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The Claude Quick-Start
- A quick-start on setting up Claude so it's more than a chatbot.
- The seven skills I've built, about 200 hours of work, to swipe today.
- Eight tips that took me months to find. Now they're yours.
02 / 16
Two years at the keyboard getting these to work.
$0
spent on AI tooling.
0
hours since June 2024.
0
skills and automations, each one a job written down once.
03 / 16
What it made
Four things Claude does for me.
Workflow #1. A demo call ends, the proposal writes itself.Calendar, transcript, proposal, inbox. No hands.
Workflow #2. A WhatsApp account connected to AI.My whole set-up, run from my phone. Live, in a minute.
Workflow #3. The lead magnet builder.One skill, three interactive tools, each one about a day.
Workflow #4. LinkedIn posts in my voice.One a day, from a skill that holds how I write.
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Workflow #1 (Farah)
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.
05 / 16
Workflow #2
A WhatsApp account connected to AI.
What it isA second WhatsApp number that sits in any group chat. When I message it an instruction, it runs my whole set-up from my phone and replies in the chat.
What it can doAnything I'd type in the terminal. Ask it "eta?" on a running job and it answers from the progress board. Only my number can give it instructions.
06 / 16
Workflow #3
The lead magnet builder.
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Workflow #4 (Sophie, Farah)
LinkedIn posts in my voice.
Satire, from the reddit-find and last30days skills plus market knowledge, so it picks up timely events in the market and writes about them the way I would.
Last Friday my cold emails to freight brokers got triple the usual reply rate.
I checked the copy. Same copy.
I checked the list. Same list.
Then I checked the news: the big load board was down. On a Friday. The entire US spot market, one website, offline.
Thousands of brokers, staring at an error page, suddenly available for a conversation.
I have since built an internal tool that watches the load board's status page and triggers our sends the moment it degrades.
We call it empathy-based timing.
Their downtime is our uptime.
I sent 84,291 cold emails to logistics companies to A/B test send times.
The reply rates:
Tuesday, 10am - 1.1%. The classic. The inbox is a warzone.
Friday, 4:55pm - 0.2%. Everyone has already left, mentally.
Sunday, 11pm - 0.6%. Every reply contained a typo and one contained a confession.
Tuesday, 3:47am - 9.8%.
- the owner is already awake
- he is on a check call with a driver in Wyoming
- my email is the only friendly thing in his phone
Testing 2:00am next. Closer to the pain.
08 / 16
The set-up
Four things to copy.
The file structure.Where everything lives, so the next session can read it.
The .env file.Every API key in one place. Any tool with a key there is one sentence away.
CLAUDE.md.The file it reads first, every session.
Todoist, Playwright, the build loop.Three things that sit alongside it.
09 / 16
Setting up Claude for maximum power
The file structure.
Reason: Claude can read your history and improve itself much more easily.
CLAUDE.md who it is for you. Read every session
.env every API key, never pasted into a chat
clients/
thrive/profile.md all it should know about them
historic-newspapers/profile.md
integrations/ (Lisa)
jira/jira.py how to talk to the tool
jira/LEARNINGS.md what it worked out, on top of the docs
shopify/LEARNINGS.md
.claude/skills/
call-context/SKILL.md the job, written down once
grill-me/SKILL.md
knowledge-base/
opinions.md what you believe about your craft
slop-text-removal.md the AI tells it must never write
memory/ what it got wrong once
automation/ the jobs that run on a schedule
10 / 16
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.
DEEPLINE_API_KEY=…
Enrich this list with phone numbers. Juliet
JIRA_API_TOKEN=…
Add these to Jira and pull last week's tickets.
SHOPIFY_ACCESS_TOKEN=…
Which of these stores are on Plus?
APIFY_API_KEY=…
Scrape every store on this list.
TODOIST_API_KEY=…
Tick that off and add the next step.
GOOGLE_CREDENTIALS=…
Read my calendar and send the doc to the client.
The file is ignored by git and hidden from every transcript.
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Setting up Claude for maximum power
CLAUDE.md
Reason: without it every session starts from zero. It's read first, every time, so your rules apply without you repeating them.
# CLAUDE.md, an excerpt from mine
## Hard rules
- Use normal hyphens only. No em dashes or en dashes.
- Write in British English spelling.
- If Stef is clearly wrong, say so plainly.
- Never bluff. If unsure or unverified, say so and check.
- Always give an ETA up front for any task that runs
longer than a couple of tool calls.
- Every action that changes rows at scale ends with a
random sample of 10 to 30 rows, shown in chat.
12 / 16
Setting up Claude for maximum power
Todoist, Playwright, the build loop.
TodoistEvery multi-step job Claude runs gets a task with a subtask per step, ticked as it goes. You can see what it's doing from your phone.
PlaywrightIts own browser, driven by code. Far quicker than Claude clicking around Chrome, and it can log in once and keep going.
Build loopFor anything big. It writes the scoring rubric before the build exists, builds, renders, then something that didn't do the building checks it.
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Skills to swipe
The seven skills.
format-fidelityMatches any formatting, a website or a document, and recreates it at high fidelity. Proves it side by side.
.claude/skills/format-fidelity/skill-creatorWrites skill files better than Claude does on its own. Record yourself doing the task once, hand it the recording.
.claude/skills/skill-creator/call-contextA call transcript into decisions, actions and follow-ups. Everyone in this room sits in calls.
.claude/skills/call-context/grill-me Lisa, SophieBefore it builds anything it interrogates you. You answer questions instead of writing a brief.
.claude/skills/grill-me/finance-inbox TomWatches Gmail for invoices, converts to GBP, adds them to the tracker, nightly.
automation/finance-inbox/slop-text-removal.md all34 writing tells, checked before anything leaves. It reads like a person because the tells were taken out by a check.
knowledge-base/slop-text-removal.mddesign-system.md all21 design rules and the direction gate, so nothing it builds looks like AI built it.
knowledge-base/design-system.md14 / 16
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.
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Tips
What I wish someone had told me.
"Make this a standing rule"Say it when you don't want it to forget. It writes the rule into a file it reads every time.
DictateWhisperFlow. Talk instead of type; it's four times faster and it sounds like you.
Copy a process you already followFar better than inventing one with AI. Record yourself, hand over the recording.
pages.devFree hosting for anything it builds. One command.
/watchA YouTube link in, the transcript out, instantly. That's how I learned most of this.
/loopRun a prompt repeatedly while the session stays open. Force it to keep trying until a process is better.
/goalIt keeps working across turns until the condition is met. Set it and go to bed.
/doctorA setup checkup that diagnoses configuration issues and can fix them. Run it before you ask anyone.
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Next steps.
I'll send you the transcript of this session.Give it to Claude. It asks you a few questions, then builds the set-up you've just seen, for you.
I'll give you the skills I mentioned.All seven. Drop them in the folder and they work.
One clarification.The first time you build anything takes about three times longer than doing it by hand. Every run after that is three times easier.
Want a skill but don't know how to build it?
The receipt-handling one Tom mentioned, for instance. Message me on Slack and we'll book a call.