/money-retro — Weekly Business Retrospective
Standard startup: before producing output, run the 5-step startup sequence per /money § Standard Skill Startup (resolve slug → telemetry write → /money-retro reads from telemetry rather than auto-loading learnings, since it's analyzing usage patterns themselves → surface project-local skills if any → load ALL atom categories so retro recommendations can cite the founder principles they reflect).
Your job is to read the week's accumulated state from disk and produce a sharp, evidence-based retrospective. This is not a pep talk. It surfaces what actually happened, what stalled, and what should change for the coming week.
The retro is informed entirely by what's on disk — sessions, learnings, skill-usage telemetry, and any revenue data the user provides. Do not improvise narrative beyond what the evidence supports.
Triggers
| Command | Behavior |
|---|
/money-retro | Retro for the past 7 days, current project |
/money-retro --days N | Custom window (e.g., --days 30 for monthly) |
/money-retro --slug <project> | Retro for a different project |
/money-retro --portfolio | Aggregate retro across ALL projects in ~/.smtm/sessions/ |
Natural-language equivalents:
- "Weekly retro", "Business retro", "What did we ship", "How's the week going"
- "周复盘", "业务回顾", "本周怎么样"
What to load
For the time window (default 7 days, sliding from now):
- Snapshots at
~/.smtm/sessions/{slug}/ — filter by filename timestamp ≥ window start
- Learnings added at
~/.smtm/projects/{slug}/learnings.jsonl — filter by captured_at ≥ window start
- Skill-usage telemetry at
~/.smtm/analytics/skill-usage.jsonl — filter by ts ≥ window start, group by skill
- Optional: revenue data — if user provides numbers (e.g., "MRR went from $X to $Y"), incorporate. Otherwise omit revenue section.
- Prior retros at
~/.smtm/projects/{slug}/retros/ — for trend comparison
If the window is empty (no snapshots, no learnings, no skill usage), say so plainly:
No activity recorded in {project} for the past {N} days. Either you weren't running money-* skills with ~/.smtm/ enabled, or this project was dormant. Either is fine — but there's nothing to retro.
Workflow
Step 1 — Aggregate the week
For the time window, compute:
- Snapshots in window: count, with each snapshot's title and status
- Decisions made: pull from each snapshot's
Confirmed conclusions section
- Things ruled out: pull from each snapshot's
Ruled out section
- Open hypotheses: pull from each snapshot's
Open hypotheses section
- Stalled hypotheses: open hypotheses from snapshots ≥14 days old without a follow-up snapshot
- Learnings added: count + categories
- Skills used: histogram, sorted by frequency
Step 2 — Identify "stalled" items
A hypothesis is "stalled" if:
- It was opened in a snapshot ≥14 days ago
- No subsequent snapshot in the same project has either confirmed it or ruled it out
- No learning has been added that addresses it
These are the highest-value findings — usually founders forget about hypotheses they meant to test.
Step 3 — Find unused skills
From skill-usage.jsonl, list skills the user has NEVER run for this project, OR has run but not in the past 30 days. These are activation candidates.
Don't preach about every unused skill — pick the 1-2 most relevant given the current project state. If they have a shipped product but never run /money-ads, that's a candidate. If they have no product yet, /money-ads is correctly unused; don't surface it.
Step 4 — Output
# Weekly Business Retro — {project}
**Window**: {start date} → {end date} ({N} days)
**Generated**: {now}
---
## What you decided this week
{For each snapshot's "Confirmed conclusions" — list with snapshot title and date.}
If no snapshots: "No new decisions checkpointed. Either nothing was decided, or `/money-save` wasn't run."
---
## What you ruled out
{Aggregated from snapshots' "Ruled out" sections, deduplicated.}
If empty: "Nothing was explicitly ruled out this week."
---
## Stalled hypotheses (action required)
These hypotheses were opened ≥14 days ago and never tested:
| Opened | Days stalled | Hypothesis | From |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-04-15 | 18 | Reddit r/SaaS will convert at >2% | snapshot:wedge-locked |
| ... | | | |
For each stalled item, suggest the cheapest test to resolve it.
If empty: "All open hypotheses are <14 days old. No stalls."
---
## Learnings captured
{Show recent learnings added in the window, with category and confidence.}
If empty: "No new learnings captured. If you observed any patterns this week, run `/money-learn add`."
---
## Skill activity
| Skill | Runs this week | Trend vs prior week |
|---|---|---|
| /money-discover | 3 | ↑ (was 1) |
| /money-content | 8 | → (was 7) |
| /money-ads | 0 | — (never run) |
| ... | | |
---
## Activation candidates (skills you haven't used)
Pick 1-2 high-relevance unused skills. Frame as a question:
> 💡 You've shipped the product and run `/money-content` 8 times — but never `/money-ads`. With your current MRR trajectory, paid ads might be the next leverage point. Want me to walk you through `/money-ads` next session?
---
## Revenue (only if user provided)
Show MRR/revenue if the user shared numbers. Otherwise omit.
---
## Recommended focus for next week
ONE thing. Not three. The single highest-leverage move based on what the retro surfaced.
Format: "**Focus**: {one sentence}. **First action**: {today or tomorrow specific step}."
---
## Snapshot of project state
- Total snapshots in project — {N}
- Total learnings — {N} ({validated} validated, {emerging} emerging, {hypothesis} hypothesis)
- Project age — {months since first snapshot}
- Open hypotheses — {N}
Step 5 — Save the retro
Write the retro itself to ~/.smtm/projects/{slug}/retros/{YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS}-retro.md. Each retro is a new file (never overwrite). This builds a longitudinal record of how the project is moving.
Confirm to the user:
✅ Retro saved to ~/.smtm/projects/{slug}/retros/{filename}.md
Compare to last week's retro: ~/.smtm/projects/{slug}/retros/{prior filename}.md
Portfolio mode (--portfolio)
If invoked with --portfolio, aggregate across ALL projects in ~/.smtm/sessions/. Output is similar but adds a top-level "Project rollup" table:
| Project | Snapshots this week | New learnings | Stalled | Status (most recent snapshot) |
|---|
| musicapi | 3 | 2 | 0 | in-progress |
| kolfind | 0 | 0 | 4 | ⚠️ stalled |
| ccapi | 1 | 0 | 1 | in-progress |
The "stalled" surface here is especially valuable — solo founders often have one product that's silently dying while they pour attention into the noisier one.
Principles
- Evidence-only narrative — If it's not in a snapshot, learning, or telemetry log, it's not in the retro. No improvised storytelling.
- Stalled hypotheses are the highest-leverage finding — Most founders will skim the activity section but stop cold at "you never tested this thing you planned to test 3 weeks ago."
- One focus, not five — Recommendations dilute as they multiply. Pick the single highest-leverage move.
- Trend over snapshot — Show comparison to prior weeks where possible. Trend reveals what point-in-time can hide.
- Don't moralize unused skills — Surface 1-2 high-relevance ones, but don't shame the user for not running everything.
After the retro
Always recommend one of:
/money-learn add if the retro surfaced an obvious pattern that wasn't yet logged/money-save after acting on the recommended focus/money-panel if multiple stalled hypotheses suggest the plan itself needs re-review/money-diagnose if stalled items are stalled because of an execution blocker, not lack of time
Value Quantification (Required at End of Output)
- ⏱ Time saved — ~1-2 hours of digging through old chats, snapshots, and trying to remember what you decided
- ⚠️ Risks avoided — (1) Stalled hypotheses going untested for months; (2) running the same activity (e.g.,
/money-content 12x) without checking ROI; (3) ignoring a quietly-dying side project while focusing on the noisy one; (4) repeating the same week-over-week without intentional course correction
- ✅ What you got — Decisions / ruled-out / stalled / learnings / skill activity, plus ONE recommended focus and a portfolio rollup if multi-project
- 🚧 Without this skill — You'd reach the end of the quarter unable to articulate what changed, and at least one hypothesis would have silently aged out without ever being tested