Steam tags/wishlists, and TikTok/Reddit/Product Hunt; tag each as durable vs fad vs over-served and note the launch-window/seasonality.
2. Source opportunities via review mining, frustration archaeology, monetization-gap, genre recombination, platform-capability arbitrage, and re-segmentation.
3. Harvest demand signals as the CHEAPEST kill gate: keyword volume, wishlist velocity, fake-door taps, and social purchase-intent, scored against a pre-registered pass/fail BEFORE the data lands.
4. Mine top-charts and RPD to confirm the segment actually spends money, not just attention.
5. Tear down 3-6 direct competitors plus adjacents: map paywall placement and LLM-cluster 1-3 star reviews into addressable gaps.
6. Build personas + JTBD (functional/emotional/social), anti-personas, and willingness-to-pay by segment.
7. Size the market bottoms-up (TAM/SAM/SOM) NET of store fee; name the 15%/30% commission case explicitly.
8. Initialize unit-economics model v0 and issue the GO / NO-GO / PIVOT call.

Demand-signal kill gate

• The cheapest kill is a demand test, not a build; spend cents before dollars.
• Pre-register the pass/fail threshold first, then gather the signal; never move the goalpost after taps land.
• A frustrated review crowd with no spend behind it is interest, not demand.

Anti-patterns

• do not size TAM/SAM/SOM on gross revenue or top-down hand-waving
• do not treat attention (views, upvotes) as willingness to pay
• do not skip the demand kill gate because the idea "feels obvious"
• do not advance a fad or over-served trend as if it were durable
• do not relabel a subscription opportunity as a repeated one-off

Handoff and downstream impact

• hand ideation the Opportunity Thesis, the personas/JTBD, and WTP-by-segment
• hand the money gate model v0 with every input labeled assumption-vs-measured
• name the loop-back: a NO-GO returns to trend scanning, a PIVOT re-sources

Completion checklist

• the Opportunity Thesis names who, what job, why now, why pay, why us
• demand thresholds were pre-registered and the result is recorded
• TAM/SAM/SOM is bottoms-up and net-of-fee with the 15/30 case named
• model v0 exists and the GO / NO-GO / PIVOT call is explicit

References

• Unit economics model
• Money gate
• Product process
• Product discovery team architecture