Welcome to Crash Course, Show and Tell.
This is a rerecorded version for those of you who missed
the live and in person session.
Crash Course delivers private, live or recorded team training on ai, social
media, and modern communication tools.
I have personally been teaching these concepts for a very long time, longer
than I wish to say, and Crash Course.
Customize's this education to your actual stack, your skill gaps, and of
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Huge thank you to Salesforce and Lucia for all that you have done to make.
Crash Course's first year successful.
Okay, let's get into it.
I am beyond excited to talk to you today.
I love Claude.
I'm hoping we can fall in love with Claude or CC as I like to call her together.
And on a very serious note, I have been working in the marketing communications
technology space for over a decade, and Claude is the singular, most exciting
piece of software that I have seen over the course of that entire journey.
Claude represents a movement of democratization of technology.
Because of tools like Claude, we can truly build anything that we want to if we
just take the time to learn how to do so.
You don't have to be a magical programming wizard to create things.
You can do it on your very own desktop.
For those of you who are not aware, this is the third show and tell,
and the very first in a mini series, taking a deep dive into Claude
Claude Code and Claude Coworking.
It is important for you to make note of the fact that we're only
gonna scratch the surface today.
Future sessions will go deeper.
The previous sessions of Show and Tell are available on crashthatcourse.com.
If you need a shortcut to get there, you can just visit unicornflames.com
where all of my projects are late.
Let's begin with a real conversation here about ai.
We are not going to get deep into the weeds of some of the ethics and concerns,
even litigation that's happening around ai, environmental impact.
There's so much to consider and I don't want to pretend that we're
gonna get into all of that today.
But I do think it's important to, at the very least, talk about what I would
refer to as the hurt help spectrum.
A really simple way to think about this, in my opinion, is to imagine the chainsaw
now, if a tree is struggling or dying, or if a path needs to be cleared for a
specific and truly necessary situation.
A chainsaw can be a really helpful tool, right?
The tree was about to fall on my house.
I used a chainsaw to cut it down.
Of course, on the opposite end of that spectrum, we have the harm.
I always imagine the saw movies that seem to come out with a new movie every single
Halloween, and it's essentially just about using a chainsaw to cause harm, right?
To end life essentially.
Would be the summary there.
I have not seen the movies.
I'm too afraid of them, and I wanna be able to sleep well.
It's the tool more often than not that we're thinking of, but
really it's human actions, right?
AI can be used for both good and bad.
In many regards.
I would posi it's.
Like most technologies.
Now, of course, I've skipped over the fact that there are some very
serious environmental concerns that will need to be mitigated.
There are legal concerns for reproducing, copying content.
All of those are certainly worth a separate discussion at a later time.
But just a reminder, today we're gonna be focusing on AI that can help, that
has benefits and benefits it does have.
Here's what we're gonna cover today.
It's short session, so we're gonna try to pack in as much as possible.
And if you are multitasking, I celebrate you, but I encourage you
to turn off the other thing that you're looking at or doing because.
What is happening on the screen is going to require your full attention.
First, we're gonna get into vocab words.
You just gotta know during the second chapter, we're gonna talk around content.
During the third chapter, we're gonna get into research.
During the fourth chapter, we're gonna talk about outbound.
Before we wrap up, I'm gonna tell you how to reach me with questions.
We really do need to start here with chapter one, vocab words, phrases.
We're gonna figure out how to talk the talk here.
First of all, API keys private credential that allows one
app to talk to another app.
So the way I think about API Keys is that different programs can
talk to each other in their magical computer language and they can
have that dialogue back and forth.
More importantly, they could pass information back and forth, right?
So if you think of your CRM or customer relationship management tool, and then
you think of another database perhaps, or another piece of software in your
stack, an API key will allow those two tools to talk to each other, right?
They can say, Hey, John, over here in the CRM said that his birthday was April 15th.
And then perhaps your other software tools in charge of managing, uh, cards
that go out in the mail or something like that, those two can exchange information.
API Keys are huge, and it used to be extremely expensive or at least
cost prohibitive to work with them.
Back when I owned a marketing agency, if someone mentioned that they had
an API key, it often added a few thousand dollars to the project.
Not always, but often.
Next, you need to know the word terminal.
If you're on a Mac, you may have interacted with this before.
You may have not The.
Terminal essentially is just a text-based interface for talking
directly to your computer.
When people think of terminal, we often think of like hacker movies.
Most often what's happening on screen in a hacker movie is completely, just made up.
Uh, but we all have this kind of image.
I think we can conjure of a, a dark black screen with code
and numbers and commands on it.
That is the terminal.
And the terminal is really useful as we get further into this series,
because with our terminal, we can do some very powerful things.
We can move from just creating web apps all the way into
custom apps for our computer,
and more importantly, we can just kind of move more quickly.
With terminal, but we're not gonna get too deep into terminal
today, but a good word to know.
Nonetheless, PHP and Python are two specific languages that we will be
working with or getting familiar with.
PHP is a service side, scripting language built for the web.
A lot of the tools that you work with online, a lot of the websites
you visit are built on PHP.
It's easiest probably for you to imagine PHP as the thing that's
driving most of your form submission.
So if you're on a website and you fill out, yes, I want to hear from so and
so, and you click submit, more often than not that's being driven by PHP
and Python is a general purpose, highly readable programming language used for
web backends, automation, data analysis.
So Python in many ways is a little bit more advanced.
It's certainly more often than not being used on the backend.
And I am not an expert in PHP or Python.
So if you are on this video and you think I have a better definition,
would love to hear from you.
Uh, but from my work so far, those are the definitions that have served me best.
We're gonna work backwards a little bit here.
We started with the, the scarier stuff, if you will, or at least some
of the more intense words and concepts.
Next, I want to just give you a few more basic ones.
And these are really specific just to Claude and to ai,
uh, for our purposes anyways.
But they're also used elsewhere, so MD or skills.
This is a really important concept because an MD file as it's commonly
referred to, or a skills file in the vernacular, is a super detailed set of
instructions that can be used on repeat.
So a way that I often imagine this is your onboarding instructions
for a new employee or team member.
Onboarding is often a pretty complex process and often needs to be repeated.
So this skills file or MD file is what really allows AI like Claude
to move from just kind of task orientated talking back and forth.
Maybe even kind of at its most basic level, AI sometimes feels
like a little bit like a fancier version of Google, right?
It really allows.
AI to move all the way towards ag, self-governing, self-functioning
autonomous, uh, and so therefore, it's a really important concept to understand.
If you wanna get the most out of a tool like Quad, OCR, this is a short
hand for optical character recognition.
When you scan in a document using an app on your phone or a fancy copy machine,
it's going to not just take pictures of that document, it's going to make it so
that all the characters are recognized.
And this is really valuable because it means you can search your documents.
You could search something like the Epstein files if it's brought
into a computer using OCR.
And more often than not, apps will say, Hey, this uses OCR.
Those are really valuable because when you're working with Claude, although it
can do OCR on its own a bit, and even if it could, it's gonna slow it down.
So as often as possible, when I'm working with screenshots, which I
work with often, I try to run them through an OCR program before I bring
them into Claude in the first place.
JSON is a lightweight text-based format for passing
structured data between systems.
So recently, oh, I think it was like two weeks ago maybe I, after a whole
year and a half of just obsessing over chat dt, I decided to delete my account.
I had a lot of data that I wanted to bring into Claude and if.
That data weren't searchable.
If Claude couldn't access it and use it, then it would've been
a really painful transition.
So I took as much of that data as possible, and I changed it to, or
converted it to the JSOM format.
And that made it so that I could jump from chat to PT into Claude with minimal effort
as far as like retraining was concerned.
And then last, but definitely not least, each project in Claude has its own memory.
And you'll notice some themes here.
I think a lot of this has to do with data and memory, and that's because more often
than not, AI is only as useful as we have trained it to be, or only as useful
as the information we have given it.
And so one of my frustrations with AI and, and with Claude too, is that.
The memory is not persistent necessarily.
And here's a really specific example of that.
If I'm talking to Claude for an hour and a half in a thread and I have
a mixture of text and also uploaded files, maybe I've uploaded a bunch of
screenshots or audio files or videos or something like that, I can count on
it to remember the text, but I can't count on it to remember the media files.
Those might be forgotten across sessions or they might become corrupted
or just disappear across sessions.
So project memory is really valuable.
When you set up Claude, you can set up specific projects, so maybe you have.
A a project you're doing where you are working with your, your inventory
and all the recipes you use for meal prep, you could upload all of
those recipes to the project memory.
And one of the great things about the way the project memory works in Claude is
that it's gonna kind of check its project memory while you're working with it.
It's gonna automatically reference that more often than not.
So I often spend quite a bit of time just getting a project set up correctly.
I want it to have as much information as possible so that working within
that project is useful moving forward.
And because of this, the way that you organize your
projects requires some thought.
And I've started organizing my entire life around the same projects
that I have set up in CLOs so that everything kind of matches like a
color-coded system, if you will.
Okay.
Woo.
Wow.
Tim, I just wanted to learn about Claude and you're making me memorize
and know all of these phrases and words.
Cut to the chase, bro.
Totally hear ya.
Let's get into some of the fun stuff.
Let's talk about AgTech that does actual work.
So chapter two, I'm gonna talk to you specifically about how to do
this with your brand and we're gonna get into projects and memory and
connectors and all sorts of fun stuff.
Okay?
So without further ado here, I'm gonna pull up my cloud.
So this is Claude Look, kind of reminds me a little bit of Google, right?
Uh, if you've used Gemini or any of the other tools, they all kind of look
similar from the home screen anyways, and.
When you're first getting set up here, it's really important
to know about this little menu.
You can upload files, you can take screenshots, you can connect your Google
Drive see all the connectors I have here.
One of the things I love about Claude is that it has connectors
that are way, in my opinion, way more powerful, reliable, and valuable
than the tools that chat chip t uses.
There's a wide array of connectors and you can access all these sits from any time.
If you just go into your bottom left here and you can get apps, you can get
extensions, you can check your settings.
There's all sorts of ways to connect Claude to different information.
And you'll see here I've taken the time to customize my preferences.
I've written out like a very detailed.
Explanation of how I want Claude to communicate with me, how I wanted to
talk with me, how I wanted to interact with the information that I've given it.
I've taken a lot of energy and time over the last two years because originally
I started this with chat pt to perfect this and to get it to the point where
I really feel like Claude is a coworker that like I would like really love to
spend as much time with as possible.
And sometimes this gets skipped over, but it's really important to, to take the time
if you're gonna use quad, uh, at length to, to fill this out, to build this out.
And to the connectors piece, you could kind of click in here.
You see I've got my Google Drive connected.
If you're on Microsoft, you could connect your OneDrive,
you can connect all those tools.
I've got my project management tool, click up, connected.
If you use something like a sauna or.
Any of the other myriad of project management tools, a lot
of those can be connected too.
I've got my calendar, of course, I've got my email, I've got Figma.
I will drag you through all of the connectors.
But there are a lot of them, a lot of them, so many connectors.
And some of them are extremely valuable.
So once they've got all my connectors set up, how do I actually do something cool?
What if I were a marketer, communications manager and I wanted to have a place
I could go where I knew that I could reliably get on-brand copy to show up?
Today I'm gonna play with a project.
That I've titled the Bamboo Brand Machine.
So Bamboo is generous enough to host this live series on a monthly basis For
those of you who are close to Bamboo, grand Rapids, and if you are close
to another bamboo, give your bamboo a shout out as I'm hoping to eventually
expand to multiple in-person locations.
Okay.
How did I set the brand machine up for bamboo?
The very first step, and this is true for most, if not many of you, or many if not
most of you, the very first step is to tell Claude to go look at your website.
So I'm gonna say, Hey, Claude, go look at Bamboo's website and
create a voice and tone guide.
Include fonts, colors, styling notes.
Words that are used often, words that are avoided and values that are communicated.
I'm sure I could have written that out better if I thought about it, but I'm
saying, Hey, Claude, go to the website and fine this information for me.
And it's gonna go to the web and it's gonna look, it's gonna comb through
the pages and it's gonna come back with what it thinks the answer is.
Now, I know this is really basic and we're starting at a basic point here on
purpose, but this blows my mind because it used to take me when I was working
specifically just as like a social media manager back in agency land, this would've
taken me a good, like, oh, I don't know.
Hour or two, sometimes easily, if not more, with a bigger website to kind
of get a sense of all these things.
And it's gonna compile it all really nicely.
If I wanted to, I could even turn what it gives me into a PDF and I could print it
out and now all of a sudden we're all able to get on the same page on my team, right?
We can be using the same colors, the same hex codes, the same styles, and so forth.
So if you do this and you don't like what you see, then you know that you maybe
need to do some work on your brand, right?
You might need to, to revise your brand because it's pulling, it's not
hallucinating here, it's, it's pulling exactly what it finds from the website.
And you could do this with any website.
That, that exists online.
And it could be useful to do it with other websites too, right?
You could pull it from a few different websites and then you could feed all that
information into CLA and you could say, Hey, I want you to merge these together.
And, you know, maybe I like the way that this website's voice comes off, and maybe
I like the styling of this other website.
You could use this if you're creating a brand from scratch or if you're
iterating on an existing brand.
You could use this to workshop, uh, and make some improvements or
changes to what you already have.
Now, as you see here, it's taking a moment, which is not surprising.
There's a lot of information together.
So I wanna make sure you know too, that we are inside of a project, maybe I
should have mentioned that first year.
But this Bamboo brand machine is a custom project that I created, and your
projects live over here in project.
And it's important to know that you can create a project, whatever you want.
So I created this bamboo brand machine, and over here you see
I promise you, there was a place where you could put files, right?
And there's persistent memory and there's instruction.
So I've told it, Hey, in this project you are a marketing and brand expert.
Your job is to maintain the brand and you should enforce the brand standards, right?
And I'll show you how to get more files in here.
But these are some files that I thought were important to it, files
that it probably couldn't just find from the website or files
that were behind a paywall or files that weren't public knowledge.
Right?
Okay.
So let's go back here and open up this thread and see what it came up with.
Okay.
It says it has a comprehensive data set.
I'll admit I'm getting impatient here.
Come on Bamboo.
I wanna know what you're all about.
Why is Claude taking so long?
Oh gosh.
Maybe I gave it too big of a task.
No, no.
I'm just being impatient.
So while we're waiting on this to finish up, one of the things that's
also really valuable for you to do is to take the time to upload to
the Project PowerPoints sales deck.
Maybe you've got things that you've printed out that you no
longer have the original file for.
Grab those files if you've got videos, if you have articles that
are behind a paywall, maybe a news.
Article maybe you were written about, you know, on like some sort of website,
local or national or somewhere in between.
One of your best friends when you're training AI is the print to PDF function.
Now, I don't know why you have to pretend you're printing to get a PDF.
That's not something that I could solve, but I know that you could
print anything to A PDF, right?
And I share that because you can upload those PDFs to the file storage.
So if you've got something that you don't know how to bring it in,
PDF is opted the easiest solution.
So if I were doing this for a brand for the first time, I would be printing out
emails, I would be printing out all sorts of things and I would be feeding it.
I wanted to get as much information as possible about my voice and
tone and my brand, right, so that I can recreate things.
Over and over again.
And I will say that I get impatient sometimes.
Okay, here, the Bamboo brand guide, and this is one of my favorite
things, by the way, about Claude.
They call this a Claude artifact, and this is where you're able to
get like a live functional preview, sometimes even interactive if you're
building something of what it is you were trying to create, right?
So here is extracted from the website, the brand guide for Bamboo.
We've got the mission and positioning.
We've got the core values, community diversity, equity, inclusion,
entrepreneurship, innovation, inclusion.
I'm not gonna read through this word by word.
We've got the voice and tone.
Warm, but not soft.
Unpretentious grounded in place.
Tone, markers, phrases that reoccur.
Words that the brand avoids, that corporate jargon love that
it avoids corporate jargon.
We've got the specific colors and where they are used, right?
So if I was working with another designer and I said, Hey, make a new version of
this page, or make a new version of this PowerPoint, you could see exactly even
the hex codes it pulled out, and we could see some typography notes, the fonts that
are being used, the weights, the sizes, the principles that are being followed.
This is really quite detailed and
it could, I'm sure, be further refined too.
And so once you get information like that and you've spent a
bunch of energy producing it.
You could add directly to the project.
So these artifacts, these previews, if you prefer that show up, you
can add directly to the project.
And now it's gonna go into the project memory, right?
But another way to interact with a memory is you could say something like,
Claude, memorize the specific colors that bamboo uses and default to those colors
when we are creating slides together or graphics together in the future.
And by the way, all of the slides that you see today for this crash course, show and
tell session, of course I made in Claude.
And what I love about making slide decks in Claude is that it
will produce PowerPoint files.
That I can actually edit.
So I can get away from like the static AI feeling and I can
customize it further, but it gives me a solid baseline to work from.
So now what it did, just so you're clear, I told it to memorize that and now it has
memorized, if we go back to the project here, so I'm gonna, these are all threads.
If I go back to the memory here, this is everything that it has memorized
specific to this project, right?
So it added it into that memory, which is really, really neat.
And you see too, the Bamboo Brand Guide, which is called an MD file.
We talked about those just briefly in our definitions.
This is an instruction file essentially.
For AI or for Claude, since we're in Claude and you see it saved
that bamboo band guide, that thing I was showing you in a preview it
saved that to the actual files.
And I could go and I could add, like I was talking about
earlier, all sorts of other files.
If I've got slide decks or photos or any sorts of media files, I
could spend time and energy training this as much as is possible.
And what good is training this thing?
What does the brand machine do, Tim?
What's the point of this?
Often when you see AI content that looks so clearly to have been written
by ai, the issue is that someone didn't take the time to do the work
that we're doing together right now.
They didn't take time to create.
Something like a brand machine project that was trained on the brand because
if you do a good job of setting up your brand machine, and I'm calling
it a brand machine, but you could call this project whatever you want.
I just think brand machine sounds fun.
If you do a good job of setting up your brand machine, then you
can create copy and content that sounds exactly like your brand.
So what does this look like using a brand?
As you understand it, create 20 social media posts formatted
specifically for LinkedIn.
Focus on the topic of community and collaboration.
These will be LinkedIn.
Post from a LinkedIn company page.
Now why am I telling it that?
I'm telling it that Because it's smart enough to know the exact
character count and limitations.
If I take the time to tell it where it's posting to, right?
It already knows because if you've taken any, uh, part of your life to
manage social media brand pages, you know that each one has its own rules.
Right?
And I'm gonna say avoid hashtags.
Personal preference.
I think when you use 20 hashtags on LinkedIn, you just kind of look silly.
I understand it helps with visibility.
Personally, I don't care.
But I understand that it can be useful.
And I'm also gonna say avoid emoticons.
Oh gosh.
Nothing gives it away as having been written by AI more, in
my opinion, than 20 emoticons.
People don't talk like that.
We don't talk with 20 emoticons, and I'm gonna say avoid using the M dash.
I know.
Okay.
So if I were managing the bamboo LinkedIn page, or maybe I'm managing
the co-founder or other co-founders page, both of the co-founders are
Amanda, so that's always fun for me.
Love you Bamboo.
Love you, Amanda.
One and Amanda too.
So if I am managing that social media, this is really useful.
And I'm not suggesting that what it's giving me here is something
that I'm not going to need to edit.
I'm not suggesting that what it's giving me here isn't something that I want
to revise or massage, but it's going to give me an excellent first draft.
And once I workshop that first draft.
Many tools, like if you're like me you've probably used a few of them.
But my favorite social media management tool more often
than not is called Buffer app.
And I like Buffer app primarily 'cause it doesn't have a bunch of different
like features and it doesn't have a bunch of like fancy, complicated things and
it makes scheduling like pretty simple.
But most social media management tools at this point in this day and age have the
ability to import something as a CSV file.
And so not only can I generate these social media posts, but after
I massage them a little bit, I can ask Claude to spit out a CSV file
specifically structured for the tool.
My choice because Buffer.
Hootsuite, each tool has a different way that you need to structure the CSV file.
CSV stands for comma separated value.
If you were curious, I guess I could have added that to my definitions, but the
different structures are also something that Claude can go figure out for you.
So you don't have to spend all this time trying to figure out
how to build the correct file.
You can import 20, 30, 40, 50 posts all at the same time, which
saves an immense amount of energy.
And CSV files are used to get data between a lot of different tools.
So the fact that Claude can figure out the specific structure of a tool
CSV file can save you a lot of time.
I often celebrate this feature during a holiday.
I love to send out like holiday cards, like in the mail.
I know it's crazy in the mail to my family and friends.
And although I'm using the mail, I use a tool minted.com to actually send them.
I don't wanna address and stamp all the envelopes myself.
I'm not quite that passionate about it.
So my point is I use Claw to create that CSV file and it saves
me an immense amount of time.
I don't have to manually build that file myself.
I used to spend a lot of time building that file.
Now I just create one, make sure it's up to date with the newest addresses and
that I've taken whichever family member I might be fighting with off of that list.
And then I can hit send.
Okay.
We're gonna give it another second here.
Okay.
Okay, good.
I was just starting to get tired of waiting.
My inner child was feeling so impatient.
So here we have, the preview is loading of the LinkedIn content.
I asked for all the posts, most that I asked for.
There's 20 total.
And did a pretty good job here.
I'm pretty happy with it.
It's got character count, it's got topics.
It followed my instructions.
It avoided the emojis.
And you know, let's just zoom in on this one here.
What happens when you stop working alone?
Here's something we've seen play out hundreds of times at Bamboo.
Someone joins for the desk, they stay for the people.
It starts small.
A nod in the morning, a shared lunch.
Then someone mentions a problem they're stuck on and the person
across the table has solved it before suddenly working alone.
Seems like a strange thing to go back to.
Community isn't a feature.
We bolt onto workspace.
It's the reason the workspace exists.
If you're building something in Michigan, you don't have to build it by yourself.
Ooh, I like that.
Now I would massage that, of course, make.
Sound, I think probably a little bit more authentic, a little bit more natural.
And that's likely true for all of these.
But as I stated, the goal here is to get a good first draft, right?
And then once you've actually massaged all of these, you could then say,
Hey, and I'm gonna stop you here.
I don't know what it's thinking about, but I'm gonna press the stop button.
Give me those posts as a CSV file,
formatted for Buffer app.
So imagine I'd done the work and I'd massage these, and they
were all looking beautiful.
I would then say that, so you'll see here that it's got Buffers,
bulk upload requires columns.
So it's figuring that out live it's figuring out exactly the right format.
Like I mentioned before, it's going to customize this CSV
file specifically for Buffer.
Here I've got the CSV to download.
It's formatted with the correct titles for the columns, and this is
ready to upload directly into Buffer.
So just like that, I could have 20 well thought out social media
posts for Bamboos LinkedIn.
Pretty fricking cool.
I'm gonna stop there and move on to the next chapter, but there is
a lot more you can do with this.
You could ask it to design slides you could go as far
as to create custom artwork.
The value in training this project and getting it as much information
as possible so that it really works, like the brand expert you want it
to be, is really hard to summarize.
And it's hard for me to even imagine sometimes that I'm able
to create what I'm able to create with so many fewer steps, right?
I'm not removing the human element, I'm just saving myself
all sorts of energy and time.
And I hope that as we were on screen there, that you noticed we created a
project, we feted data, we were able to add custom instructions to a project.
We talked about the value of creating like a skill file.
We talked about how to connect Claude to tools.
We talked about creating basic artwork.
Oh, I should go back and do that one real quick.
'cause that one is, that one is really fun.
I can.
Use a screenshot to communicate to Bamboo.
So this is kind of silly here, but for the sake of illustration, I'm gonna
take a screenshot of this session and then I'm gonna go into my brand machine.
I'm gonna paste that screenshot and I'm gonna say remake this
screenshot as a slide using Bamboo's brand guide as you understand it.
So I almost skipped that part.
Oh, that was silly of me.
This is a great way to communicate with Claude when it comes to visuals.
I spent a lot of time just taking a screenshot and saying, Hey,
remake this in the right brand, or.
Update this and use different colors or extract information
from this or whatever it might be.
My, my phone especially, is full of screenshots these days, so it's gonna
actually turn that into a slide.
Remember I told you earlier that you could have like A-P-P-E-T-X
file or a PowerPoint slide created.
This will actually do that work.
All right.
I think that, oh, yay.
Okay, so here is the vocab slide that it remade based on
what I taken a screenshot of.
I think it got a little bit confused there,
but the concept there I think you get is that you could take a screenshot
of anything and have it recreate that screenshot using the brand as.
You've taken by now the time to train it.
Train it, excuse me, on the brand.
Okay?
So we could go on and on and on and I would actually love to, 'cause
there's so much fun stuff to cover.
But I want to get into chapter two.
Or excuse me, I wanna get into chapter three.
And so here we are.
I wanted you to see what you could build with Claude, or at least an example of
something you could build with Claude.
Now, because Claude allows you to write in various languages without necessarily
knowing those languages super well, you can create some really fantastic things.
So I thought, you know, it'd be great if I could find any startup
in the Midwest and also find.
Who runs that startup and you know, it'd be really great.
It'd be wonderful to find their contact information.
So I created this prompt.
I said, Hey, I wanna build a script that will accomplish the following
once search the internet, including non gated news sites, blocks, and
anything else that doesn't require paid subscription or an API key.
So I'm intentionally showing you something here that I created
trying to use sort of like an MVP or minimum viable product approach.
I wanted to avoid paid subscriptions 'cause that gets way more complicated.
And I wanted to avoid API keys in this, this example too, because
those two are more complex.
And then I said, within the search performed in number one above
the objective, it's important to define the objective clearly is
to identify startups that are new to the Midwest region and then.
I knew that Claude would wanna know what the Midwest region was being defined as.
So I said, define that as Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana.
Define new as seemingly launched within the last 12 months.
So when you're creating a prompt, especially if you're trying to build
something like we are here now you wanna be as detailed as possible.
You wanna kind of anticipate the questions that it's going to have.
And if you don't, it will ask you those follow up questions.
But I wanted you to see sort of like an ideal prompt.
So for number three, for each startup document, the startup's
name, location, and a contact name.
And I am going to use, I am gonna use an API for this piece 'cause
I didn't really have a choice.
In the future, I want to have this work with hunter.io and Hunter is one of the.
Coolest tools out there.
I mean, there are so many tools out there, but Hunter, if you're
in a communications or a sales or a marketing role, can be really useful.
It helps you find and verify email addresses.
So maybe I find a company called Brother LLC down the street and I
wanna figure out how to contact them.
This is the sort of tool that will help you find all of the email addresses
for the people at that company.
And so I wanted to build a script that would actually pull from that so that I
could get results that had information I could use to like contact the companies.
So here we're going to pull up the actual demo.
Here is terminal.
Remember we were talking about terminal earlier.
This is what it looks like, or at least what it looks like on my computer.
And I'm going to hit run, and I'm gonna explain this as it goes.
So first you'll notice it's built in Python.
So the very first thing it's doing is it's generating in this step, these queries.
So it's going out to the internet and it's searching for Grand
Rapids startup companies, Columbus, Ohio, startup companies, right?
It's performing all of these Google searches, essentially
searching.
Okay?
So now it has stopped searching and it's actually pulling out
the contact information, and I'm gonna pause it again here.
It went really fast.
Which, you know, is kind of the point of building something
is that it can go really fast.
So it started with those searches and then in phase two it went and it
actually started extracting the contacts.
So it found for each of these websites, it started looking up the
different contacts at those companies.
And then here in stage three, it's going to, because I gave it an API
key, it's actually going out to Hunter.
And I think I spent like 150 bucks on 7,000 credits or something like
that for hunter.io so that it would go out and actually enrich this data.
Now this blows my mind.
I used to have to pay like an intern or an assistant, or an equally
capable, wonderful human being by whatever title it might have been.
And they would go and they would find the other information, right?
But here, this tool is doing it all automatically.
So it's saying, here's the name of the person, here's the company they work at.
And then that email column, it's enriching.
You see it's also got the title, it's got the city location, et cetera.
And so now it's going out to Hunter and it's actually getting, look, boom.
I've got the emails of these individuals.
It looks like it couldn't find Alina's, but it's going through those, that it's
actually finding all of that information.
So this tool took me maybe an hour to build and I had to make some changes.
I had to do some testing, but I don't know Python and I don't know, PHP.
I definitely know a little bit about code.
I don't wanna pretend that there's not some value there in, in being familiar
with code because there certainly is.
But I was able to build something that blew my mind.
I now use this on a weekly basis to find startups that I didn't know about
and to reach out to their founders and to start conversations and grab coffees
and get more involved and invested in the local and regional ecosystem.
Wild to me that you could create something like this.
And this is truly just an example.
This is certainly not completely thought out.
There's more you could do with this.
I could have added.
More layers to it made it more complicated.
But I wanted you just to get a sense of, wow, I can build
something, I could build anything.
And I will say, as a disclaimer here, it's worth noting if you're working with an
API that involves payment a hundred.io, you do have to pay to use their API.
Uh, it is important to be aware of those costs and to be careful not
to do live tests at a live API.
Almost everyone that has an API has a test, API, and you wanna use that
when you're experimenting before things are ready to actually use.
Uh, otherwise you could waste money.
I learned this the hard way, having not worked with a lot of APIs in
the past when I was building this tool, I spent 30 or 40 bucks by
accident because I did not realize.
That I was using the live API and that there is such a thing
as a test or a sandbox, API.
So, just being honest here, I have made mistakes getting
to where you see this today.
But those mistakes during my top me valuable lessons and
will allow me to build even more exciting projects moving forward.
Okay, let's go on to the next chapter, and I wanna talk
specifically about Google Scripts.
Now, if you are in the Microsoft world and you're using Microsoft products, VBS
would be your version of Google Scripts.
And what Google Scripts do is they basically allow you to create things
that interact with your spreadsheets, your Google Sheets, as I would call them.
You're.
Documents, your presentations, your email, all those different components of Google,
A Google script will allow you to interact with and in Microsoft Land, VBS would have
a lot of the same general functionality.
But today we're gonna look specifically at Google 'cause that's what I
use on my computer and therefore that is what I wanted to test.
First of all,
I'm going to go into Claude and I'm going to start a new thread.
And I'm gonna say, you know
what?
If
what if you have a problem like this, I have a problem where
I'll go into a meeting and I'll forget to send the follow up.
And the follow up is pretty much always the same thing.
I always tell people like, oh, I'll send you a link to that resource
and I'll send you a link to that resource, and I'll send you a link
to that resource, and then I forget.
Now I'm showing you this just as an illustration.
You could do far more complicated things with Claude and Google Scripts or Claude
and VBS, but this is a great example.
So I'm gonna say I want a Google script that sends an automated email to everyone
I meet with one-to-one as defined by meetings that are on my Google calendar.
I want to only send this follow up to people
meetings that are in blue.
I use blue.
I use blue to color coat my calendar a certain way, so it's smart enough to go
figure out the colors and so forth too.
And then I'm gonna say, you know.
Exclude meetings with my mom or maybe my boss and I could put in their
specific contact information, right?
So I did this,
it helped me build a script.
And one of the things I love about CLA is that we will walk
you through its questions.
So earlier what I showed you is script for the Startup Finder tool.
I was showing you something that was like, pretty well thought out, but
here I intentionally didn't do it that way because I wanted to see what
happens, but it's not thought out and it's, it's asking me all sorts
of like really valuable questions.
And it literally will hold your hand pretty much and walk you through, right?
So which blue are you talking about?
I guess that's a pretty valuable question.
Mine is a peacock blue.
And I'm not gonna drag you through each and every step of this, but it
literally will ask you the questions to help you build this and make it work.
And then once I had something that worked, I went into
script.google.com, which is where you can build these different scripts.
And you see, I've been building these all over the place.
I found so many fun use cases for them that I could just do
a dance over and over again.
I've been solving all sorts of fun problems with them, but the one that I
built here with this specific example is I called the coffee meeting follow-ups.
So I opened that editor and I had never used this editor before in my entire life.
I honestly, truth be told, I didn't know it even existed.
I was kind of surprised, like, oh, I didn't know this was a thing you could do.
And it walked me through step by step, exactly how to set all of this up.
And most of it was just copy, paste, experiment, test, revise, copy,
paste, experiment, test, revise.
And I did that a few times until I got to where I wanted it to be.
And now when I meet with someone, they automatically get this email
right here, which is hard coded into the script, and it has all the links
that I would want them to have, and it automatically sends itself to them within
24 hours and meeting them pretty wild.
I have, as you saw on the other screen, I have been building all sorts of scripts.
I have scripts that automatically update my calendar.
I have scripts that automatically delete emails that I don't like.
I have scripts that automatically label emails.
I have scripts that automatically save attachments to a specific
folder on my computer, and the list goes on and on and on.
I wanted you to see a very clear example of how to use Google Scripts, and I
wanted you also to notice that Claude walks you through the setup process of
something like this, step by step by step.
Pretty wild.
I have used Google Scripts specifically to cancel over $250 worth of
software subscriptions a quarter.
I'm saving myself a bunch of money, and that makes me feel better about
the fact that I'm spending money on Claude, because of course I have
a paid subscription for Claude.
I am now, you could start out at a free plan.
You can go then to a $20 a month plan.
I'm at a hundred dollars a month plan because I'm using it
for so many things that I burn through the tokens pretty easily.
Now, you might be sitting here thinking, gosh, Tim.
Tim,
I would love to ask you a specific question, Tim.
I would love to know when the next one is Tim.
I would love a personal training.
Maybe you or your team is interested in me coming in and doing a deep dive on this
over the course of a few hours in person.
I always prefer in person whenever possible.
It's so much more fun that way.
Uh, or maybe you.
Just add like a really specific example.
Maybe I skipped something or I didn't define something.
Shoot me a text.
Here's my actual real phone number.
This goes to my actual real cell phone, six six five four six sixteen twenty.
Most importantly, I hope you learn something today.
I hope your curiosity is satiated to a certain degree and
that you're feeling inspired.
We are going to, as promised, continue in this mini series.
There's so much more to cover with Claude Code with Cowork.
There's a whole bunch of features and things we didn't get into today there or
that we just brushed the surface up, but I hope that you are as excited as I am to
continue this learning journey together.
Thank you for taking the time to watch and to tune in, and please
shoot me a text with your questions.
Make sure you are subscribed so that you know about the.
Crash course, show and tell.
It will be happening each month.
So there is of course, one in March.
Crash that course.com.
Thank you so much for tuning in.