I Tried 100+ Claude Skills. These 7 Actually Run My Business
A video by Rick Mulready sharing the 7 Claude Code skills that survived his testing and now power his business.
Transcript
Over the past several months, I’ve tested a lot of Claude skills, skills other people have built, skills I found online, skills I built for myself from scratch. And most of them were cool for about a day, but then I never used them again. But seven of them have stuck, and they didn’t just stick, they completely took over parts of my business that I used to do manually every single day. Things that used to take me hours every week, I can now handle with a single command inside of Claude. And I’m not exaggerating when I say I cannot imagine going back. So, in today’s video, I’m going to show you all seven of the skills that I cannot live without. For each one, I’ll show you what it does, how I’m actually using it, and ideas for how you can customize it for your business. Now, before we get into the list, if skills are new to you, super quick recap for you. Now, a skill is just a folder with instructions. That’s it. Within the folder is a file that I like to call the playbook. This is sort of the step-by-step instructions for how to do whatever the task is that you want it to do. The folder might also include maybe some scripts or some reference files that Claude loads on demand whenever it’s relevant to what you’re doing. And skills are best for things that you do over and over and over again. If you find yourself repeating the same kind of task day in and day out or week in and week out, that is a skill waiting to be built. And here’s why I think this matters way more than people realize right now. Everything in AI changes every week, right? New tool, new model, new update. But the pattern underneath all of it has been the same since the 1990s and beyond. You write instructions, you put them into a folder, and a computer can read them. That’s what skills are. That’s what agents are built on top of. Tools will come and go. Models will keep improving and changing, but folders with instructions, that’s not changing. And in my opinion, learning how to create and use skills is the baseline, no pun intended, skill that you need to have right now and going forward. Everything else just builds on top of it. Okay, now let’s get into the first skill that I cannot live without. And the first skill is super meta here, right? It’s Anthropic’s skill creator skill. You describe what you want the skill to do in plain language, it asks you the right questions, and then it builds the skill for you, super super easy to do. Now, you can access the skill creator whether you’re in Cogram or in Cloud Code. I’m going to take you through my examples today using Cloud Code, but if you’re in Cogram, you can just type in {forward slash} skill and you’ll see it right here, and then it’ll walk you through the same process. If you use Cloud Code inside of the desktop app, you can do that as well. I like to access Cloud Code inside of VS Code, and that’s where I’m going to be showing you these examples here today. So again, I’ve already given Cloud Code access to the skill creator, so I’m going to go ahead and type in {forward slash} skill, and you’ll see it come up right here, and it’s just going to ask me a few different questions about what kind of skill that I want to create. So you can see here, I’ll check the skill creator skill, which has already been loaded above. What would you like to do with skills today? You can create a new skill, improve an existing skill, which we’ll talk about in a second, optimize a skill’s description. So I’m going to go ahead and choose number one, create a new skill, and I’m just going to describe the skill that I want it to create in just in plain language here. I want to create a new skill that checks my Google Calendar daily and preps me for that day’s meetings. So that’s a super basic example here, but it the point here is I just want to show you what this is doing here. So again, now it’s going to interview me a little bit to ask some clarifying questions. When should this trigger? And then it’ll just continue to ask me a few different questions that it needs clarification to, and when it feels like it has sufficient information, it’ll go through and create the entire skill, all the different files that I need, and even go into research that might be necessary to include in the skill as say like a reference file, for example. This is what it looks like in terms of the results it’ll give you. It gives you the skill.md file, which is again what I like to call the playbook or the instructions of what this skill actually does, and then it includes some additional reference files, and it’s all created. I didn’t have to physically go create any of these files. I’m just talking to Claude and having it created for me. And again, I alluded to it earlier, but this is something that I really like about the skill creator skill. If you already have a skill that’s not quite working the way that you want it to, you can point you can see right here where it says improve an existing skill. So, you can select that and the skill creator will look at your existing skill and it will optimize it based on best practices. So, if you take one thing away from this video and nothing else, it’s that you don’t need to be technical to build cloud skills at all. This is your starting point. Okay, the second skill that I use every single day solves the problem of every morning I used to do the exact same thing. Open my Google Calendar, check my email, check Slack, look at my task list, try to figure out what actually matters today and that whole process would take me 20 25 minutes before I even started doing any real work. That was every single day. And now, I just type in {forward slash} today. So, I’m going to do {forward slash} today. What’s going to come back to me is my entire day organized. And here’s the result in a matter of seconds. I have a pretty light day in terms of tasks to do. can see here, no tasks due today, nothing is overdue, yay me. But then it says calendar, busy afternoon and it outlines what I have on the calendar today and then needs your attention. So, it’s filtered through my unread emails in my Gmail inbox and is telling me what needs my attention right now. And the thing I love about this skill is that it gets smarter over time because the skill knows where to look. I’ve given it Slack, Gmail, etc. It knows which calendars to pull from, which Slack channels matter, which team members’ emails to prioritize and all that’s baked into the skill. I set it up once and now it just runs. It not only is it showing me all this inside of Cloud Code, this is also because I what I’ve written into the skill, it pulls into my Obsidian. So, this is my daily plan. So, if you go through it, this is my calendar, shows me my entire day, shows me what needs my response in terms of Slack, email, what’s due today, what’s what’s overdue, anything blocked this week coming up, etc. And again, this is a perfect example of how I want you to think about using skills that I’m showing you here today. Think about what your version of a daily plan might look like. Maybe you don’t use Slack, but you have a CRM that you check every morning or a dashboard or what have you. Maybe you want it to pull it from your project management tool like Asana or monday.com. The structure of the skill works for any business. You just swap in your sources and your unique personalization to it. Third skill is called watch video and full props to Brad at Brad Automates. This is not my skill, this is his skill, but I use it all the time. And the problem it solves is sometimes I need Claude to understand what is in a video. Maybe it’s a competitor, quote unquote, video I want to analyze or or there’s something I watched that I want to reference later. And normally Claude can’t do that. You have to go find the transcript, copy it, paste it in, it’s a whole thing, right? Well, this skill gives Claude the ability to watch any video. You just give it a link. It can be a Loom video, it can be a YouTube video, which I’ll show you here in just a second. You just give it the link, it pulls the transcript, it extracts the key frames from the video. And now, without leaving Claude, Claude can answer questions about what’s in that video. You can ask it all kinds of questions. It’s really, really cool. So, check this out. So, again, I’ll type in {forward slash} watch and then it’s going to ask me for a YouTube video link. So, I’ll paste in the YouTube video and it’ll take a couple minutes for it to do it. And here is the complete summary of that video broken down by topic that it talked about. And so, now I can just talk to the video and get my questions answered. So, as you can see here, really powerful skill. If you do any kind of content analysis or you have to do a lot of calls and get the recordings in your business, this is a no-brainer. All right, for skill number four, this is my AI digest. I subscribe to a ton of daily AI newsletters and I was spending way too much time every morning scrolling through my inbox and trying to figure out what’s actually important and what’s noise. Most of it’s noise. So, because this is something that’s repetitive I was doing every single day and taking time, I built a skill that does it for me. And so, for this skill that I’ve created, I’m going to type in {forward slash} AI and then click on AI digest and it’ll get to work. And by the way, all the skills that I’m sharing with you here today, I’ll leave a link in the description below. You can go opt-in and download them. Okay, and it’s telling me that it’s sent the Slack message over to the appropriate Slack channel. I’ll show you that in just a second. And it also gives me a summary right here of what it sent. So, GP GPD 5.5 instant, Anthropic’s 10 finance agents, etc. Let me go over and show you what that looks like in Slack. Here it is here. So, as of May 6th, platform updates. Gives me the headline and a quick description of what’s going on. Gives me a list of new tools, productivity, key insight. I don’t really need the new tools and productivity, so I can just update the skill. All I have to do is go back over here and just say, “I want to update the AI digest skill to remove it pulling new tools and productivity.” This is literally all I have to do to update the skill. So, it’s reading the current skill file first and then it’ll go through and make the update. In terms of customization, you can customize this however you want. If you’re in real estate, for example, you subscribe to market reports or you’re in e-com and you follow industry news. Same structure. Just point it at the right email folder or whatever you have set up in your Gmail or Outlook or what have you and tell it what to look for and the type of synopsis that you want it to send to you and it’ll build the skill. Okay, for skill number five, this is a big one and I use this weekly here in my business. This is my newsletter skill. Every week, I need to write a newsletter. It’s called the AI Playbook. I send it out Sunday morning and every week, the hardest part isn’t the writing, it’s figuring out what to write about. So, I created a system. I created a skill to help you with that. I do these weekly Q&A calls with my AI Playbook community, for example, and there’s always great stuff on every one of these calls. But, going back through a 90-minute recording transcript or what have you, trying to find the best topic, that’s hours that I don’t have. I built a skill for this. I type in /newsletter and it goes and finds my latest Q&A call recording, pulls the full transcript, reads the whole thing, and identifies the patterns. So, I can just type in /newsletter and again, it’s going to ask me if I already have an idea for a newsletter or do I want it to look at a database of transcripts. So, as you can see here in number one, do I have a topic in mind or should I pull from the most recent Q&A call transcript in Superbase to surface option. Now, I’m changing that right now, by the way, just to keep all of the transcripts in Notion. So, for this example, I’m just going to paste in the transcript to show you how this works. So, I’ve gone ahead and grabbed the transcript for this purpose here and I’m going to paste it in here, but I’m going to tell it, “I want you to use the transcript of this Q&A call, which was last week’s Q&A call, to come up with ideas.” I’m going to put the transcript between XML tags. And so, it’s going to analyze, again, this is a 90-minute call. It’s going to analyze the transcript as it tells you as it’s saying that it’s doing right now and it’s going to come up with topic ideas. And so, here are the three topics that it came up with, broken down by what the topic is, and then a description of why it thinks that’s a strong candidate, and then it gives me its recommendation and an explanation as to why it’s recommending that number topic. So, I just tell it, I can just literally type in number one and then it will go and write that section of the newsletter based on this specific topic. So, in terms of customizing it, if you run any kind of calls, coaching calls, onboarding calls, support calls, you can adapt this same exact structure. The skill doesn’t care what the call is about. It’s looking for patterns and stories because I’ve told it to do that in the skill. So, if you do weekly client calls, for example, and you also write content, this is a direct pipeline from your calls to your content ideas. Okay, for skill number six, this is my article optimizer skill. It solves the problem of when you’re making all of this content, YouTube videos, if you’ve got a podcast, for example, like I used to, Q&A calls, like we just talked about, and all that content just kind of sits there. It lives on YouTube or in a recording, but it’s not in a format that AI search engines like ChatGPT or Perplexity or Google’s AI overview necessarily can actually pull from and site. So, I built a skill that solves this problem. It takes any piece of content, a YouTube transcript for example, a blog post, a podcast transcript, whatever, and converts it into a long-form article that is specifically structured to get cited by AI search engines, optimized for AEO and GEO. It’s essentially structuring your article so that when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question that your content answers, yours is the one that gets referenced. I did a whole video about this where this is the new SEO. So, for example, all I have to do again is type in {forward slash} article. It’s going to ask me for a YouTube URL, a transcript, whatever it might be, a blog post. So, I’m going to paste in a YouTube URL of one of my videos. And then it’ll get to work. So, the first thing in the skill I’ve asked it to do is use the watch skill that I showed you earlier in the video. And so, as you can see, it’s drafting the full article right now. I actually have it save when it’s done as I’ve instructed in the skill to put it into my Obsidian for reviewing and editing and updating. And here’s an example of what that finished article looks like. So, it gives me the property front matter at the top of the article, and then this is the name of the video, and then all of this is GEO optimized. So, there’s a quick answer, key takeaways, and then this is the entire article. Again, I want to go through and edit and update it. So, again, if you’re creating content in any format right now, you’re probably sitting on a ton of material that can be repurposed into articles that AI search engines can actually find and site. This skill automates that entire conversion process, and it writes in your voice, not generic AI voice slop. And for skill number seven that I cannot live without, I use this all the time, this is my decision skill. As a business owner, I’m constantly making decisions, and you likely are, too. So, I built a skill where I just type in the command {forward slash} decide and ask my question, then it runs an interview to me. It asks me one question at a time. What are your options? Why now? Who’s affected? What’s your Where’s your gut leaning? And it takes everything I said and runs it through multiple passes. So, multiple agents that I’ve built into the skill. One pass structures the options with explicit assumptions and pros and cons. Another pass is a contrarian check. And this one’s really sharp. It looks for holes in my logic, like hidden assumptions, second-order effects that I’m not seeing, places where I might be picking the emotionally easier option instead of the strategically right one. And then a final pass weighs everything and gives me a recommendation, including whether this is a reversible or irreversible decision. So, let’s go ahead and run it and see what this looks like. I’m going to go into Claude code and type in decide. And so, it says, “I’ll start the decision interview. What’s the decision you’re trying to make? One sentence.” I’m trying to make a decision on whether I should hire a growth coach or not. And I’m not really doing that, but for this purpose here, let’s see what it comes back with. What are the options on the table? If you’re considering not hiring one, what does the path look like instead? So, as you can see here, it’s going through a systematic set of questions to get me to a way to decide on whether this is the right path or not. Now, it starts to dispatch three sub agents to do the analysis like we talked about. Okay, here it is. After about 5 minutes, I have my verdict. And according to what Claude is telling me based on the skill, it says, “Don’t hire a coach right now. Revisit in 90 days.” Talks about the reversibility, the criteria. And then with this sentence right here, I’m really impressed with what it says because it knows my business so well. The sharpest point from the contrarian, “Your revenue gap looks like a focus gap, not a strategy gap. You have an execution backlog, blah blah blah.” So, it’s giving me this full report and also giving me an immediate next action. Now, as you can see here, it created the decision hire growth coach and then the date and it put it into a markdown file because I asked to do that in my skill. And I can open this up over in Obsidian. And then this whole thing gets saved as a what I like to call a decision memo that I can go back to right here inside of Obsidian. And so, when I give you the skill, what I want you to do, and what I love about this skill, it’s completely customizable. And you can customize what the contrarian pass focuses on. You can add a different additional mental models into it if you want. Point is, it’s structured thinking on demand and you can customize it to fit you and your business and your thinking. So, those are my seven cloud skills I use all the time. And I want to come back to something I said at the beginning of this video because I think it’s the most important takeaway. These are just folders with instructions. That’s all they are. And I know that that sounds simple, but that’s actually the point because everything in AI is going to keep changing. The tools will change, the models will change, but this concept that we’ve been talking about here today, writing instructions that an AI can follow and reuse, that’s been the pattern since the ’90s and before and it’s not going anywhere. That’s not going to be changing. So, if you’re feeling overwhelmed by how fast everything’s moving in AI, my honest advice is stop chasing every new update and start building skills. It’s never been easier as I’ve shown you here today. It’s never been easier to build skills. And again, as I’ve been saying throughout the video here, if you want these skills, you want to customize them for you and your business, I’ll link to them in the description below. Thanks so much for watching. As always, I appreciate you and I’ll see you in the next video.