Transcription
Stop using Claude like it's ChatGPT. The way you're using AI is the reason it isn't changing your business. It's not the model and it's not the prompts. You can learn as many as you want. It is the way that you set it up for yourself.
Most founders right now are running brilliant AI on a broken configuration. And until that changes, every single AI tutorial that you watch is just a faster way to do work that shouldn't exist in the first place.
So here's what the broken configuration actually looks like. You open ChatGPT, you ask it something smart. Sometimes it gives you something smart back. Yes, it remembers your name now. Maybe a little bit about your tone, but it cannot see the folder where your business actually lives. It cannot read your email. It cannot open your drive. It does not know the skills, the playbooks, the systems that make your business yours.
So basically, every session ends up having a bit of re-explaining. Every new project leads to a bit of reset and every output leads to more copy-paste back into the tools where your work really happens. And six months in, every founder that I talk to says the same thing. AI is faster, but my life isn't lighter.
Because you aren't working with an employee, you're working with a brilliant consultant that you have to rebrief every single time that you pick up the phone. Or even worse, for some, it's like interviewing a new candidate every single morning who quits at the end of every conversation.
There is definitely a different way to do this. So, in the next 15 minutes or so, I'm going to walk you through the exact setup that I use on Claude. It's going to be five steps in a very specific order. And those are going to turn AI from a consultant that you keep calling into an employee who shows up every morning already knowing your business. Someone who has a desk, knows the team, runs the playbooks, finishes entire pieces of work before you've sat down at your desk for the day.
So, let me show you what I mean in detail. So, here's a problem that might be costing you 5 to 10 hours a week. You think AI is a tool like a calculator or like Google search. You open it, you ask a question, you get an answer, you close it. Next question, start over. That mental model might have worked for ChatGPT. It made sense. It also capped how useful AI could actually be for your business.
However, because every single task started more or less from zero, Claude in co-work mode is not a calculator. It's a workspace. And that's not marketing language. That is basically a real difference that I'm going to show you and hopefully you'll see it'll make a huge difference for you in the way you work.
So let's put it this way. A calculator has no memory. It doesn't know you used it yesterday. It doesn't remember the currency. Every calculation is a fresh exercise. Claude in co-work mode is like that. An employee is the opposite. They walk into the office on Tuesday knowing what you told them on Monday. They know where the files are. They know who Sarah in accounting is. They know you don't like Comic Sans, you know. And once that mental switch flipped in your mind that this is not a tool, but an employee, you will see that the entire way that you use it will look very different.
But here's where it gets very interesting and where almost everyone still messes up. If I handed you a brand new hire tomorrow, someone genuinely smart, super motivated, great at their job, and I dropped them off at your front door, you wouldn't just point at the desk and say, "Good luck." You would probably onboard them, right? In a specific order because if you skip steps, they don't perform. Every high-performing onboarding that I have done myself or that I have seen in real businesses has the same five steps. Five. That's it.
Now, here's the reframe that is going to help change things for you. Claude works the exact same way. When you do those five things in that order, you don't have an AI tool anymore. You have someone or something that shows up every morning already knowing your business.
So, let me show you what almost nobody sees about this. First and foremost, we need introductions, right? Most founders skip this. They just open Claude and start firing prompts. I think that's a huge mistake because Claude has a setting called personal preferences. This is where you tell it everything that you want it to know about you. Your role, your background, your business, your tone, your decision-making style, whatever you want it to know.
And here's a trick that I want you to use. Don't try to write this from scratch. Okay? Go to Claude settings, capabilities, and then click import memory. It's going to show you this prompt. Now, what you do is you copy it and you give it back to GPT or to Gemini, whoever you used before. And then you take that input, open a new Claude conversation and just say, "Here is context about me. What else do you need to know about me to be the most useful assistant possible? Feel free to ask me any questions."
Once you do that, Claude will ask you more questions about your business, about your audience, about your goals, about your communication style, your pet peeves, whatever. And you want to answer them honestly. You know, ideally, our easiest would be to do voice to text. Okay? And at the end, just paste everything into personal preferences. And now Claude knows you. Every conversation from now on starts with that baked in. This is basically the equivalent of your new hire reading your company handbook before they start. 10 minutes of work, but trust me, it pays you back every single session forever.
Step number two, they need a desk. Okay? You have to give Claude a desk. In physical offices, we give people a desk so their work has a home. You know, it's functional. Their files live there. Their notes live there. Everything that they're working on is in one place. Well, basically Claude needs the same thing, a folder structure.
Inside co-work, you can connect a specific folder on your computer or your cloud provider and that folder becomes Claude's virtual desk. All right? So, anything Claude creates, whether it's documents, scripts, analysis, anything gets saved there. Anything that you want Claude to work with, uploads, references, existing files, lives there, too.
So, if you don't know what folder structure you should have, just ask Claude to brainstorm with you. Now, I can share with you the one that I use, but it might not make full sense for you because obviously it's created for me and my own situation. At the beginning, you would have a root folder that you could call Claude Co-work. And then in my case, I have subfolders for every business that I have. In your case, it could be a subfolder for every project that you work in. Then within every business folder, in my case, I have separate subfolders per project or per client. You choose whatever works in your specific case, clearly. But what you want to make sure is that each of these subfolders ends up being mapped to a Claude project. I know this sounds obvious, but most people never do it. They let Claude work in some random temp folder, and then they wonder why their files disappear or why Claude cannot build on previous work, but that's because context is scattered. Okay? So please give Claude a desk. The whole thing is going to get a lot more coherent a lot faster once you do that.
All right. Now let's move to step number three. What do you need to do with any new team member? You need to introduce them to the team. Okay. So you want to do the same with Claude because no employee works in isolation. They need to talk to marketing. They need to pull data from sales. They need to, I don't know, live inside your email or your calendar or your CRM. Claude has the same need. That's what connectors are for. Okay.
So inside Claude co-work, you can connect your Gmail, your Google Drive, your Notion, your calendar, your Slack, dozens of others through the MCP registry. Now once connected, Claude can read your emails, can search your drive, can pull up your calendar, can update your Notion, and inside that conversation, it is able to do all of this without you having to go back and forth or copy-pasting between tools.
So here's a real example from this past week. I said to Claude, "Please look at my school community and summarize for me the top three most frequently asked questions so that we can then address them in the upcoming hype." 30 seconds later, it had them queued up. I'm not opening tabs. I'm not copy-pasting. The team, quote unquote, is wired up.
One word of warning though, do not connect everything on day one. Start with the two or three tools that you actually use daily, whether it's email or drive or your project manager. More noise than signal is going to kill this step. Trust me. Also, you want to know how to create guardrails and how to maintain some sort of separation between what you want to keep private and what you want to give Claude access to. So, start with something that is truly non-invasive and then move from there. For example, if you want to give Claude access to your Notion, one way to do that is to just create a separate account for Claude and then invite him with that account into your Notion. This way, you don't have to give access to absolutely everything, but just to those specific pages that you choose to give Claude access to.
Let's move on to step number four. What does a new employee also need? Skills. All right. So, you want to teach Claude your playbooks. These are called skills in Claude as well. A skill is basically a reusable instruction file. Write it once, or Claude writes it for you, and then it follows it forever, or until you change it.
So, here's a real one that I use personally. I have a skill called motion graphics. Okay? I know it is designed to know my brand, my avatar, my content, as well as those of my clients. And when I say, "Let's create motion graphics," Claude doesn't guess how I like them made. It just pulls up the skill and follows it to the letter. And you can build a skill for anything that you do repeatedly. Client proposals, weekly reports, email sequences, meeting summaries, lead qualification, literally any repeatable task in your business.
And the magic comes next because the longer you use Claude, the more skills you end up building. And each one becomes a playbook that any future version of Claude instantly knows. And they're transferable between co-work and code. So there you go. Now, this is the moment that people stop being impressed by AI because they think doing the work on Tuesday is better than it was on Monday. And next Tuesday, it'll be even better. I know in real life some employees do work that way, but Claude does it for sure. I promise you.
Now, step number five, I call this one the performance stack. Okay? You want to set Claude up to win. So, this is where most AI tutorials probably end because it can get a little bit technical, but it's where actual business impact begins. And I'm going to give you five tools. Each one moves you from smart assistant and chatbot to systems that run parts of your business almost independently.
Number one, these are plugins. Okay? A plugin is a pre-built bundle of skills and tools that are built by an expert in a specific domain. You can think of it like hiring a specialist consultant for your employee. What you need to do is to install it and then every conversation can use it.
Number two, slash commands. Okay? These are one-line shortcuts. You can type slash and then a word and hit enter. And Claude executes a whole routine. Something like slash review. I don't usually type entire prompts anymore because I have trained my Claude to know all of these short commands, the slash commands, and I just use those every single day.
Number three, sub-agents. These are specialized mini versions of Claude that focus on one thing. So basically, you send a sub-agent off to do research or review a document or scrape a website while the main Claude keeps working on the bigger task.
Number four, scheduled tasks. Basically, what they do is you tell Claude, "Every Monday morning at 8:00 a.m., check my analytics, pull the top three videos from last week, and write me a summary." And it just does it forever until you stop the scheduled task. You don't need a button. You don't need a prompt. The work shows up in your Claude inbox or somewhere else if you decide to ask it to do that.
And number five, routines. This is a multi-step procedure that Claude runs on demand, unlike the scheduled tasks that run on the clock. And if you want to get 13 routine examples that I believe any founder can use, I'll make sure to link the video down below where I went through everything as well as what is the difference between a scheduled task and a routine.
Now, of course, each one of these alone is going to save you a lot of time, but when you stack them, that is the true difference between AI that helps you and AI that actually runs part of your business for you.
All right, hopefully now you understand how to set up Claude. But what does this translate into? Real numbers. So, if you're a solopreneur, setting Claude up like an employee typically eliminates somewhere between 5 and 15 hours a week of repetitive work. Of course, that's not a guarantee and results will depend on what you actually automate and how consistently you use it. But across the hundreds of founders in my community, that range, I think, is a solid common one.
Now, what do you do with that time? You put it on the things that actually grow your revenue. Sales conversations, offer refinement, content that converts, the things that you've been too busy to touch because you were stuck explaining your business to AI every morning.
Now, there's a second win. When your skills and routines are documented, when your business is sitting inside Claude as a set of clear instructions, you will have built the foundation of a business that could one day operate without you. I'm not saying that's going to happen today or tomorrow, but eventually that will become a real asset.
And thirdly, everything that we just covered is leverage. You are one person writing skills that every future version of Claude working for you will know instantly. So, you're building compounding equity into your own workspace. The work that you do this week is going to pay you back every week afterwards. Okay? The compounding is the whole point. Hopefully, that makes sense. Okay?
Now, I want you to remember what I said at the beginning of this video. AI users interview a new candidate every single morning. You don't have to do that anymore. If you do those five things this week, your next session with Claude is going to feel very, very different. Not a little bit different, fundamentally different.
So, there's one thing though. Watching a video and actually doing the setup are two completely separate things. Most people are going to nod along to this and not change a thing at all, or at least this week. That is why I built the Claude Co-work 7-day challenge. It is a guided step-by-step walkthrough of every single thing that I just covered in order with the exact prompts, templates, skill starters that I use in my business. By the end of the week, your Claude is going to be fully onboarded and you will know how to keep extending it. It is a free challenge. You don't have to pay anything. You just need to join our free community in school. The link is going to be here as well as down below. And you are able to join anytime and have access to all of this. And you are going to be able to also join tens of thousands of other people who are on the exact same path as you are who are also learning to use their Claude co-work as best as possible.
Now, once Claude is onboarded, the very next question is which skills or routines should you actually build first? Because that's what separates hobbyist AI from real business leverage. Now, as I said, I covered that exact question in the video that I'm going to link here. So, go ahead and watch that one next, and I'm going to see you there.
Thank you so so much for watching. Like this video if you did. Be sure to subscribe if you haven't done so. Share it with anyone in your circle of friends or family or co-workers who you know needs to know more about Claude Co-work. And until next time, I'll see you in the next video.