What is venture-gate?

Venture Gate is a Claude Code skill that acts as a strict evaluator for business or side project ideas, instead of the usual cheerful assistant that agrees with whatever you pitch. When you describe an idea and ask whether it is worth building, the skill walks it through four gates in a fixed order and stops as soon as one of them fails. The first gate checks the idea against your own personal constraints, things like refusing consulting work or custom client delivery, which you define for yourself at the start. The second gate asks who is already paying to solve this problem and where they would find a product like yours, whether that is an app store, a plugin marketplace, or a search engine. The third gate looks at how you would get a stranger, not a friend or contact, to pay for the first time, and whether the actual profit per transaction is positive if AI usage is involved. The fourth gate examines whether the idea can attract users without constant daily posting, and whether it becomes something low maintenance or turns into another job. After going through the gates, the skill gives a final verdict tied to the weakest gate: go ahead, fix specific issues, or kill the idea entirely. It also produces a small validation plan with concrete numeric stopping points, such as a spending cap or a target to hit before giving up. Installation happens inside Claude Code itself, either through the plugin marketplace with a short install command, or by manually copying the skill folder into your local Claude Code skills directory. Once installed, a new session picks it up automatically, and you pitch an idea in plain language to start the process. On first use it asks a few setup questions to establish your personal constraints and can save them to a profile file for future reuse. The evaluation framework behind the gates was built by having two different AI models debate the same founder scenario across several rounds until they converged on a shared structure. The project is free to use and released under the MIT license.