The Claude Quick-Start
- A quick-start on setting up Claude so it's more than a chatbot.
- The eight skills I've built, about 200 hours of work, to swipe today.
- Eight tips that took me months to find. Now they're yours.
Two years at the keyboard getting these to work.
spent on AI tooling.
hours since June 2024.
skills and automations, each one a job written down once.
For inspiration
Four things Claude does for me.
Workflow #1
A demo call ends. The proposal writes itself.

1. It spots the demo
Every six hours it checks the calendar for a demo call with no proposal yet.

2. It pulls the transcript
The Fathom recording of the call, plus everything already in the prospect's file.

3. It writes the proposal
Situation, goal, blockers, objections, pain points. In the prospect's own words, in my template.

4. It lands in my inbox
Ready to read on the train back. I fix the odd line and send.
Workflow #2
A WhatsApp account connected to AI.
Workflow #4
LinkedIn posts in my voice.
How it works
A skill holds how I write, measured from my own posts rather than described. Every morning it drafts one from something that happened in the week. I edit a line or two and post.
Why it reads like me
The draft goes through the same slop file as everything else before I see it. The tells are removed by a check, not by hope.
Setting up Claude for maximum power
The file structure.
Reason: nothing lives in a chat. Anything that mattered went into a file, and the next session reads the file.
Setting up Claude for maximum power
The .env file.
Reason: one file holds every API key. Claude reads it, and any tool with a key in that file is one sentence away.
The file is ignored by git and hidden from every transcript.
Setting up Claude for maximum power
CLAUDE.md
Reason: it's the file it reads before anything else, every single session. How to reply to you, what to do every time without being asked, the rules it may never break. Write it once and it stops needing reminding.
Setting up Claude for maximum power
Todoist, Playwright, the build loop.
Skills to swipe
The six skills.
.claude/skills/format-fidelity/.claude/skills/skill-creator/.claude/skills/call-context/.claude/skills/grill-me/automation/finance-inbox/knowledge-base/What the writing skills produce
Reads like a person wrote it.
Before the slop file
"Hope this finds you well. I wanted to reach out because we specialise in seamless Shopify migrations that genuinely transform your e-commerce experience."
One of the six, running
Receipts, collected every night.
finance-inbox (Tom's ask)
At 19:00 it reads the inbox, logs each invoice into this sheet in GBP with a category, ignores the newsletters, and flags anything it's unsure of. I haven't typed a transaction by hand since July.
Browser harness
For the ones that never email a receipt. Logs in once, then once a month opens each portal and collects them itself.

Tips
What I wish someone had told me.
Next steps.
The receipt-handling one Tom mentioned, for instance. Message me on Slack and we'll book a call.


