About

Prospect

Compare observable marketplace activity with public buyer-side discussions before spending time on a product or skill idea. The signals help rank what to investigate; they do not prove demand.

Prototype; source checkout only. The repository contains an early research workflow and a small Python command-line prototype. There is no packaged installation or purchase option.

What the prototype checks

The current script reads supply-side signals from ClawHub, the skills.sh leaderboard, and Agensi's public catalog interface. It can also search public Reddit posts through Arctic Shift for people describing a need or looking for a tool. Results are returned as JSON snapshots for review.

Use from a source checkout

The root SKILL.md declares the skill discovery name prospect (display name: Prospect). The CLI path bin/demand-signals.py and subcommand demand-voice are prototype implementation identifiers; the product and skill are named Prospect. Run these from the repository root:

~~~sh python3 bin/demand-signals.py --help python3 bin/demand-signals.py clawhub-top --limit 20 python3 bin/demand-signals.py demand-voice --q "looking for a tool to compare free hosting" --limit 8 ~~~

The commands make read requests; they do not publish an offering, create an account, or make a purchase. The source prototype uses Python's standard library. Agensi queries and demand-voice (Arctic Shift) also require the system curl program. No package metadata or installer is provided.

--help is the no-provider interface check. The bundled synthetic ranking fixture is used by tests; the CLI has no offline-results mode. Supported data subcommands read the named public sources and need network access. Their snapshots are bounded observations, not proof of demand.

Provider failures emit JSON on stdout and exit with status 1. For a partial demand-voice failure, successful subreddit results remain in the output and failed sources appear in errors; other provider failures use error. Callers must inspect error and errors and preserve the nonzero exit status. If piping output in Bash, use set -o pipefail so the CLI's status reaches the caller.

Total-transfer budgets are env-overridable: DEMAND_ARCTIC_TIMEOUT and DEMAND_AGENSI_TIMEOUT (seconds, default 60). Use a shorter budget on a dead rail, e.g. DEMAND_ARCTIC_TIMEOUT=10 when Arctic Shift is timing out.

Limits

Marketplace counts measure activity on those specific rails and may include old listings, creator activity, or noisy downloads. Reddit search covers selected public results, not every buyer or community. Provider endpoints, ordering, and limits can change; a missing result is not proof that no buyers exist.

Prospect remains a human-reviewed research process. Findings should include the source, query, date, and uncertainty before they influence a build decision.