Build in Public #1
I've spent the last few months building PrimeSkills — a marketplace for AI agents and skills. This is the first post in a series where I share what I'm building, what's working, and what isn't.
Let me start with the honest version of the story.
The problem I kept running into
Every week I see new "prompt packs" and "AI agent bundles" popping up on Gumroad, Reddit, and random landing pages.
I've bought some. I've tried more. Most of them are garbage.
Not because the creators are lazy — but because there's a fundamental mismatch: these agents were written to look impressive in a demo, not to survive the chaos of a real workflow. Messy data. Edge cases. Users who don't follow instructions. Production environments that don't behave like a clean Jupyter notebook.
I've been building software for 10+ years and currently lead AI productivity initiatives at the enterprise level. I've shipped AI automation into real business operations. And I've learned that the gap between "works in a demo" and "works in production" is enormous.
That gap is what PrimeSkills is trying to close.
What PrimeSkills actually is
PrimeSkills is a curated marketplace for AI agents and skills — where every single listing has been validated in real-world, enterprise-grade workflows.
Not a dump of a thousand random prompts. Not a store where anyone can upload anything. A curated collection where quality is the only filter that matters.
The tagline I keep coming back to: No fluff, just what actually works.
How it's built
For the developers reading this, here's the tech stack:
- Next.js 14 (App Router) — full-stack, server components, built-in API routes
- PostgreSQL + Prisma — database and ORM
- Stripe + Stripe Connect — payments and creator payouts
- Cloudflare R2 — file storage for agent packages
- NextAuth.js — authentication
- Vercel — deployment
The architecture is deliberately boring. A marketplace needs reliability more than it needs clever infrastructure. Every listing has a signed download URL with a 5-minute expiry. Authors get payouts via Stripe Connect. Reviews are verified-purchaser only.
What's on the platform right now
The current catalog is small — intentionally. I'm not trying to win on volume.
Every listing goes through my own review before it gets published:
- Does it handle edge cases gracefully?
- Is the documentation clear enough that someone could use it without handholding?
- Have I personally run this in a real workflow, or verified it against one?
If the answer to any of those is no, it doesn't ship.
Right now the catalog covers workflows across content automation, data processing, developer tooling, and business operations. Small but solid.
What makes this different from PromptBase or Gumroad stores
I get this question a lot, so let me be direct:
PromptBase optimizes for volume. Anyone can publish. Search is how you find quality — which means you have to do a lot of filtering yourself.
Gumroad stores are one-creator shops. Great if you already know and trust the creator. Useless for discovery.
PrimeSkills is different in one specific way: the curation is the product. When you land on a listing, you're not gambling on whether it works. The editorial bar is that it has already shipped in production somewhere.
Think of it like the difference between a random food court and a curated restaurant guide. Same food category, completely different trust model.
What's coming next
Two things I'm focused on:
1. Continuing to grow the catalog — slowly and deliberately
The goal isn't 10,000 listings. The goal is that every developer who lands on PrimeSkills finds at least one thing that saves them real time. I'd rather have 50 exceptional agents than 5,000 mediocre ones.
2. AI-powered skill discovery
This one I'm genuinely excited about. The problem with any marketplace is matching — you have to know what to search for.
I'm building a feature where you describe what you're trying to do in plain language — "I want to automatically summarize customer support tickets and tag them by issue type" — and the AI finds the right skill for you from the catalog.
No more keyword guessing. Just describe the problem, get the tool.
Why I'm building in public
Mostly accountability. But also because I think the indie developer community deserves more honest stories about what building a marketplace actually looks like — not just the launch-day dopamine hit, but the weeks of curation work and the slow grind of building trust with an audience.
I'll be posting updates here as things develop. If you want to follow along, give this post a reaction or drop a comment — it helps me know someone's reading.
And if you're building with AI agents or have workflows you're trying to automate, come take a look at what's on the platform: primeskills.store
What kind of AI agent would save you the most time right now? I read every reply.
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