One Command Packs Up a Marketing Veteran

#AI#Indie Dev#Marketing

There’s an open source project making the rounds lately called Marketing Skills. After reading through it, I had exactly one thought: the old pros of marketing have been packaged up too.

Cartoon: on the left, lzbob in a black baseball cap sits behind a laptop, with a terminal window above his head reading npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills and + 51 skills. On the right, there’s a cardboard box on the desk labeled “Marketing Veteran, 51-piece set,” and an old man in glasses and a suit, holding a big red megaphone, leans out of it.
One command from the guy on the left, and the guy on the right is moving house.

What is it, anyway

The project is called Marketing Skills, and it’s by Corey Haines, who has done marketing for a lot of SaaS companies and runs his own company focused on conversion optimization and growth, called Conversion Factory. A bona fide marketing veteran.

It opened for business in January 2026 and in 9 months racked up 55k stars (55,527 when I checked) and 8,000+ forks, under the MIT license. In open source, that’s an overnight success. In marketing, that’s the best case study you could ever write for yourself.

The problem it treats

Marketing’s biggest problem as a trade is that the craft doesn’t get passed down.

How an old hand sets an ad budget, how to write a headline people actually click: it’s all stored in their head. Ask them, and they say it’s gut feel. Ask again, and they say it comes after enough years. It’s like baodu, Beijing’s flash-boiled tripe. The timing is all in the master’s hands, two seconds too long and you’re chewing a rubber band, and an apprentice can study for three years and still not nail the taste.

What this project does is take that sense of timing out of the old master’s head and write it down as skill files an AI can read and follow. From then on, every job runs on the same methodology:

From “gut feel” to “by the playbook.”

How to use it

One command installs it into whatever AI assistant you’ve got:

npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills

Don’t want the whole set? Pick and choose:

npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills --skill cro copywriting

It works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and Windsurf. Once it’s installed you don’t need to memorize any commands; just talk like a normal person:

  • “Help me improve conversions on this landing page,” and it goes and finds cro by itself
  • “Write a five-email welcome sequence,” and it goes and finds emails by itself

Whether or not you know the first thing about marketing, at least now there’s someone at your elbow who does, nagging away.

What’s inside

The foundation under every skill is product-marketing: first, spell out what your product is, who you sell it to, and why anyone would buy it. Every other skill reads it before doing anything, so everything comes out telling the same story. Your landing page won’t say you sell coffee while your emails say you sell tea.

There are 51 skills right now, in 9 categories, and the count keeps climbing:

CategoryA few examples
Conversion optimizationcro, signup, onboarding, popups, paywalls
Content and copycopywriting, copy-editing, emails, cold-email, social, image
SEO and discoverabilityseo-audit, ai-seo, programmatic-seo, competitors
Paid ads and distributionads, ad-creative, events
Measurement and experimentsanalytics, ab-testing
Retentionchurn-prevention
Growth engineeringfree-tools, referrals, co-marketing
Strategy and monetizationpricing, launch, marketing-psychology
Sales and revenue operationsrevops, sales-enablement

One that stands out is ai-seo, which is all about getting AI search to recommend you too. Marketers used to have to butter up search engines; now they have to butter up AI as well. This gig isn’t getting any easier.

Sponsored, not bought

It’s MIT-licensed: free for commercial use, change it however you like, stuff it into your own product however you like.

The project does have sponsors, but the rules are out in the open: sponsors pay, and they can show up in tool recommendations, but only listed side by side with neutral options, and they can’t touch what the core skills recommend. Making money is one thing, giving advice is another, and that line is drawn bright and clear.

Parting shots

Coding, design, writing: they’ve all proved the same thing already. Experience is something you can package up as an agent’s skill set. Now it’s marketing’s turn.

55k stars means the whole world has basically test-driven it for you. If you’re the kind of person who can code but is stuck doing your own promotion, install it. You can’t lose.

You can now pack up an old pro’s craft and carry it off with one command. Nobody’s asked the old pro how he feels about that.

Comments

More writing