270: How We Actually Use Claude to Run Our Businesses (With Real Workflows)
Every time I sit down with the Weird Hermits — my small peer mastermind of women entrepreneurs — I leave the conversation with more ideas than I can execute in a month. Our recent Claude roundtable was no exception.
This is part two of a two-part series. In part one, we talked about how we each discovered Claude and what surprised us about it. This episode went deeper. We talked about the specific things we are building and automating, the difference between Claude Chat, Claude Cowork, and Claude Code, and what it actually looks like to use AI to run a business day to day.
The group includes Monica Froese (Empowered Business), Kate Kordsmeier (Success with Soul), Liz Stapleton (Creator Ops Hub), Jodi Bourne (Borne Strategic AI), Steph Blake (automation and business strategy), and Ruth Poundwhite (supporting neurodivergent and introverted business owners). Real business owners, real workflows — no theory.
Here's what we actually talked about.
The Bridge from ChatGPT to Claude
Most of us started in ChatGPT. Custom GPTs felt powerful at first — you could load your IP and frameworks and create something that felt personalized. But it stopped there. The GPT followed instructions and gave you an output. It didn't do anything with that output.
The shift for a lot of us happened the moment Claude produced an HTML artifact. Monica described it well: she was working on a client project — a membership audit focused on copywriting and positioning — and asked Claude to help. It came back with two complete, formatted sales pages in HTML, each with different positioning angles. She could share them directly as links. That had never happened before, and the implication was immediate.
"I looked at it and I was like, oh my goodness — it gave me these sales pages in HTML. It just built out the whole thing. I knew immediately that was a game changer."
— Monica Froese, Empowered BusinessThe other piece was connectivity. ChatGPT had the concept of agentic tools, but in practice, getting it to connect to anything — even something simple like email — felt like it required Zapier, a playground environment, and a lot of troubleshooting. Claude's connectors are more direct. Steph mentioned having Claude connected to Airtable, ClickUp, CloudFlare, Canva, and Google Drive simultaneously — not through elaborate middleware, just through the available MCP connectors.
What Is a Claude Skill (And Why It Matters)
This is probably the concept that separates casual Claude users from people who are getting serious leverage from it.
A Claude skill is a reusable package of instructions, brand context, and process logic stored at the account level. Think of it as a much more capable version of a custom GPT — except it doesn't require you to navigate to a separate interface, and Claude can call it automatically mid-conversation based on what you're working on.
A custom GPT lives in its own silo. You have to open it specifically. A Claude skill lives in your account and gets called into any conversation where it's relevant — automatically, without you having to remember it exists.
Steph described building a skill around her event email sequences: she walked Claude through the process, refined it, added HTML formatting, and connected the output to Airtable. Once the workflow was dialed in, she asked Claude to package it as a skill. Now every time she starts working on event emails, that skill is available without any additional setup.
Ruth pointed out something important: you can also ask Claude to modify a skill mid-conversation. If you're working and realize something needs to change, you can say "update this skill to reflect what we just decided" and it will. That's something custom GPTs couldn't do.
I now have over 50 skills in my account across different areas of the business — newsletter formats, blog templates, social content, email sequences, Skool post calendars. The reason that's manageable is because I don't have to remember which one applies. Claude does that for me.
What We're Actually Building
The conversation got very practical here. Here's a sample of what people in the group are actively using Claude to create right now.
Dynamic Sales Pages That Update Automatically
Steph built a system where a single sales page pulls live data from Airtable each month and updates its content automatically. She creates the page once. The information — dates, topics, speaker details — updates on its own based on what's in Airtable. She went from 300 individual ClickUp tasks per event to seven.
Full Content Machine From a Single Idea
Kate (and I've done a version of this too) described walking Claude through a content topic and getting back a complete blog post in HTML, Canva graphics, LinkedIn copy, Threads posts, and social media scheduling — all in one workflow. The only manual step remaining is uploading images where the scheduler requires it.
Newsletter Automation with Scheduled Tasks
Every Wednesday morning at 8am, Kate's scheduled task kicks off. It starts building her Sunday newsletter based on her skill, then pings her with a few questions to fill in the human-input sections. She answers, it finishes the draft in HTML, and depending on your email platform, it can upload directly to your builder — skipping even the copy-paste step.
Morning Briefings and End-of-Day Reports
Kate and I both use Cowork scheduled tasks to pull a morning briefing — calendar, inbox highlights, project management tasks, and anything needing attention — consolidated into one place before the day starts. Kate customized hers to also include where she is in her menstrual cycle and relevant moon phase information. You can build it around whatever context matters to how you work.
Competitive Intelligence and Research Reports
Once a month, Kate runs a Cowork task that checks Google Search Console for traffic data, scans YouTube channels she follows for new content, monitors what other coaches and course creators are launching, and summarizes relevant Meta ads news — all consolidated into a single report. What used to require 25 open browser tabs is now one scheduled task.
Idea Management via Dispatch
Jodi described having an idea for a blog post while watching TV. She used Dispatch (Claude's mobile interface connected to her computer) to talk through the concept — what she wanted to say, the angle, the argument. By the next morning, a fully written blog post was waiting in Notion, assigned to her assistant for upload. Her laptop never left her office.
Claude Chat vs. Claude Cowork vs. Claude Code
This is the question most people have once they start getting serious about Claude. Here's the honest breakdown from our group.
Claude Chat
This is what most people use. You type a prompt, Claude responds, you can use connectors to have it interact with external tools. You still need to be present — you're in the conversation initiating each step. Most of us use Chat the most, even after discovering Cowork. It's fast and direct for tasks that don't require autonomous operation.
Claude Cowork
Cowork has access to your computer and Chrome browser. This is the key difference. It can navigate websites, fill in forms, pull data from pages where there's no API connector, and run scheduled tasks on a timer — without you being there. Kate's newsletter builds itself. Steph's sales pages update themselves. Jodi's briefing reports run on a schedule.
Cowork is also useful for tasks that require accessing live website data. When I needed to pull all of my Shopify product listings — and there was no direct connector — I went to Cowork instead of Chat. I turned around and it had opened Chrome, scraped everything, and populated an Airtable base. I still don't entirely know what it did. It just did it.
"I went from having 300 individual ClickUp tasks for each of our monthly events to seven. This entire system runs in the background now."
— Steph Blake, Automation ExpertClaude Code
Code is more technical. It's the right tool when you need to connect to an API, run terminal commands, or build a standalone tool that executes real logic. Liz walked through using Code to build a Kit tag cleanup manager — a tool that pulled her 452 tags via the Kit API and displayed them in a functional interface where she could review, rename, or delete them all at once. That kind of API-dependent work is better suited to Code than to Chat or Cowork.
For most online business owners, Cowork is the bridge. Code is for when you have something more specific to build.
The Bigger Shift: It's Not Just Faster, It's Better
Something Ruth said in the conversation stuck with me. She's been using Claude to help reduce cognitive load for herself and her members — not just for speed, but because some tasks that seem manageable are genuinely overwhelming for neurodivergent brains. Having Claude go collect all her summit stats from multiple open tabs and compile them into one report isn't a hack. For her, it's the difference between a task that gets done and one that keeps getting deferred.
Jodi made a similar point about AI amplifying your existing genius rather than replacing it. She's doing SEO and content work for four clients simultaneously, at a quality that would have previously taken a month per client. The system knows their brand, their keywords, their audience — she built that context — and now it runs. She doesn't get paid less because the work gets done faster. The judgment and strategy she's providing are still entirely hers.
Most of what we're describing here operates in the Retain and Advocate stages of the Creator Growth Flywheel. Automating newsletters, member communications, and content delivery doesn't just save time — it creates a more consistent, more reliable experience for your audience. Consistency is what builds advocates. What takes you from a creator people follow to a creator people recommend.
There's also something happening in the Attract stage. Monica built a system where Cowork scans her AI newsletter inbox and daily news, benchmarks them against her full product catalog, and flags where a timely promotion makes sense — then builds a spotlight she can drop into her daily email. It's not just automation. It's a strategy layer that was previously too time-consuming to maintain manually.
The Group Challenge: One Thing to Try This Week
We closed the roundtable by having everyone share one thing listeners could try. Here's the summary:
Monica: Feed a transcript (like this one) into Claude along with your offer suite and ask it to map what these workflows could look like in your specific business. You'll be surprised what it generates.
Kate: Set up a morning briefing in Claude Cowork. Connect your calendar, your inbox, your project management tool. Schedule it for 7am. Customize it for what matters to how you work. Do this one thing.
Me (Destini): Automate one newsletter. Identify the one you send most consistently, build a skill around how it's structured, and set up a scheduled task in Cowork to draft it weekly. Even a partial draft that you refine is a significant time save.
Liz: Do a 10-minute time waster audit first. Map out the tasks that consume your time. Then bring that list to Claude and ask what can be automated. Let the audit drive the workflow, not the other way around.
Jodi: If you're an ideas person, build an idea management skill. Something that captures your ideas via Dispatch, filters them through what you're already committed to, and stores the ones worth revisiting in Notion. Stop losing good ideas to bad timing.
Steph: Create a weekly scheduled task that reviews your skills and flags anything that needs updating. If you made a process change in conversation but forgot to update the skill file, this task catches it for you.
Ruth: Use Claude to test whatever you're building. Feed it a skill, a resource, a workflow — and ask it to push back, find gaps, and report on the experience as a user. The report it gives you is often more honest than what you'd catch yourself.
The Through-Line
What I keep coming back to from this conversation is the idea that Claude isn't a tool for doing individual tasks faster. It's a tool for building systems. The difference is compounding.
A task you do in 15 minutes instead of an hour is helpful. A system that runs at 7am every Wednesday and produces a newsletter draft by the time you sit down with your coffee — that changes how your business operates. And once you have one system like that running, the pattern for building the next one is already there.
If you want to figure out where to start, the Creator Growth Flywheel is a useful frame. Where in your business do you feel the most friction — attracting new people, engaging your audience, nurturing leads, retaining members, or creating advocates? Start there. Ask Claude what's possible. The conversation alone will give you more ideas than you can execute this month.
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Take the Free Scorecard →Frequently Asked Questions
A Claude skill is a reusable set of instructions, brand context, and process logic stored at the account level. Unlike a custom GPT, Claude skills are called automatically mid-conversation based on context — you don't have to manually activate them. They can also output to external tools like Airtable, Canva, and email platforms, making them more powerful for end-to-end automation.
Claude Chat is the standard AI conversation interface where you initiate tasks and Claude responds. Claude Cowork has access to your computer and can perform actions autonomously — including running scheduled tasks, opening tabs in Chrome, scraping data from websites, and executing work without you being present at your desk.
Yes. With Claude Cowork and a newsletter skill, you can set up a scheduled task that drafts your newsletter at a set time each week, asks you a few quick input questions, then outputs a complete HTML email directly into your email service provider. Several of the entrepreneurs in this roundtable have done exactly this.
Claude Code is better suited for tasks that require connecting to external APIs, running terminal commands, and building standalone tools or web pages that execute real logic. One participant built a Kit tag cleanup manager using Claude Code that pulled 450+ tags from the Kit API and displayed them in a functional HTML interface for bulk editing.
The simplest entry point is to have a conversation with Claude about a repeatable task in your business — an email you write every week, a type of content you produce regularly, a report you pull monthly. Tell Claude what you want, refine the output, then ask it to package the workflow into a skill. From there, that skill lives in your account and can be called automatically in future conversations.
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Weird Hermits Claude Roundtable — Part 2
[00:00:00] Dr. Destini Copp: Hi there and welcome back to the Creator’s MBA Show. My name is Dr. Destini Copp, and I have something special again for you today. And if you caught Part 1 of the series, you already know what we’re doing here. And if you didn’t, I want you to go back to the previous episode, listen to that one first — it will make this one so much better.
[00:01:00] Dr. Destini Copp: I’m going to give you a quick recap here. I am part of a peer mastermind group called the Weird Hermits. Yes, that is really what we call ourselves. It’s a small group of women entrepreneurs who have been in each other’s corners for a while now. And recently we sat down together to do a round table on something we are all obsessed with — and that is Claude. In Part 1, we got into how we first started using Claude, what surprised us, and how it changed the way we worked. And this is Part 2. In this episode, we’re going to go a little bit deeper. We’re going to be talking about the specific ways we are using Claude to run our businesses day to day. Things like morning briefings, automating newsletters, creating and maintaining skills, using Claude to test what you’re building, and capturing ideas before they disappear.
Dr. Destini Copp: You’re going to hear from myself, Monica Froese, Kate Kordsmeier, Liz Stapleton, Jodi Bourne, Steph Blake, and Ruth Poundwhite. These are real business owners doing real things with this tool. And they each close out with a really cool challenge for you and a free resource. Alright, let’s get right into it.
ROUNDTABLE — Introductions
[00:02:00] Monica Froese: Welcome everyone. We are here for a round table with a peer mastermind that we call ourselves the Weird Hermits. If you’ve been in any of our worlds for a while, you’ve probably heard some of these round tables. And today we want to do a round table based on using Claude. Claude has been all the rage in the online space around AI. And so all of us pretty much are new to it, I believe, and diving in and learning so much. That’s what this round table is going to be about. I’m going to have everyone introduce themselves and then we’re going to kick it off and talk about all the fun things we’re doing in Claude. So I will call on Destini first — introduce yourself.
Dr. Destini Copp: Oh, well, super excited to be here. And Monica, thanks for pulling all of this together. My name is Dr. Destini Copp, and I have two brands that I run — HobbyScool and the Creator’s MBA — where I help digital product entrepreneurs grow their business with the Creator Growth Flywheel. And I’m super excited about the conversation today.
Monica Froese: Me too. Kate.
[00:03:00] Kate Kordsmeier: Hey, I’m Kate Kordsmeier. I’m the founder of Success with Soul, and we help coaches, course creators, and digital product sellers build — high maintenance — high maintenance, oh my gosh, it’s been a week you guys — high profit, low maintenance. There we go. Big difference. High profit, low maintenance businesses without social media.
Monica Froese: Liz.
Liz Stapleton: Hi everyone. I’m Liz Stapleton. I also have a couple of brands — over at elizabethstapleton.com I help online business owners understand the legal side of things, which AI and the law is getting real fun. It’s Wild West. And then over at Creator Ops Hub, I help creators and online business owners streamline with workflows and systems that definitely involve AI.
[00:04:00] Monica Froese: Love it. Jodi.
Jodi Bourne: Oh, you’re muted, Jodi. I’m muted, which is rare for me. I am Jodi Bourne and I also have multiple brands. I just started a new brand called Born Strategic AI, and it is for female entrepreneurs to help them use AI and be seen — get more visibility through SEO and AI search strategies. And then I also own Born Creative STR Solutions, which helps women who own short-term rentals build a short-term rental business.
Monica Froese: Love that. I love the new direction with SEO with AI. Steph.
Steph Blake: I am Steph Blake. I am an automation expert and business strategist. I also have multiple brands. The first is doing exactly what I do — helping small business owners simplify and automate their businesses. And the second is focused on helping you reconnect with your creativity and using that as a way to really get in touch with yourself. So we run monthly events for that as well.
[00:05:00] Monica Froese: Love it. Ruth.
Ruth Poundwhite: Hi everyone. I am Ruth Poundwhite, and I support business owners — especially neurodivergent, introverted, low-capacity business owners — to sell more with less effort. And definitely using AI is a huge part of that.
Monica Froese: Love that. My name’s Monica Froese, and going along with the trend, I have two brands as well. I have Empowered Business, where I help people create high-converting digital products with the help of AI. And then I have a B2C brand which is Redefining Mom, which is evolving now into — the hope is — a community to help moms leverage AI in their daily lives.
THE BRIDGE FROM CHATGPT TO CLAUDE
[00:06:00] Monica Froese: So we are all pretty much very much involved in using AI in our businesses. And I think I want to start the conversation with the bridge between ChatGPT and Claude. At least I know for me — I started basically only using ChatGPT. I had decided when I got into AI that I really needed to double down on one tool to understand it, otherwise I was going to be too squirrel-like, like we always are in this entrepreneur world. And I really had no idea that I was just using it like a chat. I was not doing anything agentic. It wasn’t really doing anything for me, and I didn’t realize that until I moved to Claude. So that was my evolution. I did not pick up Claude until March when it became all the rage with the Pentagon story and all that. So I want to get a feel for what everyone else was doing before they discovered Claude. What were they using? Were they using ChatGPT? What made them get on the Claude bandwagon?
Liz Stapleton: I’ll speak up. So I was slower to Claude in part because you guys were all doing Claude and discovered Cowork very quickly, and I could not get Cowork to work on my computer. It was like a thing with the various updated version that I was on. It was a whole thing. And so I was super jealous and annoyed. But then I started — just being able in the chat to help build out pages was so much faster. I will say, because I’m on the $20 a month plan, I do still use ChatGPT. So I’m very strategic in how I use Claude because the usage can be very quick if you’re not careful. It’s better for any kind of copy you need to create. And so I sort of leave more technical things to ChatGPT Codex, because I’m not as worried about the limits there. But all the more creative side of things, I definitely lean into Claude 4. And I love using it for creating pages. It just helped me create a Kit cleanup manager so I can clean up my Kit account — I’ve got 450 tags in there. I can share that with our call later, guys. But yeah, so it was seeing all these cool things you guys were doing and then trying to see what I could do without Cowork that got me into it and started experimenting.
Monica Froese: I like how you pointed out that Claude is where you can be creative.
Liz Stapleton: Yeah.
Monica Froese: And I would agree with that. It’s really brought out a creative side that I’ve not been able to do. Anyone else had that transition from ChatGPT to Claude?
[00:08:00] Dr. Destini Copp: I’ll jump in here and just talk about my experience. So I actually started with Claude — whenever we started way back then — because I liked it. I thought it was better for copywriting. And then I went back and really started using ChatGPT mostly because we were really digging into those custom GPTs, selling them, and using those in our businesses. So I kind of forgot about Claude, and then I stumbled upon it when all the rage was coming up. But I had this issue that ChatGPT couldn’t help me with — I was working with a client doing an audit for her, all about copy and positioning for her membership. So I was like, I’m going to go to Claude and see if it can help me with this. And that’s when I had my aha moment.
[00:09:00] Dr. Destini Copp: Because when I was working with Claude on that client issue — I was telling it, here’s the issue, here’s what I want to help her work through — it gave me two complete sales pages with different positioning that we could look at and review. And I was able to publish that artifact for her and show it to her. And then I went back to it and I’m like, oh my goodness. It gave me these sales pages in HTML and it built out the whole thing. I had never seen that before. So I stumbled upon that and I knew immediately that was a game changer.
Monica Froese: Agreed. So I think the biggest thing that I discovered — I get asked a lot about custom GPTs and how they translate over to Claude. Custom GPTs are the first thing that most of us found. And essentially, you can put frameworks, your IP, guardrails, and have the chat act a certain way based on instructions you’re giving, which felt really powerful. And it was a really great way [00:10:00] to help our students and people in our programs, and even internal processes. But then it stopped there. It kept you on a guardrail but it didn’t do anything for you. And it seemed the connection point happened with Claude — that it would take it a step further and actually create something out of your output. Is that how everyone’s seeing that?
Kate Kordsmeier: Yeah. I feel like — and we’ve talked about this before, Monica — the agentic abilities. We’ve been hearing about this for years with ChatGPT and I could never even get it to connect to my email or something really basic. I was always like, I don’t understand — I’m very techie, I could not figure this out. And then very similar to a lot of people here, I was using Claude just for copy for basically the last few years. But everything else I was doing in ChatGPT. And I don’t know why — I think I was just so all in with ChatGPT that it was like, why bother? And then once I started hearing about skills, and then seeing — like Destini said — oh my gosh, wait, it just created this HTML page for me. It created this artifact. It created this very interactive tool that’s branded and beautiful. Even like creating the Google Doc in my brand, that ChatGPT was never able to do. I feel like that’s when it clicked for me and I was all in on Claude.
[00:12:00] Steph Blake: I would say for me — it’s funny because my husband kept talking about Claude in January of this year. But I’m like, I don’t care about Claude, I have my whole life in ChatGPT, I’m not switching. I didn’t even want to take the time to learn. And then at our in-person event last month, I didn’t even have Claude on my computer. Everybody was like, you have to sign up for Claude. And I didn’t know what I was doing with it. And then a day later, I became obsessed. The first thing I realized was it could do so many more powerful things — like creating the pages, like Destini said. But it’s not just that. It can connect to other services much more easily than ChatGPT did. With ChatGPT you had to use Zapier and Playground — it was just this whole mess. Too much work. And Claude makes it so easy. I have it connected to my Airtable, my ClickUp, different things through Cloudflare, and it’s all piecing together. My Canva creates graphics in Canva. And Google Drive — it literally connects everything. So it’s not just giving you an output, it’s actually doing the work for you.
WHAT ARE SKILLS IN CLAUDE?
[00:13:00] Steph Blake: And that’s where the skills come in, right? The way I like to describe skills — they are like a super profitable custom GPT. You pre-fill it with information about whatever you are creating. For example, one of my skills is around an email sequence for our events. I went through the process of telling it what I wanted it to look like, refining it, creating HTML emails out of it, then having it input those emails into my Airtable base for me. And then once I had that process figured out, it would package it up into a skill. So unlike a custom GPT where you’re just giving it instructions, this also does the work for you. It gives instructions to create the thing, and then it can output to an external resource if you want to.
[00:14:00] Ruth Poundwhite: I would add — one of the great things about skills is you can just chat. You’ve had a conversation, you’ve been doing different things, and you’re like, hey, can we just make a skill out of this, please? It’s just so easy. You don’t have to go into a separate screen. Creating a custom GPT is easy once you’ve done it, but this is even easier. And it is so easy to call on your skills whenever you want, and to mix and match them. For my brain — I’m very neurodivergent, out of sight, out of mind, I can’t hold all this stuff in my head — I love the way that Claude makes it super easy to create and call on skills. Just brilliant.
[00:15:00] Monica Froese: So basically a skill gets called into any conversation you’re having. And these skills lay account-wide. And I think the biggest thing is, a custom GPT couldn’t call itself into a conversation. Whereas when I was prepping for this podcast episode, I wanted to get everyone here a prep doc. It knew — I didn’t have to say ‘call in my brand skill’ — and it just created this beautiful branded document based on me basically only putting in everyone’s information. I said, we need to prep, this is what the round table’s going to be about. And I had a six-page branded document with my logo and everything created in two minutes. That’s nothing like what we could do in ChatGPT.
WHAT ARE WE CREATING WITH CLAUDE?
[00:16:00] Monica Froese: These are the three things I want to talk about. What we’re creating in Claude, the workflows we’re using to make our businesses run more smoothly, and the difference between Chat, Cowork, and Code. So let’s talk about some of the things we’re creating with Claude right now.
Kate Kordsmeier: I’ll share one, because I’m literally in the middle of creating it right now for this exact podcast. Monica said we can share a freebie. And so I was like, great, what freebie should I share? First I went to Claude in chat and just said, this is what we’re talking about, what freebie should I share based on my offer suite and the lead magnets I already have? And it was like, there’s not a great option here for something super relevant to this, but here are three options I could create for you. And it knows [00:17:00] everything about me and my business. One of the things it suggested was this interactive tool where somebody writes in what their bio is, and then it gives them 10 prompts to use in Claude based on where they’re at in — Destini and I both use these flywheel analogies — where you are in the attract, nurture, convert phase. And it gives you prompts to build a social-free plan based on your bio and where you are in that stage. I was like, great, I want to use this. My Neon Boho skill is one of my skins for creating branded things. So: create this thing for me. It’s an interactive tool I can publish online. People go to it, type it in, get their prompts. And now as I’m finishing it, I’m going to say, great, now I need an opt-in page for this — here’s the HTML code for my embed from Kartra, build an opt-in page. And then it’s just going to build that for me.
[00:18:00] Kate Kordsmeier: And so this whole thing is going to be done in 15 minutes and it didn’t exist 15 minutes ago. I think about how long it used to take to put together a funnel and an opt-in page. And the tripwire after it. Let alone having the product ready that you’re having people opt into.
Monica Froese: I used to participate, and still do, in a lot of bundles and summits. And it would be an entire day of prep just to get those funnels up and running. And now I can just participate. It feels unlimited because it’s so easy to get these pages up with Claude. And I was in an event recently where the host was like, I’m just going to link to wherever you want to host the video. And I was like, I want to put together a whole page for this. [00:19:00] So I went into Claude — here’s the transcript of my video, here’s what the video URL is going to be, I want them to go to my freebies. And it created this gorgeous page. It had the name of the summit on it, my video, my calls to action, links to my stuff without being super pushy. And the host was like, oh my gosh, this page is so beautiful. Thanks for taking the time. And I was like, yeah, I spent like 15 minutes on it.
Ruth Poundwhite: I think it’s helping us do things not just faster, but better. [00:20:00] I’m not just interested in efficiency for efficiency’s sake. I don’t need to just do more. In the past I would’ve just done the same — great, here’s a plain landing page that has the video and maybe a button to my freebie, done. Now in the same amount of time, maybe less, we built out this beautiful thing that actually increases conversions and positions us more as experts. So that’s huge.
Jodi Bourne: For me it’s about helping clients. I do blogging and SEO for clients, and that’s hard — it’s research into so many different things, learning their audience, learning the brand. That’s why SEO is so expensive. But when I started realizing, with these Claude workflows, how easy it was to set everything up — [00:21:00] I have four clients’ worth of content done in one month that would’ve taken me a month to do. I am literally spending no time at all other than setting up the system, uploading their keywords, doing a little research, and investing my time into strategy. Once I build their brand bible — which includes all their keywords and everything they need — I just put it on autopilot.
Ruth Poundwhite: AI is just enhancing your genius. It’s still your genius, right? You have learned how to leverage AI to get to the end result of your genius faster, to help more people. And you shouldn’t not be rewarded for that.
Jodi Bourne: Exactly.
[00:22:00] Monica Froese: I love that. And for me it’s as much about helping me with all the things I do daily, but also — I can take on so much more work and make so much more. And it doesn’t devalue your work because it’s done faster. Everyone who’s embracing AI is getting their work done faster. That doesn’t mean we should get paid less for our genius. It’s really the initial research and knowledge — that’s the most important part. Agreed.
Dr. Destini Copp: And just to piggyback on that — talking about ideas. I have so much that I want to publish. Especially after Jodi did that workshop for my folks about SEO and AEO. So what I did was set up a skill in Claude where I basically just tell it, here’s what the article is about, here’s the angle. Just giving it my genius. Then from there it does everything. It publishes an [00:23:00] HTML blog, it does the newsletter content, LinkedIn, Threads, Instagram. It will even go out to Canva and create any images I need. It will go and schedule everything in my social media scheduler. I don’t even have to touch it. It’s amazing.
Monica Froese: And we would all agree that is just not possible to do with ChatGPT, correct?
[Multiple voices]: Correct.
Steph Blake: If there is a way, that person is a lot smarter than I am.
[00:24:00] Liz Stapleton: It’s definitely a lot more technical to try to attempt something like that in ChatGPT. I think Codex is catching up to Cowork — it’s attempting to — but it’s still a much more technical platform. Claude is far more user-friendly.
Dr. Destini Copp: And what I just described to you — I didn’t even use Cowork for that. It’s a Claude skill.
[00:25:00] Ruth Poundwhite: I also like that even when you’re just using Claude for chat, when you kick off a project, it asks you questions automatically. ChatGPT really didn’t do that. I love the multiple choice because it helps me understand what it thinks I’m saying. And then I’m like, that’s actually not the project I was trying to kick off. It cuts out so much noise.
BUILDING AUTOMATED PROCESSES & DYNAMIC SYSTEMS
Monica Froese: Steph and Ruth, do you have things? What are you creating in Claude right now?
Steph Blake: I’ve spent the last week head-down creating an entire automated process for our events. And I’m not talking about just creating a new sales page — I’m talking about dynamic pages that automatically update on their own, thanks to Claude. I create a page one time and the information is automatically updating on its own.
Monica Froese: Wait — what? We need to understand how that happens.
[00:26:00] Steph Blake: So basically I put information into Airtable. There’s a lot of technical stuff happening in the background. But basically I have one saved sales page. Every single month, it will pull data from Airtable based on whatever’s happening that month and show it on that page. So I never have to create a new landing page again. It is literally just running in the background for me.
Monica Froese: Is that connected via a scheduled task to kick it off?
Steph Blake: Yeah. That’s why I said there’s a lot of things connected. We have the page with the HTML, we have some things happening in Cloudflare, we have the Airtable base, we have the scheduled task. So everything is working in tandem. Destini, steal this idea for your events too.
Dr. Destini Copp: Yeah, for sure. This is my idea for the next Lovable thing I was going to create.
[00:27:00] Steph Blake: When I say I sent a message to our group last week saying that my entire life and business has changed because of this — I’m not being dramatic. Because the one thing I think about Claude is it opens up so many more possibilities than I ever thought of. I started thinking that Claude was basically the same as ChatGPT — oh, it’ll help me write my emails. And then I went down this huge rabbit hole of realizing, no, it is actually running your business for you. This process I’ve been setting up — I went from having probably 300 different individual ClickUp tasks for each of our events every single month, to seven. Those are the only manual tasks we need now.
[00:28:00] Monica Froese: That made me think about how I used to operate. I’ve always operated in my business on a project plan. We use Asana, and like everyone who’s ever worked with me knows, I will be the bottleneck if I don’t put myself on a project plan. We had this kickoff call for one of my events, basically just talked out everything that had to happen. I fed it to Claude, connected to my Asana, and it created an entire project. And I am a project manager at heart, and the project was better than anything I’ve put together in the 10 years of my business. That took two minutes and a conversation I used to not even record. But now I record everything. Everything I say on Zoom at this point can go out and do things for me. Which is just wild.
Monica Froese: So I do want to start talking about workflows coupled with Cowork specifically. But Ruth, I want to give you an opportunity to tell us what you’re creating in Claude.
[00:29:00] Ruth Poundwhite: I’m just loving all of this stuff. And none of us is doing all of these things, by the way — in case you’re like, my mind is blown. But what I’ve been working on this week is to do with how I’m helping my members implement the work we’re doing inside my membership. I have been turning custom GPTs into skills. I made a skill that does it for me. I’m in the membership answering questions, Cowork is role-playing in the skill as if it’s a user. I’m doing stuff in the membership, Claude’s doing stuff over here, and I’m just like — this is the life. I love this right now.
[00:30:00] Ruth Poundwhite: I test it myself as well, because I’m still the visionary in my business. I still know what I want my members to achieve. But Claude is giving me a report of the flow and deliberately pushing the boundaries of the skills. I get it to test my custom GPTs as well — and I still use custom GPTs. There are definite downsides to giving people the skill file because they can literally read all of it. Giving it to people in a membership where they don’t have lifetime access also poses questions. That’s one reason I’m still using custom GPTs. But you can sell skills standalone. I’ve been turning some of my standalone custom GPTs into skills that I’m going to sell. And when users install them, they can tweak and mold them around their business — which is actually very powerful.
CLAUDE CHROME EXTENSION & MULTI-BOT WORKFLOWS
[00:31:00] Liz Stapleton: There’s a Chrome extension for Claude, and one of the first times it clicked for me was — I needed an output from one of my custom GPTs, because that output was going to be used to create an artifact and a skill. And instead of me going back and forth, I hooked up the Claude Chrome extension and told it to communicate with my custom GPT to get to the final output. It did that in the background. Then I took the output and built the artifact over in Claude. So I had two bots talking to each other doing work. That was wild to me. That was one of the first things I did.
CHAT VS. COWORK VS. CODE
[00:32:00] Monica Froese: Okay, so I want to talk about what Claude Chat is versus Cowork versus Code. I think there’s only maybe two of us that use Code on here because that’s the more technical version. I’ll take the first stab at explaining Chat versus Cowork — someone else can take Code.
Monica Froese: Chat can do things for you similar to Cowork, but Cowork has access to your computer and can actually do stuff without you. That’s where the agentic thing comes in. There’s something called Dispatch, and even from your phone, you could be out at the grocery store and prompt it to say, I need the spreadsheet updated from my 2:00 PM meeting. If your computer is turned on and connected to Cowork, it can pull a report from Airtable, from QuickBooks, and bring it all together and do that work when you’re not sitting there. So it’s truly functioning without you. [00:33:00] Whereas Chat can do stuff, but you’re still in the chat with it. That’s how I would describe it.
Steph Blake: I’d just add one thing to that. I actually use Chat still the most of anything in Claude, but I use Cowork for scheduled tasks the most. [00:34:00] Every Wednesday I write my Sunday newsletter — now I have a skill and a scheduled task. The skill knows how the newsletter is put together, how I write in my brand voice, and what to include. The skill also knows it has to ask me questions before it can write the newsletter, because there is still human input needed. And every Wednesday at 8:00 AM it’s going to run this task, start putting together the newsletter, and ping me to say, hey, I need your input on these things so I can finish it. I tell it what I need to include, what book I’m reading this week, whatever. And then it will complete the newsletter in HTML. Depending on what email service provider you’re using, you can even have it upload that HTML directly into your email builder.
[00:35:00] Steph Blake: So by me just answering a few quick questions, every Wednesday my newsletter is completely populated in my email service provider, scheduled to send. And some of my other favorite scheduled tasks are things like my morning briefing — checking my calendar, my inbox, my ClickUp, going through all of my stuff and just telling me, hey, here’s what’s going on today, here’s what needs your attention. I can brain dump into it. So mostly I’m still just using Claude Chat for most things, but Cowork is where I live for scheduled tasks.
[00:36:00] Monica Froese: Claude Chat requires us to kick the task off. Whereas these scheduled tasks can kick off without you being present. Which is cool. And also the way Cowork works — because it can work on your computer or in Chrome — it can do things on certain websites even if there’s not a connector available. It pulled down 100 product listings from my Shopify store. They don’t have a direct Shopify connector, and I couldn’t get Claude Chat to do it. I went to Cowork and I have no idea what it did, but I turned my back, came back, and I had an Airtable full of all of my Shopify products — the links, the URLs, tagged. Within minutes. Wild.
Monica Froese: Who wants to take on Code? The differences between Cowork and Code?
[00:37:00] Ruth Poundwhite: I’ll say I haven’t even touched Code yet. And I’m still blown away by what Claude can do. So there’s that.
Liz Stapleton: I’ve just messed with Claude Code a little bit. So I initially tried doing it as an artifact to do my Kit cleanup manager. I’ve been with Kit for well over 10 years. I’ve got 400+ tags, 40+ custom fields, half of which I don’t even use. I tried doing it as an artifact and it wasn’t working because of the sandbox environment. [00:38:00] So I went into Code and said, hey, make this easy. So it created this — I double click it, put in my Kit API key, and now I’ve got this page that shows me all 452 tags with the current name, a potential rebrand name based on what the current name is, and an action column: delete, review, rename, keep as is, with a proposed name. I can go in and review all of them in one place and then push all the changes at once.
Monica Froese: So why did you need Code specifically for that?
[00:39:00] Liz Stapleton: Because Code let it connect to the Kit API and actually work. If you do it as an artifact, it’s working in a sandbox environment, so the Kit API won’t actually connect and pull in your tags. I just took the whole conversation where I was trying to do it as an artifact, copied it, moved over to Code, and said, can this be easier? And it was like, yeah, we can just publish it as a page. And off we go.
Monica Froese: Could you have done this in Cowork or did it have to be Code?
[00:40:00] Liz Stapleton: I think it had to be Code, but it would’ve required a lot more back and forth in Cowork and a much higher usage rate. Right now I’m on the lower plan. But yeah, it just made it easy.
Kate Kordsmeier: Claude very much helped me when I was moving a Lovable project from Lovable Cloud to my own hosted thing. It talked me through exactly what I needed to enter in terminal to make it work. And I am not super technical. But I was like, I know what terminal is, if you tell me what to put in I can do it. Though I actually didn’t know what terminal was until Cowork one day said, open terminal on your computer, [00:41:00] put in this code, and it’s going to do the thing. And I was like, what is terminal?
Monica Froese: I think for the ordinary online business person or content creator listening to this, our sweet spot is going to be in Cowork. Because Code seems a bit more advanced, and I think they’re ultimately trying to make Code more user-friendly for everyday users. But Cowork bridges the gap between just having a task-based chat to actually going out and doing stuff. So in terms of Cowork — what other things are we doing to run our businesses?
COWORK WORKFLOWS: REPORTS, BRIEFINGS & AUTOMATION
[00:42:00] Kate Kordsmeier: Morning briefing — I love that. Especially checking my customer support inbox, because I always dread it — what if there’s a fire? And now I don’t even have to go do that. It’s just going to show up with all the other top things I need to look at. It gets rid of the dread. Helps mindset-wise and time-wise.
Kate Kordsmeier: The scheduled tasks in Cowork creating reports has been one of the most useful use cases I’ve found. Whether it’s a morning report, an end-of-day wind-down report, or every month it’s going into my Google Search Console, looking at my traffic and where things are coming from. I have a weekly one I call competitor intel — but I really don’t believe in competition, it’s much more about what other people in my industry are doing [00:43:00] and what news stories I need to know about. I want to know what coaches and course creators are selling right now. Are they selling custom GPTs? Are we moving into Claude skills? I want to know what the YouTube creators I follow are posting about. I follow a lot of Meta ads marketers on YouTube, so it’ll tell me what’s happening with Meta right now, what the latest Andromeda update is. Just the research and triage for me of all these things that used to take me opening up 25 tabs — now consolidated into reports every month.
[00:44:00] Kate Kordsmeier: And then it can create tasks for me in ClickUp, or go post something in Skool for me — it can just go do that. So yeah, those reports are the best way I’ve found so far to use Cowork.
Jodi Bourne: What I like about Cowork is Dispatch a lot. Example — yesterday I’m watching TV on my couch. My laptop stays in my office because if I don’t enforce that rule, Claude and me are on the laptop while I’m watching TV, trying to cook dinner, trying to have a conversation with my husband. New rule for Jodi’s house. But Dispatch is right on my phone. [00:45:00] I’m sitting there watching TV — watching The Madisons, y’all if you haven’t watched it go watch it — and I had this idea for a blog post. So I dispatched to my computer, gave it the idea. And then this morning when I got up, my blog post was written in Notion and had been assigned to Hannah, my assistant, to add to my blog. And all it was was me talking through the content — what I wanted to say, what it was about. It was an opinion piece, an ‘I’m against this and here’s why’ post. I talked my way through it in about 30 seconds, sent it through Dispatch, and I have a blog post.
[00:46:00] Ruth Poundwhite: I want to add something about cognitive load. I’m trying to lean into sharing examples that seem really basic, because sometimes the most basic idea — you just don’t think of doing it, and then when you realize you can do it, it’s really helpful. One example: I’m really bad with using stats and interpreting everything. So I just opened all the tabs on Chrome with all the stats I had for my summit, and said, Cowork, please go collect all of these and put them in one place and write a report on it. That was something that would’ve been very overwhelming for me. Another thing — I have a membership with a Google Calendar so people can follow it, and also a Skool calendar. There’s probably a better way to link the two, but I have Cowork go and make sure there are no discrepancies between them. Very basic, but that was a real problem for me.
[00:47:00] Ruth Poundwhite: One thing that has been really helpful is — I’ve just been through a period where, unlike me, I was struggling to write emails to my list. I took it to Claude and asked it, what are the holes in my processes that are getting me into this state? That’s not necessarily Cowork-specific, but it will help you if you chat with it and figure out where you get stuck and overwhelmed. The overwhelm piece is huge for me. I can’t say enough about how helpful it is to use AI for that side of things.
FINAL CHALLENGES & FREE RESOURCES
[00:48:00] Monica Froese: Okay, I just had a genius idea for how to wrap this up. I think several of us are going to be publishing this on our podcasts. So here’s how I think we should close: each of us is going to go around and give one idea of something you can ask Cowork or Claude Chat to help you with. And then you can take this transcript, feed it into your own Claude, and say, can you help me do all these ideas? Can you help me figure out how what they’re doing in their businesses would fit into mine based on this transcript? I guarantee you’re going to be blown away. And since I just dropped this on everyone, I’ll go first.
[00:49:00] Monica Froese: So piggybacking on my idea of having Cowork pull down all my shop listings from the Empowered Shop — I also had it go to my course site. I got this aggregate Airtable base of all of my products with the URLs. I then have a scheduled task that goes out, scans my AI newsletters in my inbox, scans the daily news, and benchmarks against all of my products — different AI angles I could take for promotion. So if something’s blowing up in the AI world and I have a training or workshop on it, it gives me an angle for a flash sale or promotion spotlight. I’m directing everyone to my free Skool community, the Empowered AI Collective — we will link to that in the show notes. Who wants to go next?
[00:50:00] Kate Kordsmeier: I’ll just go. This is Kate. I’m not going to add something new because I do feel like the morning briefing is one of the best things you can do for your business. Just set it up to connect to your Gmail, your project management software — Notion, ClickUp, Asana — and your calendar. I am a cyclical living gal, so I also have it updated on where I am in my menstrual cycle and what’s happening with the cosmos. So it’ll tell me, hey, we’re heading into a full moon, you might want to focus on these sorts of things. You can customize it to whatever you care about. All you have to do is go into Claude Cowork, say, I want to create a morning briefing, here are some ideas from this transcript — what are some things I could include? Suggest it, build this skill for me, schedule it to run every morning at 7:00 AM or whatever time works for you.
[00:51:00] Kate Kordsmeier: My freebie is going to be up very soon — I had to stop in the middle of my 15-minute session here to come on this episode. But it’s how to build your social media-free business. It’s a Claude tool, an artifact that you can use where you just put in a two-sentence description of what you do and it’ll give you 10 different ideas of how you can use Claude in a social-free way to grow your business, depending on where you are in that flywheel process. So that’s the freebie for everybody.
Monica Froese: Love it. Who wants to go next?
[00:52:00] Dr. Destini Copp: I’ll jump in. This is Destini. My challenge would be — and what’s been the biggest game changer for me — is automation of my newsletters. All of my newsletters, with Claude and Claude Cowork. And it’s timely because I’m covering this next week in the Newsletter Profit Club where we’re doing our AI Automations Lab. But go to Claude, use Cowork, and just automate one of your newsletters. I think it’ll make a huge, huge difference for you. And my free gift is my Creator Scorecard, where you can go in and assess where you should focus in upleveling your business with the Creator Growth Flywheel. And that is at scorecard.destinicopp.com.
Monica Froese: Liz, what about you?
[00:53:00] Liz Stapleton: So I’m going to start with my freebie because it’s my 10-Minute Time Waster Audit, which helps you map out all the things you’re doing. And I think that’s great — then take that map, throw it into Claude, and be like, help me figure out what I can automate. Help me figure out what are things I don’t need to do anymore. I think that’s a great way to start getting your wheels turning on what you can hand off. And then when in doubt — if there’s something you hate doing, ask if there’s a way you can automate it with AI. And just go from there.
Monica Froese: And what is your free gift?
Liz Stapleton: My 10-Minute Time Waster Audit — that’s the one I started with.
Monica Froese: Love it. Jodi.
[00:54:00] Jodi Bourne: Okay, I’ll start with my free gift too. I just created it and it’s not quite ready yet, but it’s going to be awesome. It’s a visibility audit — a visibility scorecard. You go through and answer questions about your content, your website, your authority, everything. And it will give you a priority list. I’m probably going to do a four-day email series afterwards. That’s at bornstrategicai.com.
Jodi Bourne: And for my challenge — because I’m an ideas person, I get tons of ideas every day just going about my regular day, and I’ve always struggled keeping them organized. So I created a skill where I can dispatch through Dispatch and just say, keep these ideas organized. But it also tells me what to get rid of — that’s not a good idea for you, you’ve already promised this and that. It knows my capabilities and says, hold on, you don’t need to do that. And then it’ll put it in a Notion database for later and prioritize what to do. I think that’s really useful for ideas people.
Monica Froese: Love that. Steph?
[00:55:00] Steph Blake: My suggestion would be — if you have skills, create a weekly scheduled task that will review those skills and find out if any updates need to be made. Prompt it to say, look through all of my recent chats, if we made any updates since the skill was created, update it for me. I do that a lot — I get excited, go in and update a page, and forget to update the skill with the changes I made in that chat. This scheduled task will go through that automatically and do it for you. If I could pick one, that would probably be my number one recommendation.
Steph Blake: And my free resource — I’m literally creating it after we get off this call. It’ll be focused on stealing the exact workflows that I use in Claude, because I’m all about automation. I’m going to give you those things and you can just swipe them.
Monica Froese: And she is the queen of automation. So I want the free gift as well. Thank you for creating that for us. And Ruth.
[00:56:00] Ruth Poundwhite: I just want to say we’re all so funny — we’re all like, oh, it’s in development. I’m going to say the same thing, but I’m also going to sign up for all these freebies. They’re so good.
Ruth Poundwhite: What’s very much on my mind this week is using Claude to test my own creations. I think this is really helpful both from a practical standpoint and from how well you’re helping people with the things you create. By creation I literally mean — the stuff I already talked about, custom GPTs, skills I’m going to sell. But also resources you’re creating for your members, or your website. Test the flow. So whatever you are creating at the moment, get a report from Claude about the flow, anything it’s missing. It makes you feel more solid in the value of it.
[00:57:00] Ruth Poundwhite: And the freebie that I’m actually working on right now is more about the cognitive load side of things. I know it can be very hard to know where to even start with Claude. So I need to give this freebie a name, but it’s going to help you figure out where to start with taking things off your plate, and also give some prompts for some messy brain dumps for different areas of your business. So if you don’t know where to begin — that’s where you get started.
Monica Froese: Oh, I want all of your freebies. Thank you all for offering all these wonderful things. So wherever you’re listening, we will put all the links in the show notes. But I just want to thank all of you ladies for joining us for this round table and sharing all of your amazing ideas on how people can leverage Claude in their business.
Dr. Destini Copp: Thanks, Monica.
PODCAST OUTRO — Recorded by Dr. Destini Copp
Dr. Destini Copp: Thanks for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you love the show, I’d appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day — and bye for now.