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 marg