Autumn prospect research

Workflow

When this skill triggers, follow these steps in order.

Step 1 — Identify the research target

Ask the user for the company or person name and (optionally) their website URL.

• If a URL is provided, use it with the --live flag for a live fetch.
• If only a name is provided, use web search to locate the canonical URL before fetching.
• If neither is available, offer to run the built-in example against the committed cached fixture for Y Combinator.

Step 2 — Fetch and extract

Run the research engine against the target:

Offline / cached mode (default — no network required):

node scripts/research.mjs

Reads resources/ycombinator-cached.html and extracts facts from the committed fixture.

Live mode (requires network access):

node scripts/research.mjs --live <url>

Fetches the URL using Node's built-in fetch, then runs the same extraction pipeline.

The engine:

1. Strips HTML tags and normalizes whitespace to plain text.
2. Extracts the page title, meta description, and notable bullet lines.
3. Identifies the company name, what they do, and notable statistics or signals.

Step 3 — Synthesize the brief

The engine writes a structured Markdown brief with five sections:

Section	Content
Company	Name extracted from the page title
What They Do	Meta description or first meaningful paragraph
Signals / Notables	Bullet lines from the page (stats, dates, funding, news)
Likely Pain Points	Inferred from keyword analysis of the extracted text
Suggested Hook	A tailored opening line for an outbound message

Step 4 — Deliver and iterate

Present the brief to the user. Offer to:

• Refine the hook for a specific product or angle.
• Add competitive context if the user provides a competitor name.
• Re-run with a different URL or a fresh live fetch.

Example

The committed example researches Y Combinator using the cached fixture:

cd skills/autumn-prospect-research
bash examples/run.sh

Output is written to examples/output.md. See examples/input.md for the research request.

The committed proof is fully deterministic and offline. In a live session, Claude uses web search and the --live flag to research any target in real time.