From Side Project to AI Skills Business: An Honest Retrospective

I have been building RemoteOpenClaw, an open marketplace for AI skills and personas, and I want to share what the journey has actually looked like — the wins, the mistakes, and the things I wish I had known earlier.

How It Started

I kept building the same AI capabilities for different clients. PDF extraction, report generation, domain-specific personas — the same patterns, different contexts. One day I asked: why am I not packaging these as reusable components?

That question led to RemoteOpenClaw.

What Went Right

Building on an Open Standard

Choosing to build on the OpenClaw standard rather than a proprietary format was the best early decision. It meant:

• Skills are portable Markdown files, not proprietary blobs
• Users feel safe investing time because there is no lock-in
• The community contributes because the format is accessible

The 90/10 Revenue Split

Most marketplaces take 30%. We went with 90/10 (creators keep 90%). The math is simple: AI skills are lightweight digital goods. Our marginal cost per transaction is near zero, so taking a huge cut would just be extractive.

This decision attracted early creators who had been burned by platform fees elsewhere.

Starting with Quality Over Quantity

We could have launched with hundreds of low-quality skills scraped from various sources. Instead, we started with a smaller catalog of vetted, well-documented skills. This built trust early.

What Went Wrong

Underestimating the Chicken-and-Egg Problem

Every marketplace faces this: buyers want selection, sellers want buyers. I spent three months building features before realizing I should have been building community.

Over-Engineering the Platform

The first version had skill versioning, dependency resolution, automated testing, and a dozen other features nobody asked for. The second version stripped most of that away. Users wanted: browse, buy, download. That is it.

Pricing Confusion

I originally let creators set any price. The result was chaos — similar skills priced at $5 and $500 with no clear differentiation. Adding pricing guidelines and category benchmarks helped.

What I Would Do Differently

1. Launch with 10 high-quality skills, not a platform — the marketplace infrastructure can come later
2. Build in public from day one — I waited too long to share progress
3. Talk to 50 potential users before writing code — I assumed I knew what people wanted
4. Focus on one vertical first — trying to be everything for everyone slows growth

Where Things Stand Now

The marketplace is live at remoteopenclaw.com. We have a growing catalog of skills across content, data, development, business, and support categories. The creator community is small but engaged.

It is not a success story yet. It is a work-in-progress being shared honestly.

Advice for Other Builders

If you are thinking about building a marketplace or platform:

• Solve your own problem first — be your own first user
• Choose open over closed — it attracts better contributors
• Launch embarrassingly early — you will learn more from real users in one week than from planning for one month
• Measure what matters — active creators and repeat buyers, not vanity metrics

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Building something similar? I would love to compare notes. Drop a comment or reach out.

Comments

[Ali Farhat]

Interesting perspective. The part about turning skills into something that actually delivers value instead of just building features is something I think a lot of people underestimate.

I have been experimenting with similar things, and one thing that keeps coming up is how important structure and clarity are once you move beyond a side project.

It is not just about making something work, but making it usable and repeatable.

[Apex Stack]

Really appreciate the honesty here, especially the part about over-engineering the first version. I've fallen into that exact trap building tools for my own projects — spending weeks on dependency resolution and versioning systems when users just wanted browse, download, and use.

The 90/10 split is a smart move. I've been publishing Claude Skills on a couple of marketplaces and the fee structure is one of the first things creators evaluate. When a skill is essentially a well-crafted markdown file plus some reference assets, taking 30% feels disproportionate to the value the platform provides. 90/10 signals that you actually want creators to succeed, not just extract rent from their work.

Your point about launching with 10 high-quality skills instead of a platform resonates deeply. I started by building individual skills that solved my own pain points (SEO auditing, content pipelines, financial analysis) before thinking about distribution. The skills that came from real problems I was actually facing ended up being dramatically better than the ones I built speculatively based on market research alone.

Curious about your discovery mechanism — how are new users finding RemoteOpenClaw? That chicken-and-egg problem you mentioned is the hardest part of any marketplace. I've found that publishing free "lite" versions on GitHub drives some organic discovery, but the conversion funnel from free user to paid buyer is still something I'm figuring out.