[0:00]In this video, I'm going to walk you through every single feature in Claude from the basics all the way up to the more advanced techniques like creating automations that do the heavy lifting for you. Also, I'm going to show you how to build your AI operating system. This is going to turn Claude into your executive assistant. Now, I use Claude every single day. I'm talking researching, scripting, strategy, brainstorming, knocking out tasks that used to take me an hour in literally 5 minutes. It is the tool I have open more than anything else. And the reason for that is simple. Everything you need is already built in. You don't need to connect 30 different tools and watch 20 different tutorials before it's actually useful. You open it, you set it up right and it just works. So, this is the full Claude guide. Let's get right into it. All right, let's start from the very beginning. If you don't have a Claude account yet, this is going to take you about 2 minutes. If you already have one, skip ahead. I'll put time stamps in the description, but even if you have an account, I recommend you stick around for the plan breakdown because most people are on the wrong plan for what they're actually trying to do. All right, so here's the pricing. Now, the free plan is genuinely good. You get Claude Sonic, web search, file uploads, artifacts. It's great for trying everything out before spending money. As you can see, you have all of the features right here. I'm currently at Claude.com/pricing. You can find the pricing page there. I'll even leave a link in the description if you want to access that quickly. Now, the thing I recommend to every person wanting to actually get into AI and use it is to actually get some skin in the game. Like, start putting some money into this. I don't get anything for you doing this. I just remember when I went from free to the next plan up the 17 or the 20 a month if build monthly. This is when everything started to change because this is like, okay, I'm invested now, you know? Like, you need to kind of get invested to get the genuine benefits out of all of these plans. But really don't overthink it. You can watch this video, start free. If you hit the limits within a week, upgrade. And that's signal that, okay, yeah, you've moved on. But what you can do is you can hit try Claude on any one of these and if you're not signed in, it's going to take you to a signup where you can sign up with I believe Apple or Google and it's just like any other signup process. But now you're in Claude and you've probably been here before. This is your prompt bar in the middle of the screen. This is where you type into the intelligent models. You have your model selector right here. So I'm usually on either Opus 4.6 or Sonnet 4.6. Sonnet is good for everyday tasks. Opus is for for like, as you can see, ambitious work. Uh, they even have a voice model right here where you can use voice mode. I'll show that later. And the plus button where you can access a bunch of the features. Now, over on the left hand side is where you can create a new chat. You can open up your sidebar to view all of your past conversations and you can kind of navigate around your Claude workspace. We're going to be going over a lot of this stuff today in this video. So when I open up my sidebar, what you're going to see is I have some projects here, which we're going to get into projects. And I have all of my chat threads. So I can click into one of these and view my past conversations that I've had with Claude, which is very cool. I'll ask, what's the weather like in Southwest Michigan today. I can use that for Sonnet. And then I can send it off. As you can see, it pulls up a nice view of what the weather looks like in Southwest Michigan. It gives me a nice little day by day and then in the sidebar, as you can see, I have my chats over here. And if you click into your chat, you can do a couple of things. You can star it so it stays up top pinned. You can rename it. So I can just name this weather for the week. I can hit save and I can even add it to a project, which we'll get into later. Okay, so you're in. Now, before I show you any features, I need to show you one thing that determines whether Claude is useful to you or not. And that's how you talk to it. Now, most people when they're talking to models, right something vague like write me an email or give me a business plan. And they get something back generic, and then they start thinking like, that's just how AI works, that's what it does, but it's not. Claude is only as good as what you give it. The more context, the more specific you are about what you actually want, the better the output gets. And I mean, dramatically better. So, instead of talking about it, let me actually show you. All right, so here's an example of what a bad prompt might look like. And this is how a lot of people start. They go in here and they ask it a question like 99% of people, but I always say if you talk to AI like 99% of people talk to AI, doing things like what I'm showing you right now, you're going to get results like 99% of people. And 99% of people aren't where you want to be. So don't talk to it like everyone else. Everyone's asking basic, generic canned questions like this, things that you used to type into Google. So, I'm going to show you a side-by-side example of what a bad prompt looks like with a good prompt and how you should actually be communicating with AI right now. So, I'm typing this in, how do I go viral on social media? I'm going to actually use incognito. So it doesn't pick up any of my past chats. It doesn't pick up any of my memory or anything it knows about me, just so we can have a plain prompt, raw Claude. How can I go viral on social media? I'm going to send that off. And then it gives me some generic advice. You know, it's fine, it's usable. But I would spend 20 minutes just trying to get this to actually go into my workflow and, to be honest, this is canned generic advice you could find anywhere. So it says going viral isn't a guaranteed science, create content people want to share, like evoke strong emotions, tell a story, be relatable, text talking about certain formats, like short form, reels, TikTok, Shorts, captions matter, post consistently, play the algorithm game, ride trends, collaborate, very basic things that honestly now I've got to take this and I've got to shape it into my own world, when I could have shaped the model into my world so that I didn't have to do that myself. So let me show you what a better prompt would look like using my flagship format. So here, I've got the same idea, right? We asked Claude, how can I go viral on social media? Great, right? But if you want to get the most out of Claude, you got to give it some more. So what I like using is the goal, context, action, output format, otherwise known as GCAO. I have a full video in the upper right hand corner if you want to pause here, go watch how I think about creating these styles of prompts and what I include in each section, you can do that. But this is so much better and this is how you should be talking to Claude. For example, instead of I want to go viral on social media, give it information about your situation. I want to attract small business owners who are already making money but feel overwhelmed running everything themselves. I'm not trying to get famous. I want the right people finding me and reaching out about working together. Then I give context. I run a coaching business doing around 15 a month. I post on Instagram and LinkedIn but I get generic engagement. Likes from people who will never buy. I've tried posting tips and motivational content, it hasn't translated to clients. I have about 45 minutes a day to spend on this. Then I give it a clear action. Identify the specific type of content that attracts buyers rather than followers for a service-based business and explain why that content works differently than content designed for reach. And then I give it a specific output format. I want everything above in, which is the O in GCAO. So I say, give me three content angles with a one sentence explanation of why each one attracts buyers specifically. No generic advice about consistency or hashtags. So, as you can see, this is a much better way of talking to Claude than this. This is so basic and you might as well not even use AI. Give it a goal, give it a good context, give it an action, give it an output format when you're prompting when you want to solve a problem or when you want to brainstorm something. So I'm going to send this off using the exact same model in incognito mode so it doesn't know anything about me. And now it's going to um, give me actual angles that I can hit using my specific platforms. So, as you can see, I asked, give me three content angles. So it's going to give me three different pieces of content I can create with why it works and why it attracts buyers in my niche specifically. And then it really goes down into um drills down into these three things. So, I turned down a client stories or any decision that cost me something. That would be like a social media post I would create. You know, we don't have to go into the answers, but as you can see, it's in my specific output format. It's very specific to my problem because I just took more time and I actually put effort into my prompt, which is going to make the AI begin working for me. And honestly, most people stop there, but I highly encourage iteration. Keep talking to the model until you get what you want. So I could say, give me six more variations of number two. And I can send that off. Maybe I like content angle number two. And now it's going to give me six variations of before and after operational specifics from client work. And, uh, these are the types of iteration questions or statements that you want to really drill into. There have been times where I've sat here and had a conversation with Claude for literally 7 to 8 hours straight until I got the answer that I was satisfied with. So don't be scared. Like, ask it anything no matter how dumb the question is until you figure out what you want. Okay, so now you know how to actually talk to Claude, but most people think that that's all it does. They use it like Google where you go in and you type something and it types something back, you get your answer and you leave. But here's the thing, Claude can actually see things, number one, and search the internet in real time. These two features alone turn it from a little bit of like a glorified Google search into a full research and analysis tool. And I am using web search constantly. I pull in documentation for any tool that my team is using. I'm researching current events. I'm looking up competitors, anything at all where I need information that is accurate and up to date at this very moment. That's what I'm using web search for. Now, vision changes the game completely because you can upload screenshots, photos, documents. Claude looks at them and understands them and then helps you solve problems based around them. So, let me show you both in action. Okay, so let's just start off with the web search feature. This one is more powerful than people think because it's like you have a really smart assistant friend that you can go give tasks to do on the internet. You can give it these huge prompts, tell it to research, do information on a specific company, a specific person, a specific tool, a competitor, whatever you want and you can have it do actions for you. Like, create blog posts or do whatever. And it's all powered with web search. So, in order to turn on web search, what you need to do, and by the way, you need to have this on all the time so you can get relevant, up-to-date, non-hallucinated information. But what you need to do is you need to hit this plus button. And you need to just click where it says web search, okay? That's it. So I'm going to click web search and now it's blue and it's activated. And so, in this prompt, yes, I'm using my same prompt framework and I'm building off of that because I'm serious about prompting, like garbage in, garbage out. Good quality in, good quality out. So, what I'm doing right now is I want to use web search to understand exactly what Andy Elliott is doing with his coaching offer right now. This is a high ticket X-car salesman, uh, guru. And I honestly, he's helped me a lot. I went to a lot of his, uh, mentorships and met him. Very cool dude. But I want to research how he's running his operations. Like, maybe I run a high ticket AI business coaching offer targeting small business owners doing 15K to 100K a month. This would be like my context, but I'm using web search, remember. So I say, use web search to research Andy Elliott's coaching offer, content strategy, and sales funnel. Identify his main offer and price point. So I'm basically using web search to get live information on one of not really my competitors, but somebody I look up to that I kind of want to copy some of the elements to drive sales. So I'm going to send this off and because we have web search active, what you're going to notice is it's going to start looking through articles live on the internet for us. It says, searching the web. And then it's pulling in all of these articles for what he's actually doing. It's pulling in Quora, it's pulling in his website, his Instagram. And after it synthesized all of that information from the web, now it's bringing me back an actual response. So it says his primary call to action routes and it's giving me literally everything with web search in such a short amount of time. This is insane. The entry level product is 0 to 100K self-study course priced around 599. It pulls people in before upselling to coaching. Beautiful. It gives me the content strategy, gives me a sales language and positioning. Top 1%, big dogs, not for beginners. Those ready to go dark. Okay, so it's some pretty, some pretty heavy stuff here. Gives me the gaps and underserved angles. Very cool. So this is just one example of me researching a competitor or somebody that I look up to that's doing better than me in what I want to do and giving me their strategy in a matter of seconds.
[13:21]So, that's web search in a nutshell. You can do that with current events, you can do that with market info, tool documentation. You can have it create anything for you with web search. It's pretty sweet. Now, let me show you vision. Vision is one of those things that if you're not using it, you need to start using it and it's one of the more powerful things because Claude can actually see images. I'm talking real life things you take with your phone, analyze it and give you feedback. So, think about this in terms of business. Like, you could take a screenshot of your website and go, what can I do in order to increase conversion on my landing page? What can I do to increase conversion with my form? How do these flowers look? Why are they dying? I mean, you can go completely opposite. But what I'm going to show you is an example of having Claude analyze one of my thumbnails and telling me what it could do better. I'm going to hit this plus button and then you can actually add files or photos. But since we're using vision, I want to upload a photo so it can actually look at the photo and give me feedback. I'll select this. And then I uploaded an image from my desktop. It's currently loading. This was a thumbnail in one of my recent videos. Sellable AI systems under 20 minutes. Let me see what Claude, uh, has to think about this thumbnail. And I could say something like, give me feedback on this thumbnail in order to increase click-through rate. And then I can send it off. And Claude will actually be able to give me real live time feedback because it can read images and see it. I know this wasn't the best prompt. I should give it my industry, my niche, and all of that stuff, but just so you get the idea. Here's honest feedback to increase CTR. What to fix? Your title has a framing problem. Sellable AI systems requires the viewer to already want to sell AI systems. It's insider language. Compare to how I build AI systems clients pay 5K for, same idea but the outcome, money is front and center. Your face is too passive. Hand on chin is thoughtful, not excited or authoritative. Thumbnails with higher CTR typically use an expression that signals discovery or urgency. Raised eyebrows, slight lean forward, direct eye contact with wider eyes.
[15:43]Okay, so this next feature is called artifacts and this is the one that blows people's minds the first time they see it. I know it did for me. You can ask Claude to create something substantial, something like a tool, a calculator, a dashboard, a form, an interactive document and it won't just give you text. What it does is it opens up an entirely new panel and build you a fully working thing right there in the conversation without any code or technical knowledge. You just describe exactly what you need. Claude builds it and then you can publish it, share your links to your clients, your team and literally anyone on the internet can use it. So essentially what you can do is build custom tools in 5 minutes that would have taken a developer days. So let me show you that in action. All right, let's get into it. One of my favorite features in Claude, the artifacts. Now, you can go to your left-hand sidebar. If you want to open it up, you can even do that there. Uh, but what you're going to notice is there's an artifacts button. And when you click artifacts, you get some templates. You can uh, create a new artifact up here on the on the right hand side. You can see all of the things that it has to offer. So, you can transform raw notes into structured notes. You can edit writing, you can go PRD to prototype, Slack Project Insights, flash cards. And so you can look through these. They're fun to look through. You can play around with them, but to be honest, I don't really like looking for something to build. I like it when I have an idea. I love knowing I can just come and throw it in Claude for an MVP and get something built in a matter of seconds. I could do an animation, I could do an app, a website, whatever I want. If I visually want to see something, I'm coming to Claude and building an artifact for it. Let me show you a quick example of something with actual utility. So maybe I'm trying to start a new AI agency or something. And I want business owners that I'm going to selling automations to to see the return on investment for, you know, building automations with me. So I want to build this interactive ROI calculator for business owners who are considering AI automation in their business. The inputs of this calculator should be their hourly rate, hours per week spent on manual or repetitive tasks, and number of weeks they work per year. The outputs should be the annual cost of those manual tasks, estimated time saved, estimated annual savings and a simple ROI metric. Something that makes it a no-brainer to invest with me. You know, I'm building out this calculator that people will be able to use. So, I can do that. And I can even say like in an artifact up top here. Uh, just so it knows that it needs to create an artifact. Once I have that, I can send it off. And honestly, for these more capable tasks, what I want to do is use Opus 4.6 since it's better at coding and better at building these things. So, when I send this off, what it's going to do now is use code from our natural language in order to build something for us. Absolutely insane. Now, there was no magic thing happening off camera. This is a one shot prompt, meaning I typed in a prompt and it created it in one response for a calculator. So now we have a mini app that is dynamic that I can use and it shows annual cost of manual work. So, this is an ROI calculator for a business owner. Like, what's their hourly rate on a certain task? Maybe it's like bookkeeping, $30 an hour. Maybe we're automating their entire bookkeeping process. Manual hours per week. Well, that's a 40-hour a week job. Working hours per year, 50 weeks per year. But this is a literal calculator now that we built with one prompt. I mean, you saw the prompt, it took 5 minutes to build it and now what I can do in the upper right hand corner is I can download this or I can publish the artifact and I can publish and copy link. Now, I can copy this link. I can paste it in and hit enter. And now this is a public thing that I can use as an asset. I can even go full screen, make this look a little bit nicer. But this is great for building out MVPs, mini animations, visual ways to see things. And it really just with Claude, it's quite the experience building out these artifacts. And so, if you're not using this yet, I highly recommend you get in here and start building out these mini apps, mini projects that are going to help you be more productive. All right, now everything I've shown you this far, the prompting, the search, the vision, the artifacts. All of that works in just a blank conversation with zero setup. That's just native Claude features and it's already super powerful. But what I'm about to show you next is where Claude goes from a good tool to something that actually works for you specifically. Now, Claude has a place where you can give it permanent instructions. These are rules that it follows every single time you talk to it or start a new conversation. This feature is called custom instructions. It allows you to customize the outputs of Claude. So let me just go in, set a quick custom instruction right now and show you how it works before I actually show you how I use it personally. Now, I told you, custom instructions are super, super powerful if you use them right. First, I'm just going to show you where they're at and show you a quick example so you can kind of in your mind understand and begin to think about different ways that you could use this. This is one of the most powerful features in Claude in any model because it allows you to transform the model into something that nobody else has, a customized personal assistant. So, in order to get to that, in order to get to the place where you can provide custom instructions, what you need to do is in the bottom left hand corner, hit your profile. And then go to your settings. And when you're in general, you can do a couple of things. You can select this thing, what best describes your work. And then right here in this box, these are personal preferences Claude should consider in its responses. So anything you put here, it's going to take into account for every single new conversation that you start. So this is super powerful. Let me just type something funny out so you can see the power of this. So, I told Claude, when I say pirate mode, you are to type and answer like a pirate. And the last sentence of whatever you type should always be written backwards in reverse word order in this pirate mode, even if it hurts readability. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit save changes. I'm going to wait for it to save. So now my account preferences have been updated. So now Claude's going to take this into account whenever I send off a message and when I say pirate mode, it's going to sound like a pirate.
[23:43]Okay, I'm just going to say, hey there, how are you? And it should just talk to me like normal. Like, hey, okay, I'm doing well. How are you? What can I help you with today? Uh, I'm going to say pirate mode. I am looking for something to eat. I'll send that off. And then as you can see, it goes into pirate mode here. So it says, ahoy there, matey. Lookin' fer somethin' to eat, ye say? Well, blow me down, I got some fine suggestions fer ye. Ye could be mendin' yer belly with some hearty provisions. Okay, so it followed those instructions because I said pirate mode. How about the last sentence? As you can see, it says, Adventure for sale set and to grub some grab should ye. So if you read that backwards, ye should grab some grub and set sale for adventure or for adventure. So this is a goofy example, but I'm just trying to show you what custom instructions do to your Claude account. You can make it sound pretty insane. And it's really good at following these little instructions. Now imagine this, instead of something silly, like writing backwards. Imagine if you told Claude your name, your role, your business, your communication style and how you want every response formatted. This is where it gets real. So instead of re-explaining yourself every time to Claude, which is good to do, you know, I'm a consultant. I work with XY or Z clients. I prefer direct communication. I like my responses short. Instead of doing all that, you just tell Claude once and it remembers forever. Now, in order to make it really useful, I've got a template in the description that I want you to use and this is going to take it much further than the average Claude user. We're going to be filling out a custom profile. And this is going to be where you build your AI operating system. This is where you train a model on all of your preferences, your name, what you like, what you don't like, and everything in between. And so every time you come to Claude to use it, it understands already what you want, so you don't have to spend your time explaining yourself constantly. So everything that I've showed you up until this point has been pretty beginner-based stuff, but now is when we're going to cross the line. We're not just typing prompts. What you need to do is use all that stuff that I told you consistently for a week or two, maybe even before you get into this. But I recommend everyone starts thinking in this manner. How can we make AI work for us as a partner, a thinking partner, rather than us trying to, uh, just force our way and just constantly type prompts. Develop your AI operating system and you can do so using that template that I left you for free down in the description. And it's very simple. You have five sections and this just takes a little bit of time to fill out, so I mean, you don't have to complete this now, but fill it out over the week as you're thinking about how you want AI to think with you. How would you want another employee to think with you? So, the five sections are identity, who you are and what your business does or maybe not even your business, but what do you do in your life? A lot of us aren't even business owners, right? Might be a business owner, but you also might be working for a company or wanting to escape the 9 to 5s. So don't necessarily think of everything in terms of business, but if you do own a business, that's great. But who are you? What is your work, right? Communication style. How do you want AI to talk to you? Do you like more direct stuff? Do you like when it has fun and have more emojis? There's a lot of people in my, uh, community of builders where they have their AI model send them like hundreds of emojis and they just like love having to be like all fun and like a best friend like you're texting the girls in the group chat or something. Number three, goals and priorities. What are you focused on right now? Not like what were you focused on, but what are you focused on right at this very moment because AI when it has a goal, when it knows what you want, it can help work towards that goal. Number four is super important. Daily schedule and non-negotiables, your time constraints and structure. When do you like doing certain tasks so if AI is planning something for us for you, it knows not to plan it in that certain time slot. Number five, avoidances. What you never want to see in responses. Guard rails. Be strict and give AI what you don't want just as much as what you do want from it. And so I've left this in a system prompt template and I've given you bracketed, uh, sections where you put your own details. So delete any sections that don't apply to you and then you can paste it in that custom instructions box that I was showing you. So for example, it says, my name is your name. I run business name description. Um, or I work for whatever company as what role. My clients are or my employees are or my team is, my role is. So, as you can see, it goes super in depth and drills down into who you are in order to create this operating system for you and your model to operate in, uh, for the rest of this video. And really for the rest of your life. This is like an updated file where AI understands you and it can communicate with you. And this is really how you start getting the most benefits out of AI. So, this is in the description. Uh, I'll show you mine real quick. I'm not going to fill this out live, but if you want to fill this out live, just hit this copy button right here. Go to like a new Google document. I'm really sorry for the light mode. And then just paste it in and then you can come in here and you can start editing things out like, my name is Drake Suraj. I run and then my business and I could go on. I already went on and I did all of that. So here's what mine looks like. This is what mine looks like. It's huge. I've got all sorts of fun stuff in here. My name is Drake. I run two businesses, an AI education company, a YouTube channel with 300K subscribers, a school community called AI Foundations with 550+ members at 49 a month, and a flagship course and an AI automation software company called Lerty. My clients are small business owners doing 15K to 100K a month who want AI systems implemented into their operations.
[31:07]I'm giving Claude all this information so it knows how to gear its responses towards me. I'm giving it my role, an AI systems builder who uses AI practically. I'm not a developer but I do build real AI systems, I run real businesses using those systems and I teach in a way that respects my audience's intelligence. I'm not a hype creator or a productivity guru. Giving it communication style. My goals like growing my YouTube channel to drive inbound leads for my AI business audit offer.
[31:59]So this is how you want to construct a system prompt except for yourself and this is what's going to put you in the top 1% of people because nobody's doing this. Nobody's putting in this work and you can do this on Claude and have it really be a good tool for you. So I'm going to save changes and now anytime I talk to Claude in every conversation, it's going to be geared towards my personalized instructions. So if I hit new chat now, my Google Calendar is connected. So I can say, what events do I have coming up next week? And then I can send that off and it will actually use my Google Calendar tool since we just connected it and it takes about 5 seconds to connect. And so it's searching available tools. Now it's listing my calendar events and it says three things on the calendar next week. Monday content strategy team call on Discord. Wednesday, I've got a Q&A with my community from 10:30 to 11:30. Friday, I've got another content strategy call. Pretty light week. Aligns well with your schedule. Monday content day. Wednesday business dev. And then it's using my personalized instructions. So you can use connectors to connect to any outside tool like Google Drive, custom MCP servers like my Lerty access. And the other cool thing about connectors is you can have it pull from multiple connectors and synthesize everything in one response. Think about your calendar, email, and your personalized context all in one. That right there is why connectors matter. Claude isn't just writing text anymore. It's actually pulling from your actual tools, combining the information and giving you something you can act on immediately. All right, that was kind of a lot, so let me just pull everything together so you can kind of see from an overhead view how all of these features work cohesively as one system rather than just a bunch of individual tricks that you can use. So here's the stack from bottom to top. At your base, you have your AI operating system, which is your custom instructions. You know, the things like who you are, how you work, your goals, your schedule, your communication style, anything you want to put in there, your preferences. That's the foundation and Claude will read it every single time. On top of that, you have projects. Each one is a dedicated workspace for a specific part of your life or business. Each one has its own uploaded knowledge and its own custom instructions layered on top of your personal ones. Now, inside those projects, you have skills and skills are native to your entire Claude workspace, but I like thinking of them as project or department based. These are the repeatable processes that Claude runs the same way every single time, things like content briefs, client emails, weekly reports, whatever you've trained it to do. And finally you have connectors and this ties it to your real tools that you actually use on a day-to-day basis. Your calendar, your email, Google Drive, Slack. All of a sudden Claude isn't just thinking, it's actually doing. So that's the full stack. Personal instructions, project context, trained skills, connected tools. Most people are typing questions into a blank chat bar. That's level one stuff. Now you know what level five looks like. And I'll be honest, this did not just happen to me overnight. I've been using AI for 3 years and I started exactly where you are right now. Like one conversation, one decent prompt and then I would template the prompt so I could reuse it. And then I realized you could actually save those as instructions and I started building projects, then skills. It stacks over time. You don't need to do everything today. You just need to start. Now, if you liked this video, I know that you're going to like, uh, this one right here. So, make sure you go ahead and give that a watch and I'll see you there.
