S2. Ep11 - How to Build Your Entire Business Using Claude

Can you really build an entire business using just Claude?

In this episode, Katie and Noel walk through the full process step by step — from validating your business idea (and why you should always tell Claude not to just agree with you), to creating your brand identity with colour palettes and font pairings in artifacts, to building a full production website with Claude Code and deploying it via GitHub and Vercel. They also cover marketing and content plans using Claude Skills, and how Claude Cowork can automate the operational side with scheduled tasks, proposals, SOPs, and client research running in the background.

They also chat about how long all of this would actually take (spoiler: about a day), why you don't need any technical skills to do it, and the one area where the human touch still matters. Plus there's a quick update on Clyde, OpenClaw, NemoClaw from Nvidia, and the AI Business Club.

If you want to check out Clyde, here is the link to the website.

How to find us:

Join our membership over on Skool, where we support you on your AI and automation journey. We share exclusive content in the membership that shows you the automations we talks about in action how to build them. Find out more about the AI Business Club here.

We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all.

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If you would like dedicated help with your automations or would like us to build them for you then you can find our agency at makeautomations.ai

• Episode Transcript

  Katie (00:26)

  Hello, welcome back to another episode. Hi, hello, I'm Katie and as always I've got Noel here with me. How you doing Noel?

  Noel (00:34)

  Yeah, doing great, thanks. How are you doing?

  Katie (00:37)

  Bit of a sore throat this week. Yeah, sound like a bit of a croaky old lady today.

  Noel (00:40)

  Oh dear. Husky tones.

  Katie (00:50)

  Yeah, I think I'm just going to do my best and maybe let you do a lot of the talking this week.

  Noel (00:57)

  That's fair enough. Yeah, sounds good to me.

  Katie (01:02)

  Okay, any updates that we need to be aware of this week?

  Noel (01:09)

  So I mean the OpenClaw saga continues. So we talked about Maltbook, didn't we? The social media one, so that got bought out by Meta. And then yesterday, I haven't looked at it yet, but Nvidia came out and said, well, we've now got NemoClaw. And I was like, oh, what on earth's this. It's basically like a secure enterprise version of OpenClaw, I think. But yeah, I don't know. We all seem to be going crazy about claws this year.

  Katie (01:43)

  Okay. Yeah. And how's Clyde doing?

  Noel (01:54)

  He's doing great. Yeah. So as of recording just now, I've released the early access version to everybody on the open source. So Clyde can manage teams. He's got task boards. We also reduced the amount of tokens using prompts by 66%, which OpenClaw doesn't do. Put that in there.

  Katie (02:17)

  For anyone who is listening for the first time ever, Noel do you want to explain a little bit what Clyde is?

  Noel (02:21)

  Yeah. So Clyde is basically an AI agent orchestrator. So the way you would envision him is kind of like your business partner. So you would say to them, look, I need you to go off and do this job and then he will go off and then go, right, well, to do that properly, I need to go off and hire these sub agents and it will go off and do all of that for you. So it could be like a PR team. It could be a development team.

  HR, whatever, it will go off, create all of those team members, create all the system prompts, all the skills, and essentially it learns over time. So if it comes back with responses you don't like, you can go back to it and say, I didn't like that. And it would update all of its own instructions. So it's technically self-learning and yeah, learns everything over time, which is pretty awesome. So yeah, so far it's going very well.

  Katie (03:15)

  That is pretty awesome.

  Noel (03:19)

  But yeah, we're just starting to put in visualisations into the early access build. So you could say visualise the spreadsheet and like a chart or whatever it will go off and do that. So that's coming soonish. It's proving quite difficult. Not going to commit to any dates on that.

  Katie (03:33)

  Soon. I think that's a good thing to do.

  Noel (03:42)

  Yeah. It also connects to any API or webhook as well. You just need to give it the docs, give it a link and it will go off and do the rest for you. Yeah, pretty powerful.

  Katie (03:47)

  Great. Perfect. Okay, shall we get into this week's episode?

  Noel (04:00)

  Yeah, let's do it.

  Katie (04:02)

  So we're talking about how you can build an entire business using our friend Claude.

  Noel (04:10)

  Yes, we can do all sorts with Claude now, can't we? I built my wiring company off the back of ChatGPT in the very, very early days. So yeah, if I had Claude's access back then, I could have done so much more.

  Katie (04:28)

  Yeah, should we start with like the very beginning? So someone's sitting here and I want to set up a business and you know, what are the first things you need to do? Both of us have run a couple of different businesses over the last, well, for me, 14 years. I think we should start maybe by saying you don't have to use Claude for everything in your business but if it's the difference between you starting your business and not starting your business by using Claude for everything then make the most of it. There are going to be people out there who maybe look down their noses or have got issues with building a business using AI, but there's always going to be people with issues. I still remember like 12 years ago, there were people who were still refusing to use social media for their business.

  Noel (05:47)

  Yeah, that's like refusing to use a keyboard with your computer, isn't it?

  Katie (05:53)

  It is now, but at the time there were so many people who were hesitant and they were like, no, I'm not going to use it. I mean, I don't even know if those businesses are still going or whether they did adapt, but yeah, there's always going to be that struggle between people who think AI is the best thing in the world and then there's also going to be people who want to avoid it at all costs. And I think neither of them are right. But let's start with where you would start with building out a new business and that would be probably like your branding, maybe your colour palette, even a logo. I mean, you don't have to have all of these things, but I definitely think some form of branding is a big yes.

  Noel (06:26)

  Yeah, and I kind of guess you would also probably want to use it mainly to go through the idea of your business as well. Before we jump deep into the branding, you don't want to go off too far down the rabbit hole and then realise it was a terrible idea to start with, and then wasted time.

  Katie (07:13)

  Yeah, you want to come to Claude with knowing what you want to do for a business, who you want to serve and things like that, isn't it?

  Noel (07:27)

  Yeah. I think what's also quite important when you're ideating ideas with AI is to always instruct it to not just agree with you. They're always, especially ChatGPT, always aimed to please, thinks everything's a good idea. Because everything like a range of chocolate chip teapots would be absolutely fantastic. You should definitely do it. But what I always say to Claude or any AI is to say, look, don't just agree with me. Have that two way conversation with me. So you can give it your ideas and then it would assess them and then also come back and quiz you on some of the things. So I've gone through and ideated some things and it's gone, well, have you actually thought about this as well? And I was like, well, actually, no. That thought hadn't even crossed my mind, but that was really helpful to know that. These things are incredibly powerful. Just having that back and forth with it could really help you formulate that idea. Maybe even move you down a certain path or a different path to what you were originally thinking. So you're not wasting time.

  Katie (08:44)

  Yeah, I do feel though Claude doesn't tend to agree with you.

  Noel (08:51)

  Yeah, he's pretty good at that. It definitely will call you out. But it's always good. I always have that instruction in there. Like, just don't always agree with me and then you're guaranteed. But yeah, to move to the next bit, which was the branding side. So although Claude isn't the visual generator, it's not like ChatGPT where you can create images and things like that. It's not really built for that. But I think what it could do when it comes to your brand design is it can basically create little almost like mini websites in the chat artifacts. So you could say, well, this is kind of like what I want my brand to look like, and it could come up with colour palettes, font pairings and all that sort of stuff. You could even get it to do, I did it for a project recently where I said, show me all of the buttons. How would the menu look? How would cards or call outs, how would all of that look? And they would create all of that within the chat artifacts, which is really cool to see. Gives you that vision, which is kind of what you need when you're trying to build a brand.

  Katie (10:12)

  Yeah.

  Noel (10:13)

  At least at that point, then you can go back and forth with it and change it. So yeah, it's a really awesome tool for doing that.

  Katie (10:22)

  Okay, so how would you actually ask it then to create that branding for you?

  Noel (10:29)

  So I would either get a copy of your ideation sort of chat with Claude. You could create it all actually within a Claude project. So if you want to start a business from scratch, create a project just for that business. So everything's all together. But essentially when you're ready to go down the brand voice route, give it all of that information. And then it's kind of like the tone of the business, isn't it? Like maybe red is probably not a good idea for the brand that you're looking to build. I guess that sort of thing. I can't think of the word.

  Katie (11:11)

  Yeah, it's the colour psychology, isn't it?

  Noel (11:14)

  Yeah. So it's coming up with all that. All you would ask it to do is just come up with a brand palette for that business, give it all the information and then it'll go off and do it. If you want more or less information, then add that in there. So if you want to see things like what website buttons or bits would look like, then add that in. But yeah, fonts and colour palettes, it will chew that out in a couple of seconds. It doesn't take long.

  Katie (11:34)

  Okay. Great. So Claude's done our branding, tick. Next, we would need an offer suite. So I think this is really important as well, like, how do you want to spend your time within your business? So when I built my first business in my twenties, I was willing to be on Zoom all day, every day. And in fact, even into my thirties, I was also fine with that. So do you want to be on Zoom all day, every day, or do you want a bit more time freedom? So maybe that is courses or programmes, group coaching that you offer. So I think that's really important to know, how do you want to spend your time before you even ask Claude to create you an offer suite. And then would you put all of that information in Claude and then say, create me an offer suite based on the information you've put in?

  Noel (12:43)

  Yes, so I would keep it in the project so it knows everything already. And then yeah, just keep it all together and just ask for whatever you need it for really. It will create all those artifacts, could be presentations, documents, whatever you need. And it will go off and do that for you. Yeah, it's pretty powerful and capable.

  Katie (13:23)

  Yeah. Okay. So we've got branding, we've now got our offer suite. Most business owners now would create a website, which can be timely and it can be very costly.

  Noel (13:30)

  It can, yeah. I remember we spent lots of hours looking at WordPress templates, didn't we, back in the day.

  Katie (13:49)

  Oh my goodness. Hundreds of hours we have spent faffing about with not just templates but just WordPress. A nightmare.

  Noel (14:01)

  Nightmare. Yeah. And then you download the template and find out you can't do what you want it to do. That was the worst. But yeah, when it comes to websites, obviously Claude is one of the best AI models for coding. So for me, I don't know how to, I can code simple HTML, CSS websites, they're fairly straightforward. But these days you've got all kinds of things, you've got Next.js with Tailwind CSS, it all gets very complicated very quickly. But Claude knows all of this straight out of the box. So what you could do within the chat is basically describe the structure of your website, what you would like it to look like, or the different bits that you want in each section and things like that. Try and give it as much information as you can. And within the artifacts, it will then create that overview sort of like template, which will kind of look fairly generic, I would say. It would look AI generated. There are tips and tricks to get around that. But if you do that within a normal chat first and then ideate with it, this is a lot easier to do in the artifacts. So you can go back and forth, change bits. And then once you're happy, you can then download that and then pass it onto Claude Code to build you the proper website. So yeah, that would then go off, do all of the, it'll create tens of thousands of lines of code for you. And I guess the big plus point is you'll always get what you asked for. You will never be constrained by any sort of templates. If you want something moved a little bit to the left, it can do that. That's fine. We've had many of those arguments in the past. I don't like this, look at this, move it. I can't. Yeah, those days are gone, thankfully. But yeah, you also need to connect it to something like GitHub, which stores all the code and then you can use an app called Vercel to then have it on the internet. You can buy domains and all that sort of stuff from Vercel and things like that. So that's a real quick and easy way to get a website up and running. Obviously Claude can't create any images. It can create SVGs and graphics that way, but they're a bit hit and miss sometimes. So yeah, you would need to come up with your own assets and things like that.

  Katie (16:48)

  Yeah, what I would also say is a lot of these websites look the same. So what I would really do is really hammer home that you want something unique. You want it to go absolutely crazy on the design side. And then it goes, right, okay, I'm going to produce something that's award winning kind of thing. And off it goes and does it. And yet, you would be hard pushed to tell that it was AI generated, which you've really got to hammer that home though to get that creativity.

  Noel (17:19)

  Yeah. Okay.

  Katie (17:22)

  So we've got branding, got offer suite, now got a website. We're probably going to want some sort of marketing plan, some sort of content plan to actually now market the business. And we should say this with a caveat that Claude cannot create content that has your personal experiences in if you do not give it that information. And the same, it cannot do storytelling content unless you are providing it with that information.

  So yes, it will spit out five tips for blah blah, three tips to blah blah, but no one is going to be buying your product or service because you gave them three tips. They want to know that you can help them. They want to know your experience. Storytelling as well is really important. They want to know your opinions. Again, Claude cannot create opinionated content unless you give it that information.

  Noel (18:46)

  Yeah, it's really important, isn't it? It'll have a good go. But yeah, it's not ideal. You need to really give that information in.

  Katie (18:57)

  Yeah. That's why I would say spend a lot of the time with your marketing and content plan, because obviously without that, then you don't have a business because people aren't just going to land on your website and go on and hire you. I mean, they might, it depends how good Claude has written your website.

  But they're going to probably want to come and check you out on some sort of social media platform, whether it's Instagram, TikTok, even YouTube, Substack, whatever it is. They're going to come and check you out to see if they like you, they trust you. Things like that.

  Noel (19:36)

  Yeah. But I guess with the marketing side, you can kind of use Claude to create content in a specific style and format every time. What I find with, I mean, I'm sure you've probably told me off for this Katie, but I use Claude Skills to help me generate content within certain styles. So I give it some samples and say, look, this is kind of like the content I like to create. This is stuff that I've created before. That's also helpful. And then Claude creates a skill. So every time you want to create content, it's going to use that skill every single time to create that in the format and the way that you like every time. So yeah, that's something that I do. But what I also do in one of mine is I split it out into different types. So I've got storytelling, I've got behind the scenes. There's like six or so different perspectives for each post so that I can go through and then go, actually, no, I really like that one, that fits better and then post that one.

  Katie (20:57)

  Yeah, I think you just need to feed it the information.

  Noel (21:01)

  100%. It goes down to blogs as well. If you've got a certain blog or even a newsletter format that you'd like to follow, then create those skills within Claude. Just ask it to create a skill. Give it all the data and information that you want it to contain in there and it will go off and do that. So every single time you ask it to do it, it will understand what you're doing. So you won't have that loop with AI where you go, no, that's not how I like it. Can you give it to me this way again? You're not starting from scratch every single time.

  Katie (21:29)

  Yeah, you're not getting frustrated and going, you're not listening.

  Noel (21:40)

  No, yeah, it's the ChatGPT argument, isn't it?

  Katie (21:44)

  Yeah, Claude would never do that to me though.

  Noel (21:48)

  No. It's employee of the month, Claude. Well behind Clyde obviously.

  Katie (21:52)

  Absolutely. Okay, so we've done branding, we've done offer suite, done website, marketing and content plan. So now let's look into Claude Cowork.

  Noel (22:13)

  Yeah, it's a really awesome new feature that's come out in the past, I think it's past month since we recorded this. So yeah, it's a really awesome automation platform for Claude. So you can schedule Cowork tasks or you could just ask it to go off and do stuff as and when you need it. But what it will do is that you can give it a really complicated task and what it does is it breaks it all down into individual tasks and then will go off and do each bit one by one. But it can do that autonomously through schedule. So if you've got three tasks you want done every single Monday morning at 8am, you could set that up and then you can sit at your desk at 10, it's all done, and then you can carry on with your day. So yeah, that's really awesome. It also has access to the browser and things like that. So it could go off and have a look at other websites and things like that. Maybe even social media accounts that you give it access to. And it can go off and see what's going on and provide you insights and things like that. So yeah, it's a really powerful tool that you can use. It even has access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint or even the Google versions of those as well. So you just think what you would want to automate, you can within Cowork. And yeah, it's pretty impressive.

  Katie (23:48)

  Yeah, I wrote down some things that we discussed earlier actually before recording this podcast of what Cowork can help you do or do for you. And that was like client and customer research, create SOPs and systems, create an email marketing plan and it can provide things like sales assets. So like proposals and pitch decks.

  Noel (24:21)

  Yeah, I think with things like the proposals and things like that, it's going to be really good at that. So once you've set it up and done it once, it will create those proposals in the exact same template every single time, which is actually just what you need as a business owner. You want that consistency. So yeah, they're going to be incredibly powerful. And like I said, it's all just going to be done in the background. So you're not having to type it out every single time or fill out a template. You can just give it transcripts of a call you had with a client and off it will go and then create those proposals within minutes.

  Katie (25:02)

  Yeah. Is there anything that you wouldn't use Claude, so skills, Cowork, Code, to do within your business?

  Noel (25:17)

  That's a good one. I guess it's kind of like that personal outreach. So you could have it automate your entire inbox and replying to client emails. I just think that personal touch is still needed for the business to get that credibility and trust with customers. So yes, you could use Claude to help you if you get stuck with replying to an email, but I would always say that human touch does need to be there. And yeah, I wouldn't, I always keep clients talking to me and not to Claude.

  Katie (26:01)

  Yeah. So we've just discussed how you can set up your whole business using Claude, but what technical skills would someone need to do all of this? So someone's listening, they've maybe not used Claude, maybe they've used ChatGPT a few times, but they're not sure if this is actually possible because of their technical skills. So what technical skills would someone need for this?

  Noel (26:41)

  So I guess if you've used another LLM anywhere else, you already kind of know how to chat to it and Claude's no different. He's just a bit more powerful than others, a bit more straight talking as well. But you don't really need any specific technical skills to do anything. So you may have never created a website in your life and you could get Claude Code to go off and do that.

  If you then get to the point where you're like, well, I have no idea, great, I've created it and it works on my laptop, but then how do I get it on the internet? How do I get domains? You can just ask it that in plain language. And then what it will do is take you through a step-by-step process on how to do it. So yeah, from a technical perspective, you don't really need to be that on it with any sort of crazy skills. As long as you can chat to it, I think you would be good to go. I think a couple of years ago, that would have been quite difficult because the models weren't quite that intelligent. Whereas I think now we've got to a point where you can just ask a simple question and then start getting those incredible outputs, whether it be websites or apps or whatever, within a couple of minutes. And you've done nothing other than type in a box.

  Katie (28:10)

  Yeah. How long do you think it would realistically take to build your business and brand using Claude?

  Noel (28:21)

  So that's a great one.

  Katie (28:24)

  So bearing in mind, we talked about making sure you've got that business idea, the branding, offer suite, website, a content plan. Let's say, let's stick with that. And then maybe setting up Claude Skills and maybe setting up Cowork as well. Should we include that? Yeah. Okay.

  Noel (28:31)

  Yeah. So I would say, depending, obviously it depends how complicated your business idea is, some might be really simple, others could be incredibly complicated. But what I would say to get the basics in place, I would say it would take a day. It wouldn't take you much more than that. I wouldn't have thought. I think this is also really cool for those that are still stuck in the nine to five. The olden days, trying to build a business on an evening was an absolute nightmare. There was so much manual work.

  Katie (29:24)

  Yeah, because you were doing your nine to five and then you were coming home and doing like five to nine on your business.

  Noel (29:33)

  Yeah, and it was really manual, whereas I think now, within a couple of evenings, you could probably have most of this all set up and ready to go. Yeah, it's baffling really, isn't it? How quick you can get it done.

  Katie (29:36)

  That's so cool, isn't it? And I just think all those nights that I was sat on the sofa trying to set up my business, I would have loved this back when I was setting it all up. And especially because I don't have a lot of patience for tech.

  So this honestly would have been literally like a godsend. I would have just thought it was the best thing ever.

  Noel (30:23)

  Yeah, absolutely. It's really awesome what you can do, isn't it? If you just give it that time and think, right, at least have the idea first formulated in your head, that will really kickstart it. But yeah, just getting it in there and getting it done. I've built apps within an afternoon, from an idea.

  Katie (30:44)

  Yeah, whereas before I can remember them taking months and months and months.

  Noel (30:49)

  Oh yeah, or thousands of dollars or pounds to a developer and then still wait months. Yeah, I mean it could create iOS, Android apps, web apps, websites, you name it, it can do it. Which is incredible. The first build of Clyde was done in an afternoon. So yeah, and I've not put that many hours in it since if I'm being honest.

  Katie (31:10)

  And then you are, I would say, very technical and you have that sort of brain and you understand how those things work, whereas it would not take me one afternoon.

  Noel (31:28)

  Yeah, I get that, no.

  Katie (31:34)

  No, it wouldn't. Let's not even try. So if someone's just listening to this episode now, what is one thing that someone could do today to get started with building their new business using Claude?

  Noel (31:44)

  I guess the first thing you should probably do is validate that idea and make sure that it's right. Like I say, make sure Claude just doesn't agree with you. Let it challenge you.

  Katie (32:03)

  The business idea. Yeah. But also as well, if you're trying to validate a business idea, I would also go and do some research, whether that is using Claude or whether it is your own research, to make sure that not only you think it's a great idea but actually there's some sort of demand for it or a want for it. But also there's not huge and huge demand already.

  Noel (32:47)

  Yeah, I guess so. So one thing with Claude and the research. If you asked it to help you with an idea and then tick the research button, it would go off and search hundreds of different websites. Whereas I think if you did that in ChatGPT, you'll probably be in the tens of sites that it will go and look at, which isn't particularly helpful. But what I find with Claude is it will do that broader search and have a better grounded understanding of whatever sector or ideal client you're trying to target. It will go off and find them. And yeah, it will come back with ideas. It's done it with me and just been like, you haven't thought about this. And it's like, yeah, that's very true. I think you can then start that process and go, well, how could I incorporate that in the business so I don't get caught out by that, or I meet that particular need of that customer. Really awesome how it does that.

  Katie (33:44)

  Yeah.

  Noel (33:45)

  I also have a skill set up, which is kind of like almost like a board member or like an investor. So it doesn't take much to set that up. You just ask it to go off and create one for you, but make sure that they're super critical and have a business brain and money and investment ideas because if you ever go to an investor with an idea, they're probably always going to pick holes in it. So yeah, I always have that skill set up as well. It gives you that real, super honest approach.

  Katie (34:17)

  That's a great tip.

  And as well, if you're listening to this and thinking, I want to do it, but it sounds a little bit complicated, then we have a whole Claude section within the AI Business Club, which is our monthly membership. You can come and join. If you want to stay for a month, stay for a month, or you can stay for as long as you want. You can cancel at any time. But in that section, we'll have all of our Claude, Cowork, Claude Skills, and actually how to build things out using Claude for your business. So we'll leave the link below or you can search AI Business Club over on the Skool platform. You should be able to find us that way. Thank you for bearing with me this week with my sore throat. Appreciate you listening and we will catch you next time for another episode very soon.