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Venture Scaffold Template

This directory is the reusable scaffold for creating a new venture inside the Devonshire Digital repository. It is not itself a venture — it is copied and adapted whenever a new venture is proposed.

How this template is used

  1. Copy the directory. Duplicate ventures/_template/ to ventures/[venture-slug]/, where [venture-slug] is the lowercase, hyphenated slug for the new venture (e.g. shelfery, digital-products). This is normally done by scripts/create_venture.py rather than by hand.
  2. Rename and replace placeholders. Every bracketed placeholder such as [VENTURE_NAME], [venture-slug], [Venture Display Name] must be replaced with real values throughout the copied tree, including inside venture.json, AGENTS.md, and the strategy docs.
  3. Fill in the strategy docs. At minimum, docs/strategy/venture-brief.md should be completed before any product work begins. The other strategy, ai, standards, architecture, and decisions docs can be filled in progressively as the venture matures.
  4. Do not register prematurely. The new venture should NOT be added to portfolio/venture-registry.json (company root) until it is genuinely ready to be tracked as an active venture. Registration is a deliberate, explicit step — not an automatic side effect of copying this template.
  5. Do not create a products/ directory here at all. Per ADR-0017, product specifications, decisions, and registry records (product.json) live entirely in the venture's own implementation repository, created per ADR-0014 once the venture is approved for implementation work. Until then, product ideas are unbuilt backlog entries with no interim specification scaffold anywhere.

What this template intentionally does not decide

This scaffold is structural only. It does not pre-judge brand strategy, target users, monetization, or roadmap for any future venture — those are filled in per-venture, in the copied strategy docs, by the people (or agents, under explicit human direction) doing the work.

Relationship to company-level documents

Every venture created from this template must still comply with the company-level root AGENTS.md and root docs/ policies. This template's own AGENTS.md placeholder explains that relationship; it should not be edited to weaken or bypass company-level rules.

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