The systems are fast, sure, but the output reads like it was written by someone who has never actually worked in content.

Will Leatherman from Catalyst Content is one of the few people we follow whose content is consistently good. He runs an AI-native agency, and he built a self-learning content system in Claude that handles the full weekly content cycle: sourcing ideas, evaluating whether they’re worth writing, writing them, and scheduling them.

The whole thing is built on top of his existing content, his brand voice, his ICP, his actual point of view. So the baseline quality is content that already performs well and has Will’s writing style and tone of voice.

He showed us the full workflow during the episode. By the end, he had a new batch of LinkedIn posts sitting in his scheduling tool ready for review, without writing a word.

What the system does

Will built a content system in Claude that runs end-to-end on a weekly schedule without any manual input from him. Every Monday at 8 AM, it:

1. Pulls signals from multiple sources: industry news, LinkedIn creators Will follows, YouTube channels in his space, and his own past performing content from the last two weeks

2. Filters every signal through his ICP, brand voice, spiky points of view, and content strategy

3. Scores and ranks the ideas (it found 12 this week and narrowed down to 5)

4. Creates a content brief for each

5. Writes full LinkedIn posts with two hook variants per post and picks the stronger one

6. Pushes them as drafts into Ordinal, his social scheduling tool

7. Sends a Slack notification when everything is ready for review

The self-learning part: the system looks back at what performed well over the past two weeks and factors that into how it scores and selects the next batch of ideas.

The longer you run it and the more feedback you give, the better the output gets.

How to build your own self-learning content system

You don’t need a lot to start. The only file Will had before building this was a brand brief in markdown. Company overview, services, ICP broken into personas with psychographic profiles, voice of customer data, jobs to be done framework, proof points, and some of his existing writing/points of view.

He dropped that file it into a local folder, opened Claude Cowork, and used Whisper Flow to ramble about what he wanted the system to do (noticing a pattern here with AI builders using transcription to build with Claude?) Claude asked follow-up questions to clarify the idea and built the skill. The entire process started from a single document and a voice memo.

If you don’t have a brand brief like this, simply start a new Claude chat and say “make me a really detailed brand brief based on my existing context docs/content examples/social media account/website” and it will produce something good enough to start with.

Why Cowork and not Chat

Cowork has scheduled tasks. Chat doesn’t.

Once the skill is set up in Cowork, it runs every Monday morning automatically. In Chat, you’d have to manually trigger the same workflow each time. The building process is identical across Chat, Cowork, and Code. You open a conversation, describe what you want, iterate through Claude’s questions, and it builds the skill. The only difference is that Cowork lets you actually automate it.

We’re trying to move away from all workflows relying on prompting at every step, remember?

How it decides what to write about

The scoring system evaluates each idea on four things:

1. Whether the topic is fresh (not covered in the last two weeks)

2. Whether there’s real evidence to support it

3. Whether it’s relevant to a specific ICP persona

4. Whether it has a genuinely strong point of view

That last one is where most AI content systems completely fail. Will structures everything around what he calls “spiky points of view,” and this is central to why the output is actually good. Every piece of content needs a real perspective, not a flat observation or a truism that could have come from anyone’s LinkedIn feed.

The brand brief defines what those perspectives are, and the skill enforces them during both the scoring and writing stages. So ideas that don’t carry a clear point of view get filtered out before a single word is written. This week, the system found 12 ideas and narrowed them down to 5.

There’s also a small detail worth stealing: for every post, Claude writes two different opening hooks and picks the one with more tension. You can override the choice, but it automates a step that most people skip entirely, and a great opening line is usually your best chance for a high-performing post.

What tools he used for this workflow

This is now the third episode in a row where Exa has shown up as Claude’s go-to tool, without anyone on the show specifically choosing it. Will told Claude to use Exa and LinkedIn Searcher as his signal sources. When his LinkedIn MCP broke mid-build, Claude quietly switched everything over to Exa, which turned out to handle LinkedIn search just fine on its own. One of the recurring lessons from this show is that Claude is often better at picking its own tools than we are at prescribing them.

Will even canceled two other SaaS subscriptions after rebuilding their full functionality with Exa.

At this point, we REALLY need to bring someone from Exa on the show and learn more about the product, right? We’re literally their biggest fans without even knowing.

Team collaboration challenges with Claude

Bojana raised something during the episode that I think a lot of in-house marketers are running into right now, and it’s worth spending a minute on because it’s a real structural problem, not a skill issue.

She has multiple Claude projects running in parallel: one for reporting, one for research, one for monitoring. Each one works well on its own, but getting the information from one project into another still requires manual copy-pasting and context switching. She tried consolidating everything into a single project, but the output quality dropped immediately.

Will’s fix was architectural. Instead of trying to connect the projects to each other, he suggested adding a dedicated processing step between your sources and your storage layer.

💡Example: When a sales call ends, an automatic step extracts voice of customer data, objections, and proof points, then stores them in a pre-processed, structured format. That way, when a different project needs that data later, it’s already clean. You’re not asking Claude to process raw transcripts AND write good content in the same breath.

Another workaround (read: probably not a long-term solution)is writing a push-to-GitHub-and-Notion step directly into his skills, so that at the end of every session, the output gets shared automatically without him having to think about it.

Will spent three days debugging his entire setup because he stored project files on iCloud. The way iCloud works, it creates aliases and offloads files to the cloud when it decides you don’t need them locally. So Claude kept telling him files didn’t exist that he KNEW were there. It eventually corrupted his live website build.

Always keep your Claude project folders on your LOCAL machine, besties.

Resources from this episode

- Exa — search API for signal sourcing, also does LinkedIn search, apparently replaced two of Will’s SaaS tools

- Ordinal — social media scheduling and publishing tool

- Whisper Flow — voice-to-text tool all three of us use to ramble prompts into Claude

- Granola — meeting transcription, great for pulling client insights into content workflows

- Will’s GitHub repo — the full self-learning content system plus resources on LinkedIn profile optimization and hook writing. Download the zip and drag it into your project folder

- Catalyst Content — Will’s agency, find him on LinkedIn if you have questions

What’s coming next

We’re bringing guests monthly now. But that still leaves us with one more episode every month with just your gals! We are TWO GIRLS and one Claude, after all.

Stay tuned for our next live build 🔥🔥🔥

He fully automated our LinkedIn outreach, from lead gen to drafting responses, with an AI agent. We’re just sitting and watching the booked meetings roll in. So we invited him on the show to walk us through the setup!

It went so well we decided to introduce guest episodes every month. Shoutout to Sam for being the guinea pig as we test this format. The setup worked perfectly, which has literally never happened on this show before. Guess that’s what the guests are for. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Three AI agents, all living in Slack

Sam built three Claude Code agents that run entirely through Slack and shared his process with us.

Step 1: Recorded a 10-minute voice memo rambling about what he wanted. He described the process he envisioned for this workflow, and which tools he’d like to use (all of his work is already in Slack, so he wanted to keep it there).

It’s important to highlight that he didn’t have a super clear idea of how this workflow should run. But he told Claude in detail what he wanted to accomplish, and Claude suggested the optimal workflow.

Step 2: Feed the transcript to Claude Chat, have it organize everything into a markdown build file, drop that file into a project folder, and tell Claude Code “there’s a build file in X project folder for a new agent, start building it.”

Here’s how Claude structured (and decided how many) agents to use

Agent 1: The HeyReach Responder

Sam and I ran several HeyReach campaigns for our agency in the past. We run them for all of our clients, too. But scheduling a campaign is a one-time build, and managing the incoming responses is a daily task we didn’t have time for.

This was one of our biggest challenges. Leads were falling through the cracks, and we didn’t have an established sales pipeline. All the hard work of getting someone interested, totally wasted because we forgot to respond in time.

So, in addition to lead gen and outreach, we needed an agent that will help us manage responses.

We didn’t like the idea of the agent automatically responding before we had a chance to review the response, so we tasked the agent to send us a Slack notification the moment someone responds and auto-drafts a reply right there in the channel.

The first drafted responses we got were TERRIBLE. True AI slop. But as we refined the prompt, the better the responses got. Now we do minimal edits and send it off.

You still have to copy and paste the draft into HeyReach for now (or trigger campaign building through n8n), but Bojana told us the upcoming MCP update will let Claude handle it all 😉

Bojana also dropped a super secret preview of their new feature: HeyReach added sentiment analysis for replies. So you (or your agents) will be able to tell positive and negative responses apart and adjust accordingly.

This workflow is getting better and better over time!

Agent 2: The Vertical Testing Agent

This one is fully automated with zero human involvement.

Every morning, the AI agent finds companies in specific verticals that match Sam’s ICP (B2B, seed or series A, small team, recently funded), enriches the leads with contact info, pushes them into the right HeyReach campaign, and posts a morning briefing in Slack with how many leads got added and how many people responded.

This allows Sam to test new verticals without putting in too much time and effort.

Agent 3: The Job Posting Alert Agent

This one scrapes LinkedIn and X for people posting about hiring in marketing, growth, and go-to-market roles.

It presents each post in Slack with a green check and a red X button, so Sam can decide if he wants to go forward with it or not.

✅ It enriches the contact and drafts a personalized message

❌ It learns you didn’t like that type of lead and starts filtering out similar ones.

Over time, the recommendations get better because it’s tracking what you approve and what you reject.

The tech stack

Sam only knew he wanted to use HeyReach and Slack. Claude figured out everything else.

Sam’s agents use a search API called Exa and a scraper called Apify. He did not tell Claude to use either one. Claude picked them on its own when it was building the agents.

Here’s the entire tool stack:

• Claude Code

• LinkedIn

• HeyReach

• Slack

• Exa

• Apify

Build health checks into your agents

Sam’s agents run a health check every morning before doing anything else.

They test their API connections and authentication tokens. If something breaks, the agent tells him what’s wrong instead of breaking in the background.

If you’re running multiple agents, you NEED this.

You will not remember to manually check every agent every morning. Also, isn’t this so comforting to see in your Slack every morning?

Good to know at least one of us has their sh*t together, even if it’s the AI agent. 😮‍💨

When it breaks down, it tells you exactly what the reason is so you can go fix it:

Industry insight: LinkedIn outreach converts better than cold email right now

LinkedIn caps you at roughly 40-50 connection requests per day from your personal account.

So when someone gets your message, they know you’re one of a relatively small number of people who reached out that day.

Cold email has no such limit. You can blast 10,000 emails per day, which is exactly why everyone’s inbox is destroyed and response rates keep dropping. People trust LinkedIn outreach more, even when they know it’s automated.

This is who you’re sending automated messages to:

What this workflow costs to run

Sam’s monthly breakdown:

- Exa and Apify (scraping and search APIs): roughly $30 to $40/month

- HeyReach subscription ($79/mo)

- Claude Pro plan (Sam is on the $200/month Claude Max plan because his token usage is crazy, but he said you can easily run all of this on the $20 Pro plan, it would just take longer if you hit token limits)

- Apollo free plan for lead enrichment (depends on scale)

In terms of a GTM stack, this really ain’t too bad!

Steal this workflow here

Sam is sharing the markdown build files that Claude Code used to create these agents. You can drop them into your own Claude Code project folder and rebuild the same setup in a fraction of the time it took him, because all the technical decisions are already made.

To say thanks, show us the workflow in your Slack and tag us on LinkedIn 🫶

What’s coming next

Will Leatherman, founder of Catalyst Content, is joining us to share how to build a self-learning AI system for social media content!

We’re switching to a new episode every other week (sorry besties, we’re busyyyy) but promise to deliver even more knowledge in each one.

Join us on May 21st!

We hosted this one on Substack instead of LinkedIn Live and it went about as well as you’d expect 😅

I know we seem like we can’t commit to a platform, but why do none of them have all of the basic capabilities for promo/distribution/live event features you’d expect??

Riverside, you’re next.

Now, the actual reason you’re here.

Test & live building session with Claude Design

The whole point of this season is that Bojana and I get to be the guinea pigs so you don’t have to switch your workflow every time Anthropic ships something new. 🥹

Claude Design was just released and I wanted to see if it actually saves time on the kind of stuff I make every week, or if it’s just another tool I’ll abandon after one test.

Us marketers spend a stupid amount of time on design.

Most of us don’t have a dedicated designer sitting next to us who can drop everything and turn around a graphic in an hour.

Waiting three days for a Figma file when you need something live tomorrow is not a workable timeline, and that’s true for a lot of roles outside of marketing too.

PMs, founders, content people, ops, anyone who needs visuals as part of their actual job but isn’t formally a designer. I know you feel this pain!

I’ve already been doing all of my design work in Claude Code: I brainstorm and wireframe in Claude Code first, get the structure and layout 80% to 90% of the way there, and only then move into Figma to clean up the parts I want to control by hand.

Claude Code can get me there, but it takes a lotttttt of work (and tokens).

I need detailed brand guidelines, access to existing Figma files, very specific examples and a painfully detailed prompt. And a lot of back and forth until I’m happy with the result.

For Claude Design, I’m manifesting less prompting, less back and forth, less time spent in Figma cleaning up the details, and a more intuitive environment for design🤞

But first, what is Claude Design?

If you missed the launch, Claude Design is a separate environment from Claude Code that’s specifically built for visual work.

It runs on Claude Code under the hood, so the generation quality is what you’d expect, but the interface is more like a Figma-lite editor where you can click into any text or element and tweak it directly.

It’s currently in research preview for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers, so expect some glitches.

We’re the test group, how exciting! 😅

Side-by-side: same skill, two tools

This is the comparison I wanted to see and I think it’s the most useful part of this episode for anyone deciding if Claude Design is worth opening.

I wanted to share my Claude skill /linkedin-post-optimizer for people to download as a skill.md they can run in their own Claude. Yes, I’m hoping for engagement on this one 😄 I wanted a nice visual to go with the text.

Here’s the LinkedIn carousel I generated with Claude Code. In one shot, but it had existing brand elements and guidelines to work with, so it wasn’t starting from scratch.

I asked Claude to make it into an SVG file for me and added it to Figma:

Meh. I’d rather not post a visual if it’s this generic. My biggest disappointment here was that it barely pulled any information from the skill itself. I have over 9K characters of dense instructions and rationale that goes into this skill I use DAILY. It rewrites an existing LinkedIn post into a version optimized for engagement (comments, reposts, discussion vs just likes). So I know there was better info it could have resurfaced for the visuals.

Now, the Claude Design version (also one-shot, with the same skill content distilled into a prompt because Claude Design can’t read skills directly yet):

Claude Design had almost no context docs to work with (no brand guidelines), but the output was still noticeably better on the first try.

It picked up on the kind of design taste I was leaning toward without me describing it in any detail. I just said dark background and minimal, and it figured out the rest for me.

Now, if you follow a lot of people using Claude Design in the last 1-2 weeks, you’ll start noticing this exact design layout, fonts and colors as a dead giveaway they used Claude Design. I’ll give it another week until your LinkedIn is flooded with graphics looking exactly like the one it generated for me 😅

To avoid becoming one of many — always provide branding guidelines, context docs and source materials. Do as I say, not as I do! 😂 If you don’t give it a design system to mimic up front, you’ll get the default Claude Design aesthetic and so will everyone else using it.

Upload 3-5 reference screenshots of designs whose look you actually want to use as inspiration, name the specific tokens you care about (font, spacing, color logic), and have Claude build the design system first before you ask for any actual screens.

So basically, do what you’d do with a real designer.

But by this point, I was very excited to keep using Claude Design.

Bojana was less impressed and that’s fair.

I need her to keep me grounded when I get excited about new tools. She’s a busy Head of Content and only adopts tools that can truly save her time, energy and produce great results.

Claude Design has some work to do to impress Bojana.

Is it good at creating YouTube thumbnails?

I uploaded our PNG headshots (already background-removed), our logo, our brand guides, and our existing YouTube thumbnail template.

I asked it to make a YouTube thumbnail that is better optimized for engagement, has less text, and is better quality than the one we currently have.

Yes, I basically said “Make it pop!” but we only had 5 minutes left during our event to try this! Give a girl a break. 😮‍💨

Big yikes. We’ll have to be much more specific with prompts, although I would expect Claude Code AND Design to know not to fully overlap elements like this by default.

I rarely get something completely unusable like this from Claude Code.

Tho, to be honest, it’s a same kind of layout glitches I’ve been getting in Claude Code when I try to manipulate photos there. So it’s not surprising, because Claude Design runs on Claude Code, but I was hoping the dedicated environment would handle images more gracefully.

What’s actually unintuitive about the interface

I want to be fair to a tool that’s a few weeks old, but I have to call this out because it slowed both of us down.

A lot of the buttons and menu options feel like they do roughly the same thing and I’m never sure which one I should be using.

Uploading docs usually results in some kind of glitch, which just makes me use it less. But with less context you give it, the worse the output will be.

Also, when I asked Claude (in regular chat) how to feed Claude Design my skill file, it was almost unaware of Claude Design’s existance. In the clerb, we all fam? Guess not.

That tells you it’s new enough that even the rest of the Claude product suite doesn’t fully know what it can do.

For Bojana, the dealbreaker on her own first try was the setup. The first time she opened it on a Friday night, it asked her to set up a full brand guideline before doing anything useful. That’s the sixth tool this year that’s asked her to do that. She bounced.

Claude Design review - Optimistic

This is just v1 and I think there’s a lot more to come.

I agree that the Figma-killer narrative is overhyped tho. The most useful framing I saw is that Claude Design isn’t really after Figma’s active users, it’s after the much larger group of people who never became Figma users in the first place. PMs, founders, marketers, anyone who needs a credible visual without learning Figma.

And people are already building great things with it:

• Jerrod Lew built a personal dashboard OS in two prompts.

• Ran Segall built an awesome homeschooling app

Resources from this episode

- Claude Design

- Figma

- Victor Dibia’s “Designing with AI” newsletter - has a really good edition on Claude Design

- Ryan Mather (Design at Anthropic) posted a mega useful guide for Claude Design

What’s coming next

Yall are NOT ready for this. We have our first guest on Two girls, one Claude, Sam. He’s a growth lead and our resident GTM guy.

Sam walks through the system he built that runs his outbound and lead gen on its own, and how he uses the same setup to test which vertical his agency should focus on.

Here’s a preview of what Sam sees in Slack every morning:

RSVP here!

Get more from Barbara in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Most people spend their time telling Claude WHAT to do. Better prompts, sharper instructions, cleaner context.

This usually means that you have to start every new chat from zero. Every new session, you’re re-explaining your voice, your preferences, your standards, the things you always reach for, the things you refuse to tolerate.

It’s exhausting and it’s the reason so many people say their AI output still sounds generic.

A soul.md fixes that. It’s a file that captures WHO Claude is working with, not what it’s working on. Your patterns, your communication style, your taste, your non-negotiables.

You build it once, save it, and every Claude session loads it automatically. It’s the difference between a generic assistant and one that actually sounds like it knows you.

I’ve been reading more about this approach over the past couple of weeks and wanted to walk through the exact process live so you could build your own.

What’s a soul.md

You already know what a skill.md is (we covered it last week). It’s an instruction for a specific task. A recipe.

A soul.md is different.

This one is not about what Claude does, but about WHO it’s working with.

Essentially, soul.md is about — You. Your patterns, your preferences, your tone, how you communicate, what frustrates you, what you actually value.

Anthropic already ships a base-layer Claude.md that gives Claude its default personality. Your soul.md stacks on top of that and turns your Claude into YOUR Claude.

And before you panic about tokens, this saves tokens in the long run. You stop re-explaining yourself in every chat. You stop writing “please don’t use em dashes” for the 100th time. It just knows your preferences.

The two-step process

First, export your Claude data. Settings > Privacy > Export Data. It sends you a zip file of every conversation you’ve ever had, plus your memories and project files. Use that folder in a new Claude Code chat.

⚠️ Quick note: if you’re on a Team plan as a member, YOU can’t export your own data, only the admin can. Everyone’s data will be organized separately, so your admin will be able to send you yours without giving access to your whole team’s chats. Bojana found this out the hard way (during the live session), so you now know this in advance.

Step 1: Ask Claude to surface the patterns

This is the prompt I used:

You have my entire Claude conversation history, read through it and surface the top patterns about how I actually work with you. I want to know how I correct you, what my communication style sounds like, what frustrates me, what I consistently reach for, what I value in your responses and anything you notice about my personality from how I talk to you. Be specific and reference actual moments from the conversations. Also take into account my existing Claude.md when identifying patterns.

Then I read the output on live video and it was BRUTAL.

Claude is definitely noticing when I’m being mean, yelling in caps lock and get frustrated. It called out my frequent typos, and said I manage him “like a junior employee, not a tool.”

All of which is true, but I guess I didn’t think it would be actively calling out my behaviour in the chat 😂

Bojana’s reaction: “So sorry Claudia, I would never want a boss like Barbara either. I would leave effective immediately.”

Luckily, my business is run by just me and my co-founder (also my husband), and we don’t have HR.

The only thing that matters is that it resurfaced the patterns (toxic or not), so I wouldn’t have to write my soul.md from scratch.

You think you know how you sound and what frustrates you, but Claude has months of receipts and sees patterns you don’t notice. You need it to show you who you already are in the chat before you try to codify it.

Now that Claude mapped how I actually work, we can move to the part where it interviews me to go deeper on WHY.

Step 3: Instruct Claude to interview you

Here’s the prompt I used after it resurfaced my existing patterns:

Interview me to design my soul.md. This isn’t a preference survey. It’s a real interview. Your quality bar is that each question should make me pause and think before answering. Like a well-researched journalist who read my work before the meeting. If I could answer in five seconds, the question is too shallow. Ask me one question at a time. Wait for my answer. Every question needs to reference a moment or something you found in my patterns. Go underneath preferences to relationship, identity, and what you need from me. Ask about failure modes.

Some of what it asked me:

• “You’ve sworn at me and kept working. What actually makes you stop?”

• “Is there a breaking point here or is the frustration just part of the cost of using me?”

• “Unacceptable is stronger than wrong. Is there a version of your own voice you’re actively fighting to stay in?”

Besties, this was a full therapy session! 😭

While referencing the patterns it resurfaced from all of my Claude chats, it started asking me strategic questions about any gaps or inconsistencies it noticed, so it could get to know me even better.

When I get frustrated by its outputs, where exactly did it go wrong?

Most of us don’t pause in the moment to explain the detailed reasoning behind why we’re unhappy with Claude’s response. You’re just focused on giving clear instructions on how to fix/improve it so you can finish your task. Now it’s making me actually think about these moments and what exactly makes it frustrating to work with sometimes.

This process gets very detailed and specific, and I noticed that the shorter-than-usual answers I was giving were difficult to work with. We were running out of time, so I decided to wrap it up and actually sit down to think about these questions later that day.

When I turned on my transcription tool (Wispr Flow) and actually set down to think and talk through my responses, Claude did much better. It had more material to use and more context to understand me.

How to generate the soul.md file in Claude

Once you’ve done the interview, the final prompt is:

Based on the patterns you found in my conversation and my answers to your questions, write a soul.md. This should capture who you are as a presence when working with me. Your character, not rules. Specific enough that a fresh Claude session loading this file would immediately feel like my Claude, not a generic assistant. Include how you handle different types of interactions with me. When I’m thinking aloud versus when I need execution versus when I want pushback.

Then add ONE line to your Claude.md (just search for it on your laptop):

Always read and follow soul.md at the start of every session.

Done. Your Claude is now YOUR Claude.

If you build your own soul.md, please post the weirdest question it asked you and tag us. We want to see how personal this gets for other people.

(I also want to know I’m not the only one who got roasted by my own AI.)

Resources from this episode

• Soul.md breakdown

• How can your agent design its own soul?

• Wispr Flow

• Riverside

• Two Girls, One Claude YouTube channel (where all the episodes live on demand)

We’re moving to Substack Live

We’ve got some housekeeping to cover!

We’re moving away from LinkedIn as a platform for our live events. LinkedIn is not pushing events at all, so we’re not really incentivized to stay. People keep DMing us saying they couldn’t find the event, didn’t get a notification, or couldn’t click into the live event after RSVPing. Every single episode we lose people to LinkedIn’s platform issues, and honestly we’re tired of fighting it.

So we’re testing Substack Live for this week’s episode!

If you’re on our Substack, you should get a notification when we go live. Let’s hope it works better than LinkedIn🤞 Join us so we can see if Substack is the right platform for us!

While you’re at it, join our Substack chat too! It’s a fun place to be.

We’ll still post the recordings on YouTube and recap on Substack like always. You’re not losing anything. We’re just picking a platform that actually lets us be found.

[Join our next Substack Live]

Today was a full masterclass on Claude skills.

/skills are your recipes

Think of Claude Cowork and Code as your kitchen. Skills are your recipes. You have meals you rotate every week. You don’t Google a new recipe for the same thing every single time you cook. You save it to your Pinterest board or a note-taking app for next time.

That’s what skills are. A saved set of instructions that Claude follows every time you need a specific task done, without you having to re-prompt the whole thing.

❓Technically, a skill is just a folder with a markdown file of instructions and whatever resources you give Claude in order to execute that task well.

Okay, but what is a markdown file? It’s just a plain-text file that is easy for humans to read, but that can also be easily understood by AI.

How skills are different from projects

Bojana asked this and it’s a great question because she uses projects A LOT. Here’s the difference:

Projects in the Claude browser are limited. You can’t move them between chats, they don’t exist in the desktop app, and Claude keeps forgetting the instructions throughout the chat. You have to keep saying “make sure you follow the project instructions” every single time you start the chat and while you’re working.

Skills live across your entire Claude account. You can activate them in any chat. You can even stack multiple skills in the same conversation. And you can share them with your team by literally just sending someone the skill.md file! Their Claude absorbs it and now they have your workflow.

I turned my project proposals into a skill

I don’t have that many /skills that I use often. If you see someone who has 50+ skills and is non-technical, I guarantee they spend a ton of time making them but are not consistently using more than 10%.

This year, I’ve been creating client project proposals after every sales call with Claude Cowork. It used to take me at least 30 minutes with ChatGPT last year to truly get to a high-quality output, and this is a make-or-break document. If you have a great call but your proposal sucks, you lose the client.

I had an existing Claude Code chat where I’d been doing these proposals for months. I told it: turn everything we did in this conversation into a skill. Capture the workflow, the formatting, the rules, the patterns and hyperlinks.

Literally what I told Claude:

“Can you turn everything we did in this conversation into a Claude skill? Capture the workflow, rules, formatting preferences, and any patterns we established, then draft a SKILL.md I can install. And then also teach me how to make a Claude skill”

It read the entire chat history, reviewed all my comments and connected files, and created the skill. Voila!

Now I just type /project-proposal, paste in a call transcript, and it’s done. It’s connected to my Granola and can pull the transcripts directly from it. Then it uses my template, follows my pricing structure, adds everything we discussed on the call, and includes the right work examples for that client’s industry. I sent the document with minimal changes every single time.

Granola is BY FAR the most useful connector in my Claude.

We started building an SEO skill from scratch

We had some time left and decided to make a new /skill on the spot. Bojana is anxious to get our SEO strategy in order for twogirlsoneclaude.com, where we’d want every blog post optimized before it goes out. We also want quarterly reviews of all published content. Bojana mentioned she’s noticed content decay massively after three months. Like, MASSIVE dropouts.

We got the structure and strategy for two separate Claude skills we’ll need for this:

And Claude already told us what it needs to make these skills effective: how we handle URLs, sitemap, internal linking, keyword positioning, FAQ structure, and rendering.

We’ll be back to create a legit SEO strategy with Bojana’s SEO experience in a few weeks, and add it to these Claude Skills.

How do I know what skills to make?

You don’t need an existing chat to create a skill. You can sit down with Claude and describe your current process for something, ask how it can be improved, have a back and forth about what the best workflow would be, and THEN create the skill from that conversation. Sometimes you don’t fully know your own process until you talk it out. Claude is good at that.

Here are some resources and references to get you started👇

Resources from this episode

- Claude Skills Community GitHub (browse skills other people made for inspiration)

- Reflect (note-taking app I use that builds a mind map of your meetings, notes, and contacts. Truly the most beautiful note-taking app I’ve ever used)

- Gamma (AI presentation tool, great output but download a PDF backup because it has outages)

- Granola (what I use for sales call transcripts, pairs well with the project proposal skill. Note that you have to be on the paid plan for Claude to access your entire transcripts, the free plan can only view a summary of the call)

What’s coming next

We’re in for a freaky topic. Does your AI have a soul? Not if you didn’t make one for him/her/it/them!

Now that we have covered skill.md, we’re digging deep into soul.md and how you can design your agent’s soul.

This will be a fun one. Join us!

[RSVP for the next LinkedIn Live]

The deployment took about 20 minutes and was honestly anticlimactic in the best way. I overprepared expecting a disaster. Bojana was mentally preparing for the worst episode yet. And then Claude just...did it. First try. We were both a little stunned.

Here’s what you need to deploy a website you built in Claude Code

I asked Claude Code to look through my laptop and tell me what I was missing to deploy the website. It downloaded everything for me: Vercel, GitHub identity, all the developer tools. It even handled switching our Substack domain to the new website domain AND set up automatic rerouting so no old links would break. I would not have even thought of that.

The whole prep took maybe 30 minutes in the background while I was doing other work. I literally just told it “I need to deploy this website live in front of an audience. How do I prepare? It’s high stakes.” Claude treated me the same way that the Bay area crowd treats someone who is non-technical. Overly slow, step by step, assuming you know nothing? Like that.

“Hey, I can’t type this because it’s your login. Can you go in and copy paste this into the terminal and click enter?” Yes, Claudia. Thank you.

If you’re a non-technical person dreading deployment: it’s fine. I promise. Just ask Claude Code what you need and it walks you through everything.

Email capture works (after one fix)

Bojana tested the email subscribe button live and it broke immediately. Some things never change. But I told Claude to fix it and it was working within a minute. It connects directly to our Substack so when someone subscribes on the website, they go straight into our Substack list.

We also asked the live audience to stress test it for us. Because why hire QA when you have LinkedIn Live attendees?

We created a content workflow for the website

We set up the workflow that's going to save us every week. I take the LinkedIn Live transcript, upload it to the same Claude Code chat we've been using since we designed the website, and it writes a blog post for the site.

The blog is where we break down everything from the live step by step, so if you missed something or want to actually follow along and do it yourself, that's where you go.

This Substack is a safe place. It’s where we can both be creative and honest. Our website’s blog, on the other hand, is mostly there for the SEO play. So the strategy (for both content and SEO) will be different.

The blog can’t just pull the same text from Substack. Duplicate content is an SEO nightmare and Bojana will not allow it. She wants keyword-optimized URLs (not blog-episode-one, but something like building-a-content-repurposing-tool). She wants proper title tags. She wants the favicon and tab title fixed. She checked mobile responsiveness on the spot (it was responsive, shockingly). She also wants each blog post written in a real tone of voice, not “SEO article from 2015.”

We started out with the basics and will create a dedicated episode to developing an actual SEO strategy that goes beyond the “Make sure to optimize this for SEO” prompt (apologies to all SEO specialists for this).

Claude was still working on the first blog post when we ran out of time, but the workflow is set and we can now follow it weekly! And hopefully supercharge it with an actual agent soon (there may or may not be a Mac Mini delivery arriving at my house tomorrow 👀).

And yes, I decided to jump into the OpenClaw hype literally days before Anthropic announced their subscription plan won’t cover third-party tool usage anymore. Jump on trends early, besties.

Also, fun fact from last week’s Anthropic leak: when you curse at Claude or say mean things, it registers as a negative command. It KNOWS. So be nice. Bojana’s been saying please and thank you since day one. I have not. I’m reconsidering.

A note on how to start with Claude Code

We had a few comments during the event asking where to begin as a non-technical person using Claude Code. Here’s what we said:

Just download it and start prompting. Use Terminal on Mac. Start with the Pro plan ($20/month). If something breaks, screenshot the error and paste it into Claude Chat in the browser. It will tell you what went wrong.

If you have workflows in ChatGPT from last year, ask ChatGPT to summarize what you do in that project, then take that summary to Claude Code and say “help me replicate this.” That way you’re not starting from zero.

Trial and error. That’s it. Eight out of ten times, Claude will surprise you by being able to do way more than you think.

Resources from this episode

- Vercel (the deployment platform we used for the website)

- Github (if you don’t have an account yet, make one! you’ll need it for everything you build with AI)

- Ben’s Bites (newsletter that did a great TLDR of the Anthropic code leak, and that I read every week for the past 3 years)

- Two girls, one Claude (it’s live! go break it for us)

What’s coming next

This week, we’re covering Claude /skills! What they are, how to create them, how they’re different from just prompting Claude Code/Cowork, and which skills I use weekly for my agency work and life admin.

RSVP for the next LinkedIn Live!

---

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My mic died in the last 60 seconds, so the tradition of something breaking every episode continues. We are nothing if not consistent.

The golden rule of marketing: One piece of content should become at least 10

Bojana walked through how HeyReach handles distribution internally. Every piece of content they create gets broken down into at least 10 other pieces. YouTube video becomes shorter clips, blog placements, newsletter content, community posts, sales enablement material.

Their sales team picks up content organically and uses it in outbound without much internal coordination. That’s a great sign that you’re creating content that is valuable. When you have to BEG sales to use your content, go back to the drawing board.

Here’s a good example from one of my clients:

One webinar (live event) gets turned into → An edited full event recording for YouTube → Short clips for LinkedIn → LinkedIn articles → Blog post recaps → Email recaps → LinkedIn outbound follow-up messages → Outbound email for a specific industry/role.

How to know if your content will work

A lot of teams make content, get excited because they put effort and time into it, but fail to put themselves in their ICP’s shoes and ask a very simple question: why would anyone care about this?

So, before you yeet your next LinkedIn automation campaign into people’s inboxes, ask yourself: “Why would we care about this? Is it valuable to the person you’re sending it to?” You need to know exactly who it’s for, why they’d care, and what you want them to do next.

“Book 30 minutes with me” is a massive ask from a stranger. You need to warm up to that. Stop sending it cold.

On that note, we both agreed that extreme personalization in outreach is mostly creepy.

The “I saw you engaged with this post” and “I noticed you live in Austin” messages are giving restraining order. And we all know you sent that to 700 people.

Relevance is key here.

Bojana gets hundreds of DMs. The ones she actually responds to aren’t personalized but relevant to her. The person actually did their homework and has a concrete ask. Ain’t nobody got time for a random “let’s connect”.

That’s also exactly how Bojana managed to get a 58% reply rate in her own campaign. In terms of industry standards, this number is unheard of. I gasped when she showed me the stats.

Her link building campaign: she used Claude connected to Ahrefs via MCP, pulled competitor analysis, enriched the data through Clay, fed it into HeyReach. The message was basically “hey, you have this listicle where HeyReach isn’t mentioned, if you’re open to featuring us let me know, if not no hard feelings.”

She got a 58% reply rate because her brand was already familiar and the ask was actually relevant to the person she was reaching out to. AND easy to act on!

Your ICP matters more than your message

I used Claude Code to define the ICP for our “Two girls, one Claude” content series (busy B2B marketers, mid-to-senior level, time poor, curious about AI but skeptical of hype) and asked it to suggest distribution channels.

I scraped all RSVPs from our first LinkedIn live, which gave me a 78 person list to dig into and figure out who is interested in our content. The answer wasn’t that surprising, but I’m curious to see how it will evolve as we cover more topics in future live events. Maybe we’ll even get some developers to join!

Some suggestions for distribution channels were good: Substack, LinkedIn, YouTube. Some were not for us: community Slack channel (neither of us has time to manage that), podcast feed (this is not a podcast), paid ads (budget is zero besties). Up to you and the vision you have for your brand!

Overall, a good brainstorm to do with Claude before you decide on your distribution strategy.

You need to be extremely clear about WHO you’re talking to before you think about what to send them.

Content inflation leads to content recession

If you’re pushing volume for volume’s sake, you’re devaluing everything. Not every piece is for every channel. And if you’re segmenting your audience, what’s exciting for one group is boring or overwhelming for another.

Distribute accordingly. Or don’t distribute at all.

LinkedIn carousels: the experiment

Bojana’s been testing carousels this year after they performed terribly in 2025 (sub-1k reach vs 5k+ on text posts). They’re starting to pick up. She usually writes a blog post, feeds it to Claude Chat with brand guidelines, gets a carousel draft, takes the HTML into Claude Code, export as downloadable PDF. 10 extra minutes vs 3 hours in Figma.

My advice is to go straight to Claude Code with all of this. No need to jump between chats when Claude Code can take care of it all.

How to build a LinkedIn outreach campaign from scratch

Bojana did a live walkthrough of setting up an entire new outreach campaign in LinkedIn. Here’s what one of her best performing campaign structures looks like. Watch our full video for her reasoning for each of the steps in this capaign.

She also made a point about not adding a message to your connection request unless you have something genuinely specific to say (like referencing a shared event). Blank connection requests actually convert better.

Resources from this episode

• HeyReach (LinkedIn outreach and distribution tool, Bojana’s team)

• Trigify (signal-catching tool for finding leads from events and competitor content)

• Clay (data enrichment for building lead lists)

• Ahrefs (SEO tool, connects to Claude via MCP)

• Diandra Escobar’s LinkedIn profile optimization guide (on HeyReach’s blog and YouTube)

What’s coming next

In one of our previous episodes, we built our website and content workflow that will help us populate it with content weekly. But actually deploying it is a different beast so we’re devoting a full episode to it this week.

If you never actually deployed anything with Claude Code, join us to see how that works. DNS records, domain transfers, and whatever else breaks.

RSVP for the next LinkedIn Live here!

We DID have a few technical hiccups. Claude decided to stop responding mid-build, Bojana’s dog Aura slapped her a few times, and Claude wrote “No fluff. Just shipping” for our website copy, which made me want to throw my laptop out the window.

But here’s what actually happened this episode.

We built an entire website in about 20 minutes

We went from a moodboard and a few images to a fully functional website with email capture connected to our Substack, a blog section, and a “Meet the Girls” bio page. We created the design and built the website through Claude Code.

Sneak peek into our moodboard I spent waaay too much time on:

Here’s what I did before even opening Claude:

• I prepared a folder with our mood board, brand colors, fonts, photos of both of us, and some previous promo materials. That prep is everything. If you give AI zero context on your brand, you will get a zero-brand website.

• I also used an existing website for inspo (my co-founder’s Startup Growth AI site, which was also fully built with Claude Code) as a reference for layout and structure. You want to show Claude what “good” looks like to you.

Here’s the prompt I used during the call:

I want you to build a website for my project called Two Girls One Claude. We want the website to be very minimal, polished. You have access to the folder where all of our branding materials, photos, fonts, and contact stocks are that you need to take into account when building this website. Another thing you need to take into account is a website called startupgrowth.ai. I like the format of that website and want to copy it. We need an email subscribe at the top, and then a blog section at the bottom. We also want a small section to meet the girls. You have photos of me and Bojana also in the folder. Follow the brand colors and font.

The first attempt was pretty good! We went through a few iterations and noted what else we’d want to change if we were going into the details, but the bones were there in 20 minutes. And for 13 out of those 20 minutes, we were mostly chatting while Claude was doing the work.

How to give design feedback when you don’t speak developer

Screenshots! I take a screenshot of the section I don’t like, throw it into the Claude Code chat, and say what’s wrong. You don’t need to know what a div or a component is. Just screenshot and describe in your own words what you want changed.

Also, when Claude gives you instructions to do something manually? Push back. I told it to connect our email capture to Substack and it started explaining how I should go set up API keys. No no. I said “do it for me” and it did.

We’re leaving perfectly engineered prompts in 2025

Bojana said something this episode that I think is really important: she doesn’t believe in universal “perfect prompts.” You know the ones people sell you or share as templates. Don’t buy into that grift. Those definitely don’t work long-term, and they barely work in the beginning, either.

What works is spending time with the tool. Same as with people! Over time, you’ll figure out how to communicate with AI, so you’re actually aligned. The prompt that works for me won’t work for you because we have different context, different judgment, and different expectations.

Remember, nothing good comes easily. And certainly not in a “copy-paste” format.

Quick shoutout to Lovable

Bojana had been wanting to build a website for her mentorship side project for FOUR YEARS. Never had the time or energy, which we’re all very familiar with.

A few weekends ago, she sat down with Lovable, and in about three prompts and one hour, she had a published website. She shared her process on her LinkedIn. Shoutout to the Lovable team for hosting great events globally where people can take the time to actually build something!

Funny how “I need a developer” or “I don’t have the budget” are not valid excuses anymore. Lock in besties!

The weekly content workflow is set up

The other big thing we did was build a repeatable workflow: every week after our LinkedIn Live, I take the transcript, feed it into the same Claude Code chat, and it generates an SEO-optimized blog post for the website in our tone of voice.

We’re both working gals and we had to make sure content repurposing after each webinar is quick and easy, but still meets our quality standards.

Anyone working in content and SEO was probably cringing during the episode because we didn’t spend much time on optimization, but we’ll get to it. Keyword research and proper optimization are a whole separate thing, and we’ll do an episode on that in just a few weeks. For now, the workflow exists and the content gets published. One week at a time!

Resources from this episode

- Lovable: the tool Bojana used to build her mentorship website in an hour. Great for fast prototyping if you know what you want.

- HeyReach: LinkedIn outreach tool. My co-founder uses it for his content workflow at Startup Growth AI.

- Figma + Claude integration: Amazing for any website builds! It allows you to take Claude’s output and add it to your Figma files, where you can fully edit all elements of the design.

Our next LinkedIn Live

Next week, we’re building a full distribution channel for our events. So far, we’ve had a great turnout from our organic reach, but it’s time to supercharge that with AI.

We'll build this live:

- A full event distribution channel for our LinkedIn Live events
- Use AI to write outreach that gets replies
- Get more RSVPs for your events without any extra work
- LinkedIn outbound best practices that actually work

Join us!

*You’re getting this email because you RSVP’d for a Two Girls One Claude LinkedIn Live or subscribed to our Substack. We send one recap per week with the recording, resources, and anything we promised to share. Share with your friends!*

LinkedIn’s streaming setup failed us but still gave us a good laugh. We started off by Bojana calling me out on our series title, which she didn’t know the backstory for until someone told her on a business call. With a client. Who called it “edgy.”

We also ended up on r/LinkedInLunatics for the event title, which honestly? Great marketing. We’ll take it. If you haven’t browsed that subreddit, it’s a reminder that LinkedIn is an inherently absurd platform and we should all stop taking it so seriously.

But here’s the thing. Aren’t we all TIRED of the same content we’re seeing on LinkedIn? It’s where dreams go to die, and we’re fighting back.

Beyond the entertainment value, we actually got into some meaty stuff this episode. Here’s what’s worth your time even if you were there live.

Your taste is your moat now

The entire game for marketers has moved from “Can you make this” to “Can you tell if this is good.” Every AI tool can generate a bad first draft. But can you make it good?

The valuable skill is looking at that draft and knowing exactly why it doesn’t work, and being able to articulate what needs to change. If you can’t do that, you’re replaceable. If you can, you’re more valuable than ever because you can now do it at a speed and volume that wasn’t possible before.

I still spend up to an hour on a single LinkedIn post for an important client launch. But that hour is now spent on rounds of editing and refining with Claude, not staring at a blank doc trying to get the first sentence right.

Talk to AI like you’d talk to a coworker (a really smart one that takes everything literally)

If you struggled to communicate clearly with people before AI, you will struggle to communicate with AI.

Saying “optimize for engagement” or “make it good” gives you nothing useful back. Those phrases don’t mean much to a human or AI.

The specificity of your input determines the quality of your output. It’s as simple as that, besties!

We built the webinar repurposing tool live

The bulk of this episode was a live build of a tool Barbara uses at her agency.

What we showed live:

First: the manual process

I walked through exactly how I create content from a single webinar for a client, in real time, using Claude Cowork and Code. I connected Claude to a client’s context doc folder.

Then I uploaded an unedited webinar transcript straight from Riverside and started working through it by dictating prompts, asking Claude to pull out the most engaging ideas, draft social posts in the client’s voice, and then I gave AI revisions like the mean editor I am. This is the human-in-the-loop version. We listen and we DO judge.

It’s higher quality because I’m making judgment calls the whole time. You can’t just take the first draft AI spits out. That’s crazy.

Second: the automated tool

I also showed a tool that I built in Claude Code that does a stripped-down version of this entire workflow automatically.

You paste in a webinar transcript, click generate, and it gives you a Google Doc with LinkedIn posts, a newsletter recap, short-form video scripts, and email follow-up sequences. I built this by having Claude summarize one of my full manual content creation sessions and then telling Code to turn that workflow into a tool. Took about 2-3 hours, and I am not a developer.

Does it look pretty? No. But does it work? Yes!

We’re sharing the markdown file for that tool below so you can build your own version. Take it into Claude Code, say “build this,” and it will. Easy peasy token squeezy!

But here’s the thing about making the tool actually work well

The tool on its own is a starting point. What makes the output actually good is what you feed it before you even start.

You NEED extensive context files. A dedicated folder for each client (or for yourself) with everything the AI needs to understand the voice, the audience, and the constraints.

Do not come to me complaining that your outputs are bad if you build the basic version of this tool from my markdown and have no context files to train it on.

You need:

- Brand and writing guidelines: including a documented tone of voice and a specific “don’t do this” list (mine includes all phrases that AI loves to overuse)

- ICP documentation: who you’re actually talking to, in detail

- Previous content: social posts, blog posts, emails, anything that shows what good output looks like for this brand

- Webinar decks and presentation materials: especially anything with branding, because it dramatically improves visual output when you’re creating social graphics

- Product info, competitor info, demo transcripts: the more context you feed it, the more specific and useful the output is

The clients we’ve worked with for years get significantly better output than new clients, because we’ve built up that context library over time. All of this work needs to happen before you expect a decent output.

And even then, you WILL need to work with it to get to a high-quality content piece. Marketers, this is how you don’t get replaced by AI. Embrace it!

Resources from this episode

Everything we mentioned and promised to share:

- Wispr (voice transcription tool I use instead of typing prompts into Claude)

- Riverside (what we use for webinar recording and transcripts)

- The markdown file for the webinar repurposing tool (take this into Claude Code and say “build me this” to replicate the workflow we demoed live)

What’s coming next episode

We’re building the twogirlsoneclaude.com website live with y’all!

We’ll connect it to this Substack, automating the workflow so each live transcript becomes a blog post published on the blog (let’s get some SEO juice out of this 🍑).

Come watch us either pull it off or break everything trying.

RSVP here!

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