Best Claude Skills: the 6 I run a business on.

Ryan “RyMac” McKinney · USMC · 26 August 2026 · 5 minute read

Search for the best Claude skills and every list is developer tools: debugging, testing, document converters. Useful, if you write code all day. I don't. I run businesses, and these are the 6 Claude Code skills that run mine.

Why this list looks different

The people writing best-of lists are developers, so the lists rank developer problems. Nobody's list has the skill that writes the sales page, because the person who needed that skill was busy running an agency.

I owned a 7 figure agency and trained agencies for years. Every skill below exists because a job kept eating my week. They're all text files, all free, and the point of a text file is you can open it and change my rules into yours.

1. The headline skill

Won't let a page ship on the first headline that sounded good. It demands 20 candidates before a shortlist, because the headline is the highest leverage line on any page. 5 times as many people read it as read anything under it, which is the argument in why the page you lead with decides the deal.

2. The sales letter skill

1 person talking to 1 person. It names the reader's pain in the reader's words, agrees it's not their fault, and only then says what got built. Same shape as the letter on this site's front page.

3. The blog post skill

Researches the search term first, finds what page 1 is missing, then writes in my cadence and checks itself against my banned words. This post went through it. So did the CLAUDE.md post that ranks for the map file.

4. The niche research skill

Before anything gets built, this one maps the pain in the market's own words and comes back with a verdict: build it, change it, or walk away. It exists because building first is the mistake I keep paying for. Research is also the show, not the chore, when you sell the framework instead of the template.

5. The video production skill

Carries the production line: script, then the spec, then the render, with a gate at each step. Nothing moves forward until the step before it is signed off, because every re-render I ever paid for came from skipping a gate.

6. The pricing skill

Finds the floor, the price below which a job isn't worth taking. The floor is arithmetic, not a feeling. Knowing it has killed more bad deals for me than every objection handler I own.

Where the library lives

All of it is on GitHub at rymac-skills, free, no form in front of it. Copy the folder in. Each skill is a folder with a text file of instructions inside, and you edit the parts that are mine into the parts that are yours.

The mistake waiting at the start: installing 20 skills and using 0. Start with the 1 job that eats your week. If you're a creative agency, start with the writing, because the writing is what clients see.

Skills sit inside a folder system, not instead of one. If your AI still starts every session confused, the skill isn't your problem. The filing is, and the folder structure fixes that in 20 minutes. It comes from Jake Van Clief's Interpretable Context Methodology (ICM), and the free kit below is my working copy of it.