Transcription
Forget prompts. They're not the problem.
If you are new to Claude and you keep watching tutorials and wondering why other people seem to be getting more out of it than you are, trust me, it is not what you are typing. It is what you set up before you typed.
Look, I have helped thousands of people through this channel and my communities. And what I see is that the beginners who end up running an entire business through Claude, sometimes even within 30 days, they don't have better prompts. They just have a map. And today, I'm going to draw it for you. We are going to walk through every single continent. I'm going to mark five places or cities along the way that almost nobody tells beginners about. Now, I want you to stick around till the end because hidden place number five is the one that took me the longest to find.
So, here's the lie that almost every single beginner believes. The lie is that Claude is just a smarter chatbot. It's not. First of all, it's not a chatbot. A chatbot is a tab. You open it, you talk to it, you close it, and the conversation goes away. It disappears. Claude is fundamentally different. Claude has a desktop app that reads the folders on your actual computer. It saves context across every session. It runs tasks while you sleep. And it can drive your browser basically like a real assistant. None of that is hypothetical. That is the actual product right now.
And McKenzie's state of the AI report this year is pretty blunt about it. The companies getting real productivity gains are not using better models. They are the ones who build persistent context and connect AI to their actual systems. They have the same model, sometimes even the same prompts, but they have a different setup. So I want you to write this down. You don't use Claude. You move into Claude. And day one is not about typing. Day one is about getting your bearings, all of your belongings, and knowing where to go first.
This is Claude. The whole thing, all 28 places across seven continents. We have surfaces, where Claude lives. We have memory, where Claude remembers. We have identity, who Claude is to you. We have skills, what Claude knows how to do. Automation, where Claude works without you. We have access, how Claude reaches your world. And we have creations, what it creates and builds for you.
And most beginners visit two places and quit. Almost always it's web and a single project. They never even leave the first continent. That is why Claude feels like just a chatbot to them. They're standing in one city and judging the whole continent or the whole country at least.
So here's how this video is going to work. We are going to be walking every single continent, all seven, in the order that you should learn them. Okay? Each continent gets its own section with its own purpose. As we go, I will mark five hidden cities almost no beginner finds. And I want you to pay attention because number one shows up on the third continent. Number five is on the last one and it's the one that genuinely changes what you think Claude is.
So, let's start. Continent number one. I called this one surfaces. This is where Claude actually lives. And I have six cities here. This is the continent where Claude already starts living in your computer. And it's really important that you get to this one first, right? Because if you get it wrong, then nothing else on the map is going to matter.
You see, most beginners only know one city, web. That's claude.ai. Okay? It's the tab in your browser. And it's fine for a quick question, but cannot see your files. It cannot run on schedule. It cannot remember your business between sessions. And if you stop there, you've basically downloaded Microsoft Word and never opened it. The real day one move-in is the desktop app. So you install it on your Mac or your PC. It looks like a chat window, but it has a sidebar with a few massive things in it.
Co-work is basically where Claude actually starts becoming useful because it's the workspace inside the desktop app where Claude reads your real folders, runs skills, execute scheduled tasks, and operates inside projects. Everything we're going to talk about for the rest of this video lives inside co-work or code and I'm going to come back to that. So you need to install the desktop app and open co-work. That is the next city.
And then we have the extension. The Chrome extension is what gives Claude browser hints. With it installed, Claude can read pages and click buttons and fill in forms and pull data from sites that don't have an API. And I'm going to come back to it on continent 6, don't worry.
The other two cities here are corners of the same continent and you will grow into them. Mobile on the one hand, that's the phone app for capture on the go, voice notes, quick questions, snapping a receipt, and code, the command line tool for people wanting to write software. Or maybe you're looking for even more advanced capabilities. But you don't really need either on day one, so don't worry.
Now, some weeks ago, someone on my team told me that Claude wasn't working for her. So, we hopped on a call and I noticed that she had been using Claude AI in Safari for 3 weeks. We spent 11 minutes installing the desktop app together. And by the end of the call, she was running an entire workflow that she'd been spending hours on before. The blog was not her skill. It was her starting city. So, when you've settled this continent, Claude already becomes part of your computer and it becomes significantly more useful. I want you to comment below and let me know if that's not the case.
Now, continent number two is memory. And that's what Claude remembers between sessions. And here I have four cities for you. This is the continent that fixes the single biggest complaint that beginners have about AI and that's the conversation amnesia. Every time that you open a chat and have to re-explain who you are and what you're working on. So you want to settle this one and the amnesia is going to end.
Two of the cities here are the ones that everybody confuses and I need to clarify them. Hopefully one central. We have folders and projects. They're not the same place. A folder is a place on your real computer that Claude can read and write into. It's a desk drawer. You point co-work at it once and it has permanent access afterwards. A project, on the other hand, is a workspace inside Claude with its own instructions, its own memory, and its own task history. It's a folder with a brain. Every project lives inside a folder. One folder can also hold multiple projects.
For your day one setup, I have four steps for you, and I think they're pretty simple, so you should be able to follow along. Step number one, make one folder on your computer called Claude Workspace. Put it on your cloud drive, ideally your Google Drive or Dropbox or One Drive. If you have local-only folders, that's basically how you're going to lose work the first time that your laptop dies or you're not next to it. Step number two, open the desktop app and go to co-work settings and set that folder as your workspace. Once you're done, Claude has a permanent address. Step number three, inside that folder, create one subfolder per your area of life or business. In my case, I have something for my personal information and project, something for each one of my businesses and so forth. And step number four, you go back inside co-work and create one project per subfolder. So when it asks which folder should this project live in, you point it at the matching subfolder. Most beginners are going to skip this and then they wonder why their files are scattered across three locations that Claude cannot find.
The other two cities on this continent, you don't really set up. You just notice one of them is your knowledge base. This is the document that you attach to a specific project. So Claude has them at hand. You can be multiple documents by the way. So here you can drop your business one-pager or your client offer document or your client templates and they're all going to sit there permanently. The other city is conversations. Okay, that's the chat history inside each project. Every past session becomes searchable from the project sidebar. So once you settle this continent, Claude is no longer going to be forgetting between sessions. And that's how your work compounds.
Now, continent number three, we have identity. So, who Claude is to you specifically. And here I have three cities. This is the continent where Claude can truly become yours and use your tone, your context, your guardrails. It's also where we hit our first two hidden cities. Okay.
So, first I want you to start with system instructions because every project in Co-work has a system instruction box. Most beginners leave it blank, but honestly, that's the single most expensive blank field in your account. So, don't. You can think of it like the briefing that you would give a new hire on day one. Not too complex, okay? Five lines. It takes 5 minutes, I promise you. Number one, who I am, two sentences, your name, your role, your business. That's it. Number two, what this project is for, the specific work that this project covers, and the outcome that you want to achieve. Number three, how I want Claude to operate. What's the tone, the length, the format? You should be direct and tell it exactly what you want. Okay? You can say no fluff, no "as an AI assistant," blah blah. Number four, what's in the folder. So, give it a quick map of which documents to prioritize and how to use them. And number five, what to ask before assuming or guessing the list of things that you would rather have Claude pause and confirm rather than make up.
One of my community members runs content repurposing and for their first few weeks, every output was average. And then they added a proper briefing to one project. Same Claude, same folder, but the output went from "nah, fine" to "I don't even need to edit this one paragraph." The top of the project changed everything this person ships.
The other two cities on this continent are like I said, the first two hidden cities. They are the reason identity is where most beginners level up the fastest. Okay, so let's talk about hidden city number one and that is the profile. And here I want to share with you my two-email rule because look, Claude is not your chatbot. Claude is your coworker. And you don't give a coworker your personal Gmail and your saved passwords on day one, do you? So don't give them to Claude either. Okay? So how do you go about that? Well, the way that I found works for me is that I make a separate Gmail address, something like yourname-claude@gmail.com. That is Claude's identity. You can open a separate Chrome profile under that email. You can install the Claude extension only inside that profile and then share calendars or drives or inboxes from your real account into Claude's account. Read-only when you can. Now, why would you do that? Well, when you eventually let Claude take actions for you, like book meetings, send emails, fill forms, you want it operating from its own identity, not yours. Trust me, guardrails before power, always.
All right. Now, hidden city number two are your global instructions. So Claude can know you across every project, but only if you tell it to. Most beginners that I've seen think the only place to give Claude context is inside a project, but that's wrong. There is a setting in co-work that is called global instructions. You open it once, write it once, and every project that you ever create after that will automatically inherit it. And now I'm sure you're wondering what goes in there. I think you can keep it short and sweet. Probably not more than five paragraphs. Who you are, your name, your role, your business, your work, the kinds of projects that you typically run, your style, how you want Claude to write to respond to, decide your tools, the platforms, and the apps that you actually live in, and your rules or guardrails, what Claude should never do without asking. And like I said, you type it once, you save it, and now every chat, every skill, every routine, every sub-agent opens with Claude already knowing you. Most beginners build a folder structure and skip this setting entirely. Then they wonder why Claude still feels generic two weeks later.
But now you know. At the end of this continent, Claude is going to stop being a generic AI and it will use your voice, your rules, your guardrails, your memory. And now we are ready to move to continent number four.
This is your skills. Basically, this means what Claude knows how to do. And I have five cities here. And every city on the skills continent is a different way to teach Claude something once and have it repeat that work forever without you re-explaining anything. Now, the most important two cities on this continent are also our third hidden city pair. So, hidden city number three, I want you to write this down. Skills are a cheat code, and slash commands are how you summon them.
Now, let me explain what I mean. A skill is a saved instruction set that Claude can rerun on demand. Most people think you have to build them from scratch, but you don't. There is a public skills library. Presentation skills, document skills, data skills, even ones built by Anthropic. Their own team builds some as well. Only two clicks and they're installed inside your co-workspace. So before you build a skill from scratch, you can just search the library. Half the time someone already built something similar to what you need and you can start from there. But here's the part that nobody tells beginners. Once a skill is installed, you don't need to write a paragraph asking Claude to use it. You just type a forward slash. Just forward slash inside co-work. That opens a menu of every skill, every plug-in, every built-in command available. So you type the first few letters and hit enter and Claude runs it. I know beginners type prompts, but people who actually use Claude type slash commands. That one habit alone is going to save you minutes, probably hours every week.
The continent has three more cities, though. Each one a level above skills. Number one, plugins. These are bundles. Basically, a plug-in packages a set of skills plus the tools that they need into one install. So, instead of adding skills one by one, you install a single plug-in and you get a whole suite. A marketing plug-in, an accounting plug-in, a real estate plug-in. Each one teaches Claude an entire profession at once.
Next, we have sub-agents. These are specialist little Claudes, if you will, that you delegate to. Your research sub-agent, your writing sub-agent, your accounting sub-agent. Each has its own briefing, its own folder, its own tools, and your main Claude doesn't try to do and be everything this way. It just dispatches to the right sub-assistant underneath.
Now, the next city or place is MCP. This is a very important one and it's the protocol underneath everything. It's how Claude talks to external tools. Every connector that you will ever add, Slack, Gmail, Notion, your CRM, runs on it. But don't worry, you don't have to configure MCP. But knowing it exists tells you Claude can connect to almost everything.
Now, once you're done covering this continent and settling or conquering it, you are going to start summoning specialists. Sub-agents specifically are the level above this video and that's probably the next one that I'm going to be recording. So, let me know in the comments below if that's something that you want me to get into more details on.
Now, continent number five is automation because that's when Claude works without you. That's what a lot of people expect and want Claude to do. And I have four cities here. This is the continent that turns Claude from a tool into a co-worker who actually shows up and does work for you. It runs tasks while you sleep. It drafts replies before you wake up. It reports back when something happens. The leverage on this continent is where the real deal is, but you do have to know which city to start with.
Okay, so let's get into all of them one by one. The first two cities are our fourth hidden city pair. They're also the cities that most beginners visit in the wrong order. So hidden city number four, routines and scheduled tasks. They're not the same place. And I know that this confuses a lot of people, so let me clarify. A scheduled task runs on a clock every Sunday at 7 a.m., the first of every month. That's when it fires, basically when time hits a specific point. A routine, on the other hand, runs on a trigger. When a new email arrives, when a new calendar event is booked, when a payment lands, it fires when something happens. So, if you want Claude to summarize your week every Friday afternoon, that's a scheduled task. If you want Claude to drop a reply every time a specific client emails you, that's a routine. Now, most beginners pick the wrong one and then they end up with stale, useless reports. I need you to promise me that you will pick the right city and Claude is going to start working without you asking. I promise you.
Now, the continent, like I said, has two more cities and both are more advanced. One of them is triggers and these are the specific events that fire a routine. Like I said, a new email in a specific inbox or a new payment in your Stripe account, for example, or a booking on your calendar. Triggers aren't a separate thing that you configure on their own. They are the doorbell on each routine. But once you learn what triggers are available, you are able to start spotting routines that you couldn't see before. And then we have workflows. These are basically what happens when you chain skills and routines together. So when one trigger fires, which runs a skill, which writes a file, which fires another routine, which sends a message. I know it sounds complicated. A workflow is an actual AI-built machine for your business that actually works. So once you're comfortable with this continent, your business is going to be awake probably before you are if you do it right.
Now, continent number six, this one has to do with access. How Claude reaches your world. And here I have four cities. This is the second to last continent and I think it's the most consequential one. Without this continent, Claude is going to be a brilliant employee with no keys to the building. But with it, Claude can read your inbox, post to your Slack, browse the web, take phone calls. Also, our fifth and final hidden city is here, and it's the one that I told you to stick around for. So, let's get into it.
First, we need to start with connectors. These are native links that Claude has to things like Slack and Gmail and Notion and Google Calendar and your CRM, your Zapier, and dozens of other tools. It takes two clicks to authorize and once a connector is on, Claude can read messages and draft replies and pull events and search your docs. I mean, a lot of the things that people use automation tools for, Claude does natively now. So you will add your first connector within a week of installing co-work if you learn how to do this right now.
The next city is voice. And this one lets you talk to Claude instead of typing, obviously on the surfaces that support it currently, mobile and the desktop app. And what you need to do is you press a button and have a conversation. I know it's totally underrated. The first time you walk through your day with Claude in your ear deciding what to focus on, you understand why people who use it cannot go back.
Then we have an API. This is for builders who want programmatic access to Claude from their own software. So if you're building a product on top of Claude, an app, a tool, an internal system, that's the door, the API. You're not going to touch it on day one though. But it's the city that explains how every Claude-powered product you have ever heard of actually works.
And then the last city in this continent, hidden city number five, that's the hands. I know Claude has hands. Who knew? Well, with the Chrome extension installed and connected to a project, Claude can actually browse and click and copy and fill in forms and pull data from sites that don't have an API. That is the agentic part. It's also the thing that makes Claude not comparable to other chatbots, I believe, one of them at least. So, let me tell you this. Last week, I had Claude pull 20 days of comments from one of my communities, summarize the top 10 themes, and turn them into slides for my next live call. He did not open the community once, and the whole thing ran from a single sentence that I typed inside of Claude in co-work, in case you're wondering. That is not the future. That is right now. And that's the difference.
Let's talk about the last but absolutely not least, continent creations. So, continent number seven is basically about what Claude actually makes for you. I have two cities here and they are the newest territory on the entire atlas. This continent did not exist 18 months ago. It actually did not exist a few months ago and it's also the reason Claude has stopped feeling like a chatbot and became an actual co-worker with hands that finish your work.
First, we have artifacts. This is the side panel that opens whenever Claude has something to show you that is not just a paragraph. Code that runs, HTML that you can preview, markdown documents, tables, charts, dashboards, even small interactive apps. When you ask Claude for a calculator, a one-pager, a comparison table, a working prototype, Claude does not describe it to you anymore. It builds it inside an artifact. You can edit it in-line, you can copy it, you can export it. Your work stops living in the chat and it starts living as a thing that you can hand to a client. This was not possible even a few weeks ago, but it is now.
And number two, we have the design. This is basically Claude's visual layer. It can create diagrams, flowcharts, presentations, posters, infographics. You basically describe what you want and Claude renders it as a real visual that you can edit and export. No more taking your idea to Canva afterward. The visual lives where the work happens. You're going to feel a big difference the first time you ask Claude for a one-page strategy diagram. Trust me, it'll surprise you and it'll basically just hand you one. Okay? You'll see. Try it. I challenge you.
Look, most beginner tutorials don't mention either of these because most beginner tutorials were written before some of these even existed. But these two cities are why people who use Claude every day cannot go back to anything else. The output is no longer text. The output is a deliverable.
And now you have the whole map. Okay. So let me bring this back to where we started. I told you in the beginning to forget prompts. Now you know why. You started this video with two cities pinned on the map. Probably maybe three, maybe four. I don't know. You let me know in the comments below. But you now have walked every continent. 28 places, seven continents. Seven cities for day one. I believe that you need to touch. And every other place named. I've given you the hidden cities that most beginners never find and every single other place named so you know where Claude can take you.
By now, hopefully for the first time in your career working with Claude, you have a co-worker who shows up already onboarded, already aligned, already in your folders, and already prepared. That is leverage. I hope you can feel how that feels because leverage is the only thing that lets a one-person business feel like a 10-person team.
So, your day one challenge is to pick one of your projects, just one, tonight. Install the desktop app, open co-work, make the workspace folder, write the briefing. I promise you it won't take longer than 60 minutes. And tomorrow morning, open Claude on that project and tell me in the comments what changed.
Now, if you want the full step-by-step, we did a free 7-day challenge in my community. The link is going to be in the description, and the QR code is going to be here. You are more than welcome to join. Like I said, the community is completely free. You can join tens of thousands of other people who are on the exact same path as you.
So now you've seen the whole map. The next continent worth your time, I believe, is skills, specifically routines. That is where Claude truly becomes autonomous. And I think that's the next video that I suggest you to watch. I will walk you through the exact 13 routines that every solo founder should build first. So watch that one next.
And in the meantime, thank you so much for watching. Like this video if you did. Be sure to subscribe if you haven't done so. Share this with anyone in your circle of friends or family or co-workers who is struggling trying to learn Claude and feeling like a beginner still. I hope it helps them as well. Thank you again and I'll see you next time. Bye.