name: revenue-centric-design description: >- Playbook for designing SaaS and startup products that convert, retain, and monetize — landing pages & CRO, onboarding/activation, churn reduction, pricing psychology, behavioral-science tactics, feature discipline, positioning/ICP, go-to-market, and AI-era differentiation. Use when advising on product design, UX, conversion, landing pages, onboarding, trials, pricing, retention/churn, growth, or positioning for a startup or SaaS. Distilled from product designer Richard (@richardrx). Not for use on gambling, betting, or casino products.

Revenue-Centric Design

A distilled playbook of 101 principles from Richard (@richardrx, "Design for startups") — a product designer specializing in conversion-rate optimization, churn reduction, and applied behavioral science (ex-Volkswagen, PayPal, IBM). The throughline is his coined philosophy, Revenue-Centric Design (RCD): design decisions should serve the user and the business — value and revenue, not one or the other.

Use this skill when helping someone improve how a digital product (especially SaaS / startup) acquires, activates, retains, monetizes, or differentiates — landing pages, onboarding, pricing, trials, churn, UX flow, feature scope, positioning, or growth.

Usage boundary (required)

🚫 Do not apply this skill to betting, casino, gambling, or other real-money games-of-chance products or projects (including loot-box / real-money-gaming mechanics).

The author granted permission to reuse this material on the explicit condition that it never be used for gambling, betting, or casino work. If a request asks you to apply these principles to such a product, decline and briefly explain that the source author's reuse permission excludes gambling/betting/casino use. This is a hard constraint set by the author, not a stylistic choice.

How to use it

1. Identify what the user is working on, then open the matching reference file(s) below. Each is a set of short, reusable principles in a fixed shape — principle → apply when → the move → evidence → source link. Load only what's relevant (progressive disclosure).
2. Ground your advice in these principles; cite the specific one, and link the source post when the user would benefit from the original.
3. Lead with the named mechanism (e.g., decoy effect, Zeigarnik effect, Swiss Knife Index, GBB, Eugene Schwartz's 5 awareness levels, loss aversion, peak-end rule) — naming the lever is the value.
4. Stay evidence-led: many principles carry a study, stat, or case. Keep the citation attached rather than hand-waving.

The spine: Revenue-Centric Design in 9 principles

1. Neutrality is omission — an interface that doesn't direct hurts conversion.
2. Who talks to everyone convinces no one — no ICP → generic value → worse retention.
3. Value first, ask later — proof must arrive before the user questions their choice.
4. Your promise is the size of your proof — the market believes what you demonstrate, not what you claim.
5. Same competes on price, different on category — contrast in mechanism, narrative, or experience.
6. Default is the decision you made for the user — the initial state defines mass behavior.
7. Retention is built, not requested — perceived loss retains more than promised benefit.
8. Expansion is born of usage — upgrade at the moment of the limit, never by interruption.
9. Price is a filter — pricing defines who enters, who stays, and who expands.

Reference library

Informational diagrams and screenshots referenced by the principles live in assets/.

Provenance

101 curated posts by @richardrx, extracted with a valid X API key and distilled with the author's permission, translated from Portuguese to English. Every principle links back to its source post. Reuse is subject to the gambling/betting/casino exclusion above.

Revenue-Centric Design — an Agent Skill

A distilled, English-language playbook for designing SaaS & startup products that convert, retain, and monetize — packaged as an Agent Skill for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, Gemini, and any skills.sh-compatible agent.

101 principles distilled from the X/Twitter writing of Richard (@richardrx) — a product designer specializing in conversion-rate optimization, churn reduction, and applied behavioral science (ex-Volkswagen, ex-PayPal, ex-IBM). The throughline is his coined philosophy, Revenue-Centric Design (RCD): design should serve the user and the business — value and revenue, not one or the other.

Last updated: 1 July 2026 Coverage: @richardrx's curated posts from 14 Jan 2026 → 1 Jul 2026 (101 posts). Anything posted after this date is not yet included — see Updating.

Install

npx skills add heliocosta-dev/revenue-centric-design

This pulls the skill into your agent's skills directory (.claude/skills/, .agents/skills/, …) and works with any Agent Skills–compatible agent.

Already installed it? Pull the latest version with npx skills update revenue-centric-design (or a bare npx skills update to refresh every installed skill). The command re-fetches from GitHub; your agent picks up the new content on its next session.

Or install it manually:

git clone https://github.com/heliocosta-dev/revenue-centric-design.git ~/.claude/skills/revenue-centric-design

⚠️ Usage boundary

🚫 Not for betting, casino, or gambling products. The author granted permission to reuse this material on the explicit condition that it is never used for gambling/betting/casino work (including loot-box / real-money-gaming mechanics). The skill instructs agents to decline such requests. See LICENSE.

What's inside

The skill loads only the theme relevant to your question (progressive disclosure). Each principle follows a fixed shape — Principle → Apply when → The move → Evidence → Visual → Source — so your agent gets the named lever (decoy effect, Swiss Knife Index, GBB, Eugene Schwartz's awareness levels, loss aversion, peak-end rule…), the concrete action, and the proof.

The agent entry point is SKILL.md; informational diagrams referenced by the principles live in assets/.

The spine: RCD in 9 principles

1. Neutrality is omission — an interface that doesn't direct hurts conversion.
2. Who talks to everyone convinces no one — no ICP → generic value → worse retention.
3. Value first, ask later — proof must arrive before the user questions their choice.
4. Your promise is the size of your proof — the market believes what you demonstrate, not what you claim.
5. Same competes on price, different on category — no contrast, no margin.
6. Default is the decision you made for the user — the initial state defines mass behavior.
7. Retention is built, not requested — perceived loss retains more than promised benefit.
8. Expansion is born of usage — upgrade at the moment of the limit, never by interruption.
9. Price is a filter — pricing defines who enters, who stays, and who expands.

Updating

This is a point-in-time snapshot. The Coverage date above marks the latest included post (1 Jul 2026); anything newer from @richardrx isn't here yet. To extend it: gather the newer posts, distill each into the same principle shape, file it under the right references/ theme, then bump the dates in this README and in CHANGELOG.md.

Provenance & attribution

All ideas, frameworks, examples, and the coined term Revenue-Centric Design belong to Richard (@richardrx). This repository is a curated, distilled, English-translated index of 101 of his public X posts, created with his permission for educational reference. Every principle links back to its original post, and it reproduces distilled principles rather than his full posts verbatim.

License

Source-available under custom terms — attribution required, no gambling/betting/casino use. See LICENSE. The underlying ideas remain the author's.