How To Build A Claude Skill From Scratch

I'm going to show you how to build a Claude skill from scratch. So, we're going to do this by using Claude co-work paired with Notion. Okay?

And if you think about it, a Claude skill is really just a chain of prompts. All right? And so the point of building a skill is to be able to have individual prompts that accomplish individual skills, no pun intended, and then to build a Claude skill that runs those prompts in order with the goal of achieving some sort of larger end result. Okay?

And so for example, I'm building a really advanced Claude skill internally right now for uh our company specifically around how to build digital products to help us accelerate our own digital product building process. But this is also a Claude skill that we want to provide you and other writers, you know, and other uh creators and other people that want to launch digital products. And so I what I thought would be cool is as I go through like I've prepped everything and now I'm at the last stage where I have individual prompts that solve uh individual tasks and now I'm at the last stage where I'm going to compile them all together into a Claude skill. So I thought it would be helpful to walk through this and actually show you step by step how I how I do this because I've built some really advanced Claude skills uh for our company internally and so I thought this this would be helpful.

So the very first thing is you need to make sure that co-work is communicating with Notion. Okay, the way to think about uh co-work and Notion working together is sort of like an advanced Claude project. Okay, the benefit of a Claude project, if you've played with Claude projects at all, is that you can upload a bunch of context, a bunch of materials to the memory, which means every time you do something inside of that project, you are pulling from the same reference docs. You can do the same thing with Notion. The benefit of doing it with Notion instead of a Claude project though is you can start to chain prompts together in the form of skills. This is something that you can't really do inside of Claude projects because it just it's not intended to work that way. So if you use co-work paired with Notion, the Notion hub ends up accomplishing the same thing that a project does, but Notion is also like a word processor. And so what that means is that co-work can not not only read the documentation, but it can also use Notion to start drafting things for you. So not not just in the chat but literally drafting you know files for you inside of Notion. That's where things get really powerful.

So the very first step is you open co-work and you want to make sure that you and co-work are starting from the same place. Now what I like to do is I like to create a fresh page inside of my Notion that is essentially acts as the hub for whatever thing that I'm about to build. So here I'm going to build an advanced Claude skill on how to go through my entire process for uh ideulating and outlining and ultimately flushing out a digital product a to z. And so what I want to do is I want to create a fresh page inside Notion and I want to title it something that's relevant. So here I titled it digital product AI hub. Okay. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to fill this hub with all the documentation aka all of the context that I want uh AI or Claude in this case to have as we go through this process. Okay. And so the first step is we're going to fill it with the documentation. And then the second step is then we're going to ultimately tie it all together into a form of a skill. And then the third step is that we're going to execute that skill inside of Notion. And we're going to watch Claude run through every step and basically do it all for us. Okay.

So, you go into co-work and you say, "I want to start a new project. Like, I want to build this thing." Doesn't have to be a long explanation. But first, let's make sure that you have access to my Notion. Now, if you've never connected Notion to co-work before, now would be a good time to do that. You do that in connectors. It's very simple. But even if you have connected your Notion, what tends to happen is if a couple days goes by and you haven't used co-work or or you haven't um used Claude to call to your Notion in a little bit, uh it can forget the connection or or it it loses its place with the connection. And so I like starting every project going, let's make sure that we're connected to to Notion. And more specifically, I want you to find this page, okay? And I want like I this this is let's start on the right foot. like I want you to access my Notion and I want us to operate inside of this project page. Now depending on your unique situation or depending on whether you've connected Notion before or not or in my case depending on what other materials you have in your Notion uh Claude is going to give you different types of confirmation here. It's either going to say yep got it or it's going to say yep got it but with you know some nuances or some things that it needs clarified or it's going to say oh I don't have uh access to your Notion. I need to I need your help for me to go connect to it. Okay. So, whatever it is like you you got to take that step based on your own situation. So, here if you if you look at mine uh my Notion is connected but it says I also found in your Notion these other uh docs this other documentation that may or may not be useful. Do you want me to use these? Do you want me to add these to the the working memory of the thing that we're about to to build together? My quick tip here is I I am going to say no. I don't want you using any pre-existing material. I want to build this from scratch. Okay? And so that's my personal preference. I think that it just it's easier to silo and create things from scratch that way. Whereas if you try and create something new, but you're also like, yeah, maybe you should also pay attention to all this other random stuff I have in my Notion, it becomes difficult to isolate variables. like if all of a sudden uh the output isn't what you want it to be, it's hard to know is that because of the documentation that I've given it now or is it because it's reading conflicting documentation from something else that it found in my Notion, right? So it makes it hard to isolate the variables.

So here it's asking me some clarifying questions and so all I'm going to do is answer the clarifying questions. I'm going to say uh should we pull from existing Notion pages? No, let's not pull from any existing Notion pages. Let's start fresh. What's the scope? The scope of a digital product will ultimately be a full-blown $350 text and video course. However, inside the skill I hope to build here, I also want to include the outlining and creation of other tangential assets like marketing emails, mini products, bonuses, etc. And where does the skill file end up? We are building uh yes we are building a Claude skill uh that will be packaged and delivered using the Notion hub as the working documentation source of truth. Are we on the same page? Ready to begin? And then we go. Okay.

So answering Claude's questions. Now you can see Claude is asking back or saying back um here's what I would recommend like let me know what you want to do but here's what I would recommend. Now I think that one of the most misunderstood ideas in building uh prompts and really like chaining prompts together with skills is that a lot of times people start deferring too much of the thinking to AI. So they they begin the process of building something, but then you know here like AI is like, "Oh, here's what I would recommend." And it just sort of like starts jumping to an answer. And I think it's very easy for people to go, "Oh, well, it seems like Claude's got it." You know, and then you start deferring the thinking to Claude. There are obviously opportunities where AI can be helpful or uh AI can start doing things for you. But through this lens, I think it's really important to understand that the point here is for you to engineer the skill. Okay? And as we get into this, what you'll notice is that engineering skills, which are really just advanced chains of prompts, is less of a game of AI and more of a game of clarity of thinking. All roads lead back to using writing as a vehicle for improving your ability and skill to think. Because a prompt is really just the automated version of the English language, right? And if you think of like what is a book, what like I've written a bunch of books. What is a book? What is a video course? What is a digital product? These are really just long form prompts for human beings. A human being reads this book and in, you know, takes in new information and then you would hope that that new information in some way changes their behavior. What is a text and video course? All it is is an education product intended to prompt or teach other human beings, give them new information to act on, to change their behavior. Changing behavior, taking new action inherently leads to different results, right? And so a prompt or a chain of prompts is really the same idea. It's just instead of explaining it to a human, you're explaining it to a robot. And so what does that mean? That means that the bottleneck actually has nothing to do with AI. The bottleneck to you being able to create valuable things has everything to do with your ability to articulate it. Period. It doesn't matter if you're articulating it to another human or you're articulating it to AI. The bottleneck is still you having to articulate it. And this this has been a really fascinating um just unlock for me realizing that the more education products I build, the more books that I write, the more I'm starting to realize that um I am simultaneously building a product and a prompt for a human and also the same product or prompt for AI. It is actually the same thing. And if you can get really good at explaining things to humans, you are also building the skill of being able to articulate it to AI. Okay, so just little thing to keep in mind here. This is why I'm such a big believer in continuing to practice the skill of writing even though AI can write things. Like that's fine, but I still spend hours and hours and hours every day practicing the skill of writing. Because with writing, you're not really just practicing the skill of writing. You're practicing the skill of clarity of thought. you're practicing the skill of articulating the thing that you're trying to do, which is ultimately what's required in order to get leverage on any of those skills. Okay?

So, AI is here and AI is like, "Hey, I I could handle this for you." Go, "No, no, no, no. I don't want you to take the wheel. I have the wheel." Okay? So, even though we're connected to Notion here, I'm not actually going to put anything into Notion yet. What I want to do is I want to do all of the drafting and all of the brainstorming and all of the outlining and everything, I want to do it inside of Claude and then whenever I get a piece to work, okay? So, think of the chain, all the things that you're trying to chain together, I'm going to go step by step and every time I get a piece to work, then I'm going to go, "All right, like let's save that or let's let's document that or let's ship that to Notion." So think of Notion as um a project like a project base and think of it as the space where you store the final versions of things. Okay. [snorts] So that means that co-work sort of acts as your your sketch pad and then Notion acts as your final pile of files. Okay.

So the first thing that I want to do and I'll you I'm going to use building a digital product and this skill as the primary example. The first thing that I want to do is I want to give Claude a high-level overview of all the different things that I ultimately am going to want to create. Okay? Because I want it to have a bird's eye view of this is this is the big idea. This is the thing we're trying to accomplish. And then we're going to go step by step. Okay? And also I just want to show show you this because prompts prompts and skills are always just reflections of education. Again, it's the same thing articulating it to a human as it is a robot. Okay? And so a lot of the skill that I'm going to be building is based on um two different things. So we have an asynchronous product called Low Ticket Launchpad. And then we also uh run a boot camp called Low Ticket Launchpad Live where we basically take all of the fundamental ideas, add in a couple new upgrades and things because it's live and then build digital products together. Okay. So, I have a lot of pre-existing content to work with. And some of this is full-blown modules explaining things. Um, which you can think of again as like just a different form of a prompt. It's like long form education is a prompt for a human, right? And I also have prompts engineered already. So, I can use those prompts. I can use these modules. I have a bunch of stuff to play with.

So ultimately what I want to start with is I want to go to Claude and I want to say okay here's high level what I'd like to create. The final version I have in mind is I want to create a skill that walks through the following steps related to creating a digital product from scratch. Okay. So notice how like what's the bottleneck? The bottleneck is me being able to sit here and go, "Well, what are the steps? What steps are uh what what steps are involved in building a whole digital product from scratch? What's the order?" Right? All of this actually has nothing to do with AI. Has to do with my ability to articulate the thing that I want to create. Okay, so step one, I want to ideate $350 digital product ideas. Now I need to remind myself because in here I know this is really the thing that I want to do. Uh and I already have a prompt for it. So what I want is I want to create I want to go through this offer creation checklist. Okay. And so that means before we even create the digital product, I want to nail down what's the specific problem that it solves? Who's the specific person that it's designed for? How do we help them in a specific way? like there's all these different decisions that I I want to make. Okay. Um and so what I'll probably end up doing is I'll just want to use this whole prompt here because I already engineered this step. So I'm going to come back to that because I also realize that there's a step before that that I want to do the ideation component. So these are all the attributes that make a high-quality digital product. And so niche digital product idea generator. Okay. So here in this prompt, let's see. I'll give you my niche. Present back to me 10 digital product ideas that I could sell within that niche. Okay. All right. Great. So I can use I can basically just use this prompt. So yeah, that's the first thing that I want to do. So the first thing I go back to Claude is Oh, sorry. Stop. I realized that I didn't change the screen as I did all that. So you can just cut that part. I'll just pick it back up here.

So, step one, I want to ideate different potential $350 digital product ideas. Okay? And I have a prompt for that. Uh, if I go back through here, um, inside of our live low ticket launchpad curriculum, I have a prompt already engineered here for generating ideas. So, cool. So just to think through the process, I first want to generate different digital product ideas. Then I want to pick an idea and run it through my offer creation checklist. Okay, this is just to show you. I also have this already written out um inside a module here. And there's basically like all these different pieces that I want to create uh when it comes to designing a digital product. Like I want to know the problem that it solves, who it's for, how we solve it in a unique and different way, etc. So I want to run through that whole checklist. Okay. Then step three, once I have the offer creation checklist, um let me check my steps here. This is why education products are so great. Um, then I want to outline it. Okay, that's right. And so when I outline it, I have a whole process for how I want to do this. So here, this is the process. We start with the beginning and end in mind. We list out all of the action steps. We outline each action step. Okay. So I'm going to go back to Claude and I go step three. Then uh once we have the offer nailed down, I want to create the full outline for the digital product. And then step four, I want to um actually create the product from scratch using my writing techniques and examples. Okay. So, in theory, we could add as many steps here as we want. I mean, we could go step five. Uh, I also want to pull out um marketing emails and newsletters from this. Uh, step six, I could pull out uh social content from all of the the different modules. um like you can you can make it as advanced as you want but for the sake of walking through this let's just stick with these four steps okay so now it has a high-level bird's eye view of what I want to create and I say let's take this step by step I'd like to go through each step here give you the proper documentation to train you on how I'd like you to execute that step and then show me the output here so I can review it. If the output is good and the documentation is creating the right output, we'll ship it to Notion and move on to the next step. And if it's not, we'll adjust it here until it's right ready to be in. Okay, so now it's saying step one is ready. Now it depends on if you already have things engineered, then really all you're doing is you're just sort of copy and pasting between and you're like, "All right, I already have this thing. Let's make sure it works. Okay, it works. Now let's ship it to Notion." Like in my example here, I've already done a lot of the hard work. If you're trying to do this from like if you haven't done all of this work, then this is like this is where I would actually encourage you to go do the manual version first because as you watch me walk through this, you'll notice how much easier it is when it's like, "Oh, cool. You already have all of this written out in the form of content and prompts." Well, yeah. Like that's the whole point. Uh but if you don't have this, then you can see how then you just start talking to Claude and then Claude's like, "I got it." And then you're like, "Sure, I'm sure you'll be good at it." And then all that's why you end up with outputs that that aren't very high quality. So it really again like everyone's so fixated on I got to learn how to use AI. AI is actually very easy to use. But the bottleneck to you creating high quality prompts or high quality outputs really has nothing to do with your knowledge of knowing how to use AI. It has everything to do with your ability to articulate the thing that you're trying to create. Okay.

So, step one, I'm going to go into my materials here, and let's take this prompt. And I believe I already um I think I really already engineered this the way that I want it to be. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to paste this here. And I'm just going to read through this real quick to make sure that this has everything that I want it. So, I want your help generating ideas. I'll give you my niche. I want you to give me 10 digital product ideas. Um, and then here's all the training documentation on positive attributes that make for high quality ideas. Um, again, what's funny just I just want to show you this because this is this really reinforces the point. This prompt, this looks like a really long prompt. This prompt is really just a slightly modified version of this entire module that I wrote out for human beings. And that's that is like the biggest thing that's clicked for me with writing prompts recently is that the best prompts are really just uh education products copy pasted into AI. And so here all I'm doing is training AI the same way that I would train a human which is here's how to do the thing. Here are positive attributes to look for. You know do this, don't do this. It's the exact same thing. So, we're going to run this. And here it's going to go step one. Now, if it's executing the prompt, it's probably going to ask me some questions. It's going to be like, "All right, so what's your what's your niche?" Now, I want I want I don't actually want to um execute this for a specific I don't want the skill to be for a specific niche. I want this skill to be universal. Okay. So, I'm going to say, okay, so just to be clear, the end goal here is to create a skill anyone can use, any writer, creator, etc. that is not specific to a niche. So, what's the best way of shipping this to Notion and continuing to build this skill without it being tied to a particular niche because I want this to be universal. I want anyone to be able to use this. Okay, cool. So, just reading what uh Claude responded with here. Um, it's basically confirming for me and this is what I want. um we want this to be more like high-level documentation not specific to to a niche. So now this is where AI can propose things and you can go back and forth. Now obviously the important part is that you read it and you understand what it's saying and then you confirm okay yes I that's that's what I'd like to do versus no. So here the documentation that it's suggesting is basically uh I'm going to Claude is going to take the material that I gave it in the form of this prompt. It's going to ask me for my niche. It's going to generate ideas, then do the offer creation checklist, then full outline, then create the product. So, it knows already because these are the steps that I said that I wanted to walk through. And so, it's going to execute this first step first. And so, two things I need. Thumbs up on the architecture. Yep. And then a sample niche so that we can do a test run. So, yep, this architecture is correct. Sample niche. Let's do this for accountants who work with high net worth individuals and help them reduce their taxable income liabilities. So let's just ship that as a as an example to see what happens. Okay.

So here you can see Claude is now executing and running this. And if you look at the progress here on the right, it has the bird's eye view in mind. Okay? And so we're doing this first step, but then as I finish that first step, it's going to go into, all right, so we've shipped the documentation for step one. And then we're going to do the same thing for step two, offer creation. Then we're going to do the same thing for step three, full product outline. And we're going to work all the way down to, okay, we have all the steps. Now we're going to package it as a full skill file. Okay. So here, this is where things get really cool. using co-work and Notion. You can see how um let's like let's go over to our Notion hub. It has started creating the documentation here. So it has the high-level overview. It has it's created the the page for it. Then it has this for step one and this for step two. So it has these all as placeholders. And what's going to happen is as we work through the steps here when we get when when we go okay you understand it's executing this step well we can ship the final version like basically like a mini packaging of that individual step to the page in Notion. So we save that documentation and then we move on to the next step. So here 10 digital product ideas. So the niche is accountants who work with high net worth individuals and help them reduce taxable income/ liabilities. Target customer, okay, is probably going to be business owners, executives, investors, real estate holders since they have the purchasing power and etc. Their target person. Okay, so here's 10 different digital product ideas. How to structure your business as an S corp. Optimize your reasonable salary and cut your self-employment tax by up to $30,000 a year. Awesome. Um, we're not naming the product yet. We're just coming up with ideas like what are different things that we could help um, someone do. So, all of these product ideas look pretty great. How to launch a solo 401k with a mega backdoor Roth and shelter up to $69,000 in tax-advantaged contributions. Great. That's a super specific type of thing that we can help people with. How to sell your startup shares using the QSBS exclusion. As someone who has tried to figure this out, I can tell you that is not an easy thing to understand. That would make for a great digital product. Um, how to reinvest capital gains into a qualified opportunity zone fund. I have a couple friends who do that. I don't know how to do that. that's a great very specific thing that you could help people with. So these are all really high-quality ideas and it's running through my framework and my framework is what makes for a great idea is it has these five different attributes. You know it's like um they're they're qualified ideas meaning that they are relevant to the niche and relevant to the person that we're trying to help. They're price anchored in some way. Make more money, stop losing money, save time. They're designed for a very specific type of customer. it uh has potential to be paired with some sort of tangible digital asset and it completely solves an isolated problem. Okay, so it's not like an impartial solution to a a small problem. It is a complete solution to a specific problem. Okay, so here then we go yes this is great. Let's consider step one successful and ship it and move on to step two. Now if you didn't get good outputs then chances are the problem is not in co-work here. The problem is in the documentation that you're giving. And so just to as Claude's doing this just to go back here the reason that I get a high-quality output is because look at this module. This module is almost 5,000 words. So, I essentially wrote 5,000 words for a very specific human walking through all of the steps and all of the things that go into doing this specific step well. And then I just took all that information and added a little bit more context to like run it as a prompt and then created the prompt using that. So, if you're not getting high quality output, it always is an input problem. And the problem that most people have with inputs is they they ask AI to do things that they haven't fully thought through themselves. And so this module or all of these different modules are great examples. Like I have sat here and thought through exactly how I would walk a human being through the thing that I'm trying to help them with. And I have explained it in excruciating detail. And so that is why I get higher high quality outputs.

All right. So now Claude has finished with step one, shipped it, put it inside Notion. So here if we go back to Notion, we can check. And here in step one, everything's filled in. It's basically taking all all of the context from my prompt and then just reinforcing it here and it's connecting it to the next step in the skill. So again, this is like skills are really just chains of prompts. So now we move on to step two, which is the offer creation checklist. So here I got to go get my documentation. So I go back into here. We go to offer creation and I want to use this prompt here at the bottom. So I'm going to bring this back over to Claude and I go great. Here's the documentation. Okay, cool. And now it's prompting step two. Step two is first we want to check the output. So I need to pick an idea, you know, because I'm doing the drafting here inside co-work. So I got to pick an idea to see all right what what does this prompt lead to in terms of an output and then second is in order to expand this idea into a digital product really the big decision that needs to get made is what is the experience level of the target customer. Now if you go back to the module, this is like a huge part of the the education for the human being, right? Like look at th this is how much space I take up to explain why this is so important. Like that's a that's a hefty explanation. And so going back to the prompt here inside Claude, this is the big decision that we need to make. And I want to bake that into the skill so that whenever someone is buil is using this to build digital products, they have to make this decision in order to move forward. Okay. So here, let's let's see which one should we do. Okay. So I'm going to pick this first one, escorp, because I've actually lived this problem. I remember when I first started being an entrepreneur, I had an LLC. I understood the like the basic idea of how LLCs worked. And then uh this happened in both my first business and in my current business. We transitioned from LLC over to escorp. And there were all sorts of like new things I had to learn in doing that. And it's not that it's like hard it but there is a learning curve. And in hindsight, I wish that I had consumed an education product that walked me through it. So I understand what what goes into this. So cool. I'm going to pick that as the the opportunity, the digital product that we could build. And the experience level I'm going to pick proficient beginner. Someone who has been working for themselves and is generating 100k or more a year in income but is anticipating to scale further and wants to make the move to an escorp to reduce their taxable liability. I am picking this also to stress test because this was me like I I was making about 100 grand a year and then business started going well and all all of a sudden I was like whoa I see a lot of growth ahead of us we should we should do that and we should make the pivot to an escorp. So I'm going to give Claude these inputs and then we're going to take a look at what the output looks like and if it's a high-quality output and the documentation's working the way that it should, we're going to do the same thing we did with step one. We're going to evaluate it. We're going to ship it to Notion and then we're going to move on to step three.

So now you see Claude working through step two. It's it's going through my framework, my offer creation checklist, and it's basically making notes next to each item. Now, this is exactly what I would train a human to do. I would say you have an idea for a digital product. Now, we we want to make some of these high-level decisions or at least make sure that you're aware of all these different pieces because that's ultimately what's going to go into building a really compelling product. So here it's just going down the list and next to each item it's just sort of riffing on, you know, so like here's a specific problem. You're self-employed. You're generating 100K a year and your self-employment tax bill is growing. You don't know how to make the move to an escorp without making costly mistakes, etc. Like that's what the digital product is intended to help the person with. So this checklist is really just like chicken scratch and that's all it needs to be. Then the next part of the offer creation checklist is anticipating objections. And there's always three big objections that people have when it comes to digital products, for example. Um, they see a product, they go, "Oh, that's compelling, but and then they always have one or two or all three of these objections." They have a time objection being, "I don't have time for this." They have an expertise objection being, "I don't think I'm going to understand this or I think this is too far over my head or I think I need XYZ skills before I can do this." These are all just rationalizations. and or they have a cost objection and cost really has nothing to do with money. Cost has to do with perceived value and so they're like h why would I buy this when I could just figure it out on my own or should I buy this? I mean I feel like I need to pay an accountant. Shouldn't I do that? And so it's worth getting ahead of these three types of objections when you're thinking about the creation of a digital product. And so in the framework, not only do I want to walk through the checklist, but I also want to get ahead of these three objections. And then this is specific to digital products, but just to riff on it for a second, the the whole name of the game is creating bonuses and not just creating uh free bonuses for the sake of creating free bonuses. The name of the game is creating free bonuses that speak directly to each objection. So here it's coming up with and it's executing the framework perfectly. It's it's coming up with three tangible bonuses that address each one of these different objections. You know, time, expertise, and cost. And so here it's asking me let's confirm yes this is and all of this looks great. So go yes this is great let's ship it and move on to the next step. Okay and step two is shipped. So let's just double check it. We go back over to Notion. We go to step two. It looks like everything made it over. That's the whole framework. It added some execution notes for itself. That's fine. And then hand off to step three. Okay, perfect.

So, we're going to go back to Claude and we're going to go Great. Let's move on to step three. Here's the documentation. So, I want to go back to my digital product here. And I have another prompt that is my whole framework for expanding um the outline and so or taking the digital product idea and then creating an outline and expanding it. So here this is nice and beefy. I'm going to take this prompt and I'm going to bring it back to Claude and I'm going to give it the documentation and then it might need um it might need some input from me. Okay. And here Claude is asking for clarification, which makes sense because I built these prompts as standalones. And so this is something to flag when you're doing when you're creating a skill using uh previous prompts that you probably built for something that's isolated is sometimes when you when you take a prompt that's uh been isolated for a specific task and then you start to combine them with other things. Um there's there's like nuance differences, right? So here Claude is saying, "I just want to make sure uh because in this prompt which I built for a standalone use case, you're not going to give me a different offer. What you want is you want me to use the output from step two to inform step three." And so here I want to say yes, I do. Yes, that's correct. Yes, that's correct. Use the approved step two offer to move into step three. And this is where you can start to see uh the power of chaining prompts together, you know, because then like now it's not just individual task followed by individual task. Now it's uh the first prompt creates an output. That output influences the second prompt or the second step which those two things added together influence the third step and then those three things added together influence the fourth step. That's what makes skills so powerful is that the context uh grows as the skill gets executed. Okay. And Claude came up with a full product outline and named the product here the six figure escorp switch. So here the first step is we want to start with what I like to call the bookends. So where is the person starting from and where do we want them to end up? So it's outlined that here. Here's where they are at the beginning. Here's where where we want them to be at the end. Then the outline quote unquote for the digital product is really just think of each module as the major action step between where they are and where they want to end up. A lot of times just a little riff on digital products here. A lot of times people make the mistake with digital products thinking that what the the customer is buying is information or the purpose of a product is to share lots of interesting things. That is not the point. The point of a digital product is to give someone the documentation. Remember a digital product is like a prompt for a human being. So the point is to give uh a human the documentation needed so that like the instruction manual so that they can walk from where they are to where you want them to end up and where they want to end up. Which means each module is really not don't think of it as information. Each module is an action step. you're here, you need to do this, this, this, and this. And if you do those things, you will end up here. That's the goal. And so the easiest way to think about outlining a digital product is to think in terms of action steps. All right? And then now it's executing the framework. So it's taking each action step and it's going through the full outline. So it's like here module here's module one. This is the first action step. And then we're working through my subframework which is and here's how to outline each individual module aka here's how to take the action step and then unbundle it into the necessary information. So here it's like the first section of this module is here's the reasons why you should take this action step. Here are the mistakes to avoid when you are executing this action step. Here are the substeps. So in order to accomplish this major action step, there are substeps, right? You got to do this and then this and then this and then this. And if you do all of these things, you will have accomplished this major action step. Then frequently asked questions. It doesn't matter how clear I am when I explain something. The person is always going to have follow-up questions. They're going to want things clarified. Or most common people's questions are actually objections in disguise. So, they might ask the question to themselves or to you if it was like a live boot camp or something. They might ask a question like, "Okay, this makes sense, but but will this work for my niche?" That's not actually a question. That's an objection phrased as a question. And so this is a great section to speak to those objections that the person probably has, right? You've explained to them how to do something and they're sitting there and they're like, I don't know if it's going to work for me, though. Will it? That's not a question. That's an objection. Then section five, this is just like a note to you or the creator or me or whoever is building these digital products, but you would want to share some sort of walkthrough example. So showing how you do the thing that you just explained to them how to do. Uh section six, this six, this is just a nice little uh subframework that I love using which is you pair a tangible asset with each individual module. And the tangible asset you should think of as an asset that increases the likelihood that the person will be successful at executing this action step. You frame it as a bonus and that increases the perceived value. But really, the purpose of this asset is to go, I just explained this whole thing to you. And to increase the likelihood that you are successful, here's a checklist. Here's a template. Here's a prompt. Here's a swipe file. It's just something that increases the likelihood that they will do the thing that you just explained to them how to do. And then seven, assignment. Uh, if it if you're running like a if this is a curriculum for a live program, for example, this assignment might be something that like there's gamification tied to it or they submit it somewhere. If it's a if it's a high ticket group coaching program, maybe they submit their assignment to their coach. But in the case of just a low ticket digital product, like a $350 text and video course, the goal of the assignment is really just to recap. Okay, I explained all this stuff to you. I know it's like drinking out of a fire hose, but as a reminder, these are the things you got to go do. So, it's just like a a compressed real quick recap of what's most important. What does the person need to actually go do? And then here it like look it just executes that entire framework over and over again for each major action step aka each major module. So all of this looks great. Awesome. And now here's the QA at the bottom. So is this framing right? Yes. Is the number of modules right? Six. That's fine. Inside each module is the depth of bulleting correct? Yep. It executed the framework. Did you correctly use the bonuses? Yep. Um, or is that correct? Yep. I'll say this is perfect. Let's ship this and move on to step four. Okay, great. And it has shipped step three. So, let's check our work here. We're going to go back to our hub. We go to step three. Everything is in there. So if we were to export this skill as it currently is what would happen is we would go all right these are the high this is high level what we're going to do we're going to generate an idea for a digital product we're going to take that idea and we're going to build out the offer creation checklist then once we have that checklist we're going to uh like and we have the appropriate context for the product that we want to build then we're going to flush it out into an outline and then from that high-level outline we are actually going to then further outline each individual module inside of that digital product. But I want to push it one step further, which is and I want AI to actually be able to create an entire V1 of the product itself. So we notice like how each layer and this is this is the way that you should think about building skills. Skills, you want to start, you know, it's like bird's eye view. Here's the whole thing that we're trying to build. And then the first step ends up, you know, you come to decisions and that decision narrows in the thinking to the second step which narrows in the thinking to the third step which narrows in the thinking to the fourth step. And so here, notice how we've gone from I want to create a digital product to generate ideas to pick an idea and create the the offer stack to create the outline to create the outline of each individual module inside that outline to and then the very last step is and then write each module. And this is what gets so fascinating about using AI for stuff like this is I truly believe as much as I am a purist when it comes to writing and I will always I will continue to write like no matter how good AI gets I will continue to write because again writing is a vehicle for clarifying your own thinking. I am of the belief that if you understand how a piece of writing is generated um well enough then and you are aware of all of the little subjective decisions that you make when you

Are sitting down to write, you can automate that thing. And so, I do believe that I can get AI to write a comparable, even if it's maybe like 70-80%, a comparable uh V1 digital product that I would do. I just need to be very explicit about the instructions.

So, I actually haven't created the prompt yet for this fourth step. So, uh, this might be a little janky as I go through and do this now, but I actually want to show you how I would think about doing this because, um, I do think that it's possible to get fairly high-quality V1s of each individual module if we take the time to really break down what the rules are. So, let's go ahead and do that.

And by the way, I do this a lot. Um, sometimes if I have a very clear idea of how I want a prompt engineered, I'll just write it inside Notion and copy-paste it over like I've been doing. But other times, I find it more helpful if I'm building a a new type of prompt or I'm sort of like creating something by duct-taping other things together. I find it more helpful to actually do the writing inside of the Claude window. I'm not really sure why, but that's what I'm going to do here.

So, I'm going to say, "Okay, here's the documentation for step four, which is expanding each individual module and its outline into a fully written module. However, I, when doing the writing process, I would like you to keep a handful of rules in mind. So, let's walk through them here."

So, when I am writing a module of a digital product, I, I kind of always do the same thing over and over again. And so, first, I would like each module to open with a welcome statement that, or a welcome section that introduces the customer to the big ideas we are going to cover inside that module. Here's an example.

So now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into one of our other digital products and here I'm taking this as the outline or as the example. So, I copy-paste it here and I go, "So, when writing the welcome section, please use this template every time. Hey there. Welcome to module number [sighs]. Welcome to [name of digital product] module number. In this module, we're going to be talking about how to solve [problem], how to unlock [sub-outcome number one]. Let's dive in."

Okay, great. From here, now I need to go back to my little checklist here. I've got, let's see, the outline here, or no, it's in the offer, or no, it's in the outline. So, I'm going to take this whole section, which I already have the documentation for this. From here, we are going to create, um, H1 headers in Notion for each of the seven sections here. Then, inside of each section, using the niche and product-specific information from step three, so the product's outline, I'd like you to write each section out in full. However, I'd like you to execute the writing of each one of these sections with these specific rules in mind.

So, here, this is the hardest part. This is where we've got to figure out what is the best way of articulating to AI how to do this. So, there's a newsletter prompt that I engineered a while ago, um, that I use all the time and, uh, we use this in our ghostwriting program. We use this internally for a bunch of our different email sequences and it's, and it's great because I spent a lot of time dialing in, um, a lot of the, the writing rules that I find myself using often. And so, here, this is designed for a newsletter. So, I don't really need, I don't need the high-level, these different variables. I don't need a subject line. Um, I don't need, maybe I could use an introduction. No. Section content is probably the thing that I want the most. So, yeah, I think it starts here. So, I'm going to have to copy-paste this over and sort of see what I want to keep and what I don't.

So, I'm going to copy-paste this. Oh, why did it do that? Bring this into Notion real quick. Okay. So, I copy-pasted this in. Now, I've got to like stitch this together. So, inside of each section, I want you to write the section in full. However, I'd like you to do it with these rules in mind. Um, within each section, provide specific, tangible, differentiated, and actionable insights so that if the reader wants to know more, um, actually, I don't need this. You can use the "10 magical ways." Say, "When in doubt, you can always use the 10 magical ways to expand on valuable insights for the reader." And I want to find the 10 magical ways. It was further up in the prompt here. This is another sub-framework I use often. Not sure why it's doing that. But here's some specific criteria for making a really valuable section or making each section of each module as valuable as possible.

So, the writing of each module is actually very similar to the way that I would think about writing a newsletter. I just need to tweak the language here so it doesn't get confused. So, like here, if it says, um, if the newsletter, like, I don't want it to say that, you know. So, I'm going to say, "If the section is some sort of how-to information, make each section as actionable, instructional as possible. Tips, steps, reasons, etc. Reader should know exactly what needs to be done. If the section is more focused on the why." [Sighs] And then, "This is how to make it skimable and easy to read. Here's how I recommend accomplishing that. Always start and end each section with an open or closer. Middle bullet lists. Alternate rhythm and pacing." Here's a section example. Actually, this is all okay.

And then, whenever I'm separating sections, I just like separating them with a little liner squiggly. It just helps me organize in my brain what each section's accomplishing in a prompt. So, here, um, I'm going to say, "This is a section example with the promise of the section being okay." All right. So, basically, I'm taking a newsletter prompt, which has a lot of the same writing rules, and I'm just modifying it for this context.

So, I also just think it's cool to show you how this is why, like, taking the time to, to write, clarify your thinking, um, build digital products, engineer prompts. It's, it's never wasted time because you can always go back to things that you created in the past and you can re-wizzle it, you can remix it, you can duct tape things together, you know, like this prompt is the combination of, you know, five different prompts that I've created in the past. And so, here, I've given it all the, the rules and I would say, "I would like you to, um, lastly, when expanding the outline from step three and actually, this is where Co-work and Notion really can start to work together, um, that expanding the outline from step three and actually writing out the entire digital product. I'd like you, inside our Notion hub here, to create a new page with, or new page titled, the name of the digital product. And then, inside that page, I would like you to create subpages for each individual module and then do the writing for each module inside of each subpage. So that way, everything is cleanly organized."

Are you ready? Are you ready? All right. So, then, just so I don't lose this, I'm going to take this prompt because I basically just engineered this a whole new prompt, right? So, before I run this, I want to take this and just save this somewhere, um, and then copy-paste and then run this.

Okay, Claude says, "Understood." And then, "Two quick confirmations. Which module should we do as a test run?" So, "Module three from our outline. That's fine. We'll test that. And then delivery flow. I write the full module here in the chat first. You review. Once approved, I do, I do two things." Actually, I don't because I think the documentation will be good enough. I actually don't want to stop it. I want the skill to just run all the way through. I don't want to have to like stop it module by module. So, I'm going to say, "Yep, let's use that as our test." And two, actually, for the final skill, what I'd like in this step is for you to draft all the modules in a row inside Notion. And then I'll do a QA at the very end instead of drafting each module individually here. Is that okay?"

All right. And you can see here, Claude is doing the work for us. So, uh, it understands the documentation. Um, it's going through the steps and now it is going through the writing process. So, this is what's cool about skills is now I've set it on its way and I could go make another cup of coffee. I could go work on something else and I come back in, you know, 10, 15, 20 minutes and it's done. So, this, this is what's so awesome.

So, I'm going to give it a second and let it, uh, run through some of the skills and then, um, walk through the packaging process. Okay. And come back 10 minutes later and the entire digital product from our test idea here has been written and flushed out into Notion. So, you can see, uh, I didn't do any of this. I mean, I gave the documentation, but it ran through all of the different modules from our outline and then it worked and then it used the writing prompt to expand each module and actually write it out and it did it all in a row. So, this is again where skills start to get really powerful when you chain things together because in, uh, chat, what you would have done is you would have said, "I want to write a module." It would have written it. It would have given it back to you in the chat and then you do that step and then you copy-paste it over somewhere, right? It's very like back and forth. With skills, you can give the context of the entire project that you're trying to create and then bake into the skill, "I just want you to go through all of these steps in order." And so, here, it wrote module one. It didn't ask me for my confirmation. It didn't ask me to QA it. It just went straight into writing module two. And then, when it was done, it went straight into writing module three, straight into writing module four, etc.

Okay, so here, let's just check our work. If we go into our hub, we have the documentation here. And then underneath, notice it created, it did what I asked. It created a new page for this entire digital product. And then I click into here. It has some context. It wrote these things out like summarizing what this product is. And then it has all of the modules in here. So, module one, module two, module three. So, these are all subpages. These are in the instructions. This is what I asked for. And then we can go into each individual module. So, like, let's go into this one. And it's executing the intro. Like I said, "Hey there. Welcome to module three. Here's what we're going to talk about. Let's dive in." It has the different sections. So, section one, reason why, section two, mistakes to avoid, etc. And it's using the writing frameworks that I gave it to actually expand the whole outline. It's got some great, uh, FAQs in there. It has a note for the sort of walkthrough example that I, or whoever is creating the product, could provide. Uh, it has an idea for a bonus template. So, obviously, I, or you, or whoever is using this would have to go build the template, but it has the idea written out here for you. And then it summarizes the assignment. Here are all the things that you need to go do.

So, this is awesome. So, if you go back through, I mean, look, we just wrote out essentially an entire digital product in 10 minutes using the documentation. Obviously, this is much longer because we're working through and we're building the whole skill. But now, like, I could give this any idea I want and then leave my computer and come back in 15 minutes and it's going to have a new page created and inside that page, it's going to have the whole outline and then inside each module from the outline, it's going to be fully written. And all of a sudden, what would have taken me three hours minimum, and I'm like, really proficient at this stuff, you know, three hours minimum to get a V1 of all of that, it can do all of that for me in 15 minutes. And then it's just a matter of cleaning up the writing, which is really cool. This is, this is where skills and and chaining tasks together become extremely powerful.

So, let's go back to Claude and let's do the final step, which is, "This looks awesome. Now, let's package all of this up into a skill that is not specific to any particular niche. Remember, any writer, creator, business owner, etc. should be able to use this skill, answer the questions, or give the appropriate context and walk through these steps to build a full digital product."

Okay, so Claude is almost done packaging this up as a skill and you can see inside the working folder here. So, it has the different steps and then it has like the README file and the example, like the worked example file, etc. And so, now it's just validating that all of that is working. It's going to package it up and then we're going to have that as a skill that we can save inside of our, our Claude.

Now, I could add in a couple other files if I wanted to. Like, for example, I could, uh, create an editing step where maybe step five, after the entire product has been created, um, it goes back through and it reads the entire, like, every module and it looks for things, you know, it looks for, uh, consistency. It looks for like AI giveaways and and tweaks those, etc. I will, I will tell you though that I find that those types of like editing steps, especially when the editing step is, is trying to identify, uh, like AI giveaways. A lot of times, I think people don't spend enough time on the instruction or the documentation and they defer too much to AI and then they try and fix it at the very end by creating some sort of editing file that's like, "Oh, and after you did all that thinking for me, uh, remove the things that make it sound like AI." And I, I tend to take the opposite approach. Um, if the documentation on the front end is good enough, you don't even need that editing step. Like, even just skimming through what Claude created here, like, I, I don't even need to build that editing step because the documentation is so specific and so clear.

So, here, let's just look at what's inside this, uh, this plugin is done and I can save the plugin here to my Claude. So, I save the plugin. That's pretty cool. And then what I can do is I can export this. And now this is a really powerful Claude skill that I could, uh, give away to writers inside of our programs. I could include it in products. I could sell the skill as a standalone. I could add it into our SaaS. Like, the amount of IP that you create with these types of files is tremendous. So, that is how you build a Claude skill from scratch. Um, I hope this was helpful. This is what I do every time. I use Co-work and I use Notion together. And then, once I solidify all of the steps, now inside this Notion hub, for example, like you go back inside Notion, I could build 50 digital products in here. And so, I mean, think about the leverage of that.

And I think the last thing I want to say is, um, of course, if we go into this product and let's say we pull up a module and we start reading through it and we're like, "Eh, you know what? I don't like the writing of this for whatever reason." Well, think about the amount of, like, how much we've accelerated getting to here, right? Like, we just skipped basically three, five, ten hours of outlining and offer creation and putting together the different modules and organizing the files and creating the outline of each individual module and then putting the chicken scratch of what we want to say inside of each section of each individual module. We just pulled forward five or ten hours. And I think what's funny is oftentimes, even when there's like a very high-quality output from AI, people will look at an output and then find one sentence that they don't like or one sentence that's written in a way where they're like, "Ah, that sounds like AI." And what they do is they take that one sentence and then they, they think to themselves, "Oh, I should throw the entire product away." Well, no. The, the point of using AI isn't to go from, you know, it takes me time to, it takes me zero time. The point of using AI is to realize, well, if I was to do this on my own without AI, it would take me 10 or 20 hours. Now, with AI, maybe it only takes me two hours. That doesn't mean that you still don't have to do work. You still have to do two hours of work. You have to do two hours of like refining and cleaning it up and make, you know, making sure that it is up to your own standard, but two hours is a lot less than 20 hours, right? And I find so often, like that is the biggest issue, uh, that I see people have with AI is like they, they generate this huge output and then they find one little detail they don't like and they want to throw the whole thing away. That's not true. There's a lot of really great stuff in here. I might clean some of it up or I might change the voice of a couple things. I might change the formatting of a couple things, but like this is a fully fleshed out product that's done.

So, that's how I build a Claude skill from scratch. Uh, I hope that this is helpful for you and I really encourage you to build the skill of building skills.