How I built a B2B growth system with Claude Code skills (and you can steal it)

Three years ago I was COO at AFFiNE, a local-first open-source knowledge base. When I joined, we had a few hundred GitHub stars and zero revenue. When I left, we had 60K+ stars, a $10M Pre-A round closed, and a community of developers who actually gave a damn about the product.

I'm not telling you this to brag. I'm telling you because most of what I did during those three years wasn't magic — it was a repeatable system that I rebuilt from scratch every single time a new challenge showed up. And I was slow at it, because the system only lived in my head.

The problem with growth knowledge

Here's something nobody talks about: growth knowledge doesn't transfer well.

I'd spend three weeks figuring out the right PLG motion for a developer tool, write up a Notion doc, and six months later when the same question came up in a different context, I'd start from scratch anyway. The doc was too generic to be useful. The nuance was in my head, not on the page.

After leaving AFFiNE and starting Gingiris, I've advised 150+ early-stage startups on B2B growth. Every single one had variations of the same questions:

• Are we PLG or SLG? Does it even matter at our stage?
• How do we get to $1M ARR without a sales team?
• We have GitHub traction. How do we turn that into paying customers?
• Our SEO is dead since the AI search shift. What do we do?

I was giving essentially the same frameworks over and over. The answer was always "it depends" — but the what it depends on was consistent. That's systematizable.

The problem with a PDF or a blog post is that it can't ask you questions. It can't say "wait, before I tell you whether to hire AEs, tell me your ACV and your self-serve conversion rate." Static content is a monologue. Good growth advising is a dialogue.

Why AI skills instead of a playbook

I built Gingiris Skills as Claude Code skills — not a SaaS product, not a consulting retainer, not another ebook.

The reason is simple: the people who need growth frameworks most are already living in their terminal or their IDE. Founders and technical co-founders are running Claude Code for engineering tasks. If I can put growth methodology into that same environment, I remove the context switch entirely.

You don't open a browser, navigate to a tool, log in, onboard, and then finally get advice. You type one command and your growth co-pilot is running in the same session where you're already working.

There's also a deeper reason. Skills built on Claude Code can do things a static document never could:

• Pull in your actual metrics and reason about them
• Adapt recommendations to your specific stage, market, and constraints
• Chain together multiple frameworks (e.g., run a PLG/SLG diagnosis, then immediately scaffold a 90-day plan based on the output)
• Be updated when frameworks evolve, without requiring you to re-read anything

What the B2B Growth skill actually does

Let me give you a concrete example instead of waving my hands.

The B2B Growth skill covers the $0→$10M ARR path for technical B2B products. The two most common decision points I see founders get wrong are:

1. Going SLG too early

Most technical founders hate sales. So they default to "we're PLG" and invest in self-serve onboarding, in-product activation flows, and usage-based pricing — before they have enough conversion data to know if that motion even works for their ICP.

The skill walks you through a diagnostic: What's your ACV? What's the buying process complexity? Is the end-user also the budget holder? Based on your answers, it either validates your PLG bet or flags that you're in SLG territory pretending to be PLG (which is a cash-burning trap).

2. Confusing top-of-funnel growth with business growth

At AFFiNE, 60K GitHub stars sounds impressive. It was. But stars don't pay salaries. The real work was converting open-source community momentum into enterprise pipeline — which required a completely different motion than what got us the stars.

The skill has a specific framework for this: Open Source → Commercial conversion. It's not about slapping a "Pro" tier on top of your repo. It's about identifying which community behaviors correlate with eventual purchase intent, and building nurture paths for those users specifically.

When you run it, the skill asks you for your current metrics, your ICP, and your 12-month revenue target. It outputs a staged plan with specific milestones, not generic advice.

How to actually use it with Claude Code

Installation is one command:

npx skills add Gingiris-1031/gingiris-skills

That installs the full skills package. Then in a Claude Code session:

> use b2b-growth-advisor

The skill initializes and asks for your context — company stage, current revenue, primary ICP, growth blockers. From there it runs the relevant frameworks and produces actionable output.

If you want to go deeper on a specific area:

> use b2b-growth-advisor --focus plg-slg-decision

Or chain it with other skills:

> use seo-geo-advisor
> use user-interview-guide

Everything stays in one Claude Code session. Your context carries across skills. You're not re-explaining your business to three different tools.

The other skills in the package

The B2B Growth skill is the flagship, but there are three others that I use constantly with the startups I advise:

SEO-GEO Advisor

Search changed. If your content strategy was built for Google circa 2022, it's probably underperforming now. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the emerging discipline of making your content surfaceable in AI-generated answers — Perplexity, ChatGPT search, Google AI Overviews.

This skill covers both. It audits your current content posture, identifies gaps, and generates a content plan that's optimized for both traditional search and AI retrieval. It's particularly relevant for technical B2B companies whose buyers are increasingly using AI search to evaluate tools.

Open Source Marketing Advisor

For companies with a public repo, this skill is specifically about the GitHub → commercial funnel. It covers:

• README positioning for your actual ICP (not just "contributors")
• Issue tracker as a sales signal (which issues indicate purchase intent)
• Community → pipeline conversion without being gross about it
• Developer relations as a growth function, not just a feel-good hire

This one is close to my heart because it's essentially everything I wish I'd had a system for at AFFiNE.

User Interview Guide

Not glamorous, but I've seen more growth strategies fail from bad customer insight than from bad execution. This skill structures user interviews specifically for B2B SaaS — job-to-be-done framing, willingness-to-pay probes, competitive displacement questions.

It generates interview scripts based on your specific hypotheses, helps you synthesize findings across multiple interviews, and maps outputs to positioning and roadmap decisions.

Who this is for

Honestly? Founders and early growth hires at technical B2B startups who are tired of reading frameworks that don't account for their specific constraints.

If you have a sales team and a proper RevOps stack, you probably don't need this. But if you're trying to figure out your GTM motion with three people and a spreadsheet, having a growth co-pilot that knows B2B SaaS and developer tools is more useful than most consultants — and it costs nothing to install.

The skills are free. You need a Claude Code setup, which means a Claude API key or Claude.ai Pro.

Try it

npx skills add Gingiris-1031/gingiris-skills

Full documentation and the skill source are at gingiris.tools/skills/.

If you end up using it and have feedback — what's missing, what's wrong, what framework you wish existed — I'm @iris1031 on dev.to or you can open an issue on the repo. I'm actively updating these based on what I'm seeing with the startups I work with.

The whole point is to make this stuff less locked in someone's head. Happy to make it more useful.

Iris Wei is the founder of Gingiris and former COO of AFFiNE. She's spent the last several years at the intersection of open-source developer tools and B2B growth.