42:07Greg Isenberg · Interview
I got a private lesson on Claude Cowork & Claude Code
Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, walks through a live Cowork demo and unpacks the 13-tip viral setup thread that got 99K bookmarks.
January 23rdThe argument in one line.
AI tools become procrastination machines when founders spend days optimizing systems nobody knows exist yet — the real job of a CEO is promotion, and Claude just accelerates each phase of that loop.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You have shipped a product and the silence after launch surprised you.
- You are a solo founder or small-team CEO and most of your time goes to building, not selling.
- You want a repeatable framework for taking an audience from cold to purchase.
- You are curious how an experienced marketer structures Claude projects for day-to-day business use.
SKIP IF…
- You already run a tight sales and marketing engine and just want specific Claude Code prompting tactics.
- You are looking for a technical deep-dive into Claude Code architecture.
The full version, fast.
The founders everyone knows became known because they spend at least half their time promoting, not building. Jonathan frames this as a four-step loop: generate traffic, hold people in your world, run a selling event, and loop non-buyers back. He then demonstrates how Claude accelerates every phase of that loop, including a live walkthrough where a 15-minute voice memo becomes an ADHD-friendly podcast outline, a vibe-coded blueprint web app, and a live Vercel deployment in about an hour. The broader advice: scale output and campaigns with AI rather than cutting team size, and stop prepping before you have anything to sell.
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Create a free account →Who's talking.
00:00hostGreg Isenberg
00:57guestJonathan Courtney
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 04:13
01 · Intro and framing the problem
Greg sets up the episode premise: founder builds with AI, launches, gets crickets. Jonathan introduced as the person who will explain how to fix that.
04:13 – 09:23
02 · The Founder Real Job Is Promotion
Jonathan argues that the CEO job is promotion, not building. Names Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Peter Levels as examples of founders who are famous because they promote constantly. Introduces the restaurant analogy.
09:23 – 19:38
03 · The Promoter Blueprint
Screen share of the vibe-coded Blueprint app. Walks through four steps: traffic (organic or paid), holding pattern (newsletter, podcast, social), selling event (webinar, email campaign, retargeting, direct outreach), conversion with a loop back.
19:38 – 22:52
04 · AI Use Cases Layered On Top
Jonathan reveals the AI toggle on his Blueprint app (with animated sticker cutouts of his face and an ice cream cursor) and explains why he hid AI tools until after establishing the framework foundations.
22:52 – 28:01
05 · Inside Claude: Jonathan's Podcast Workflow
Walks through how he prepared for this episode: 15-minute voice memo to Claude project, ADHD-friendly outline, iterative project instruction updates after each chat, WhisperFlow for dictation, research file on Greg.
28:01 – 30:14
06 · Moving from Claude to Claude Code
Shows the CLAUDE.md handoff: had Claude generate a markdown context file, exported the HTML blueprint, dropped both into a Claude Code folder, and had Claude Code continue building. Shipped to Vercel in about one hour total.
30:14 – 35:15
07 · Building the $450K Webinar Campaign
Opens the AJ&Smart Marketing Expert Brain Claude project. 17,766-line email swipe file, custom instructions, books loaded in. Live demo: prompts for lead magnet ideas tied to this episode, gets three strong concepts in seconds.
35:15 – 43:40
08 · Scale Up, Abundance Over Efficiency
Jonathan and Greg agree that using AI to replace headcount is the wrong play. The right play is five campaigns instead of one, more Facebook ad variations, more experiments. Warns against over-preparation and building tools instead of closing clients.
43:40 – 44:45
09 · Final Advice and Sign-off
Jonathan closes: accept that your job as CEO is promotion. Do not be embarrassed by it. If you hate promoting, find a co-founder who loves it. Just cut.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Founders whose names you know are famous because they show up everywhere promoting, not because they built the best product.
- If your revenue stayed flat after five days of AI automation work, those were procrastination days.
- The CEO job description is: get users, make money, make deals. Building is secondary.
- Every non-converting prospect should loop back into the holding pattern, not get discarded.
- A 17,766-line email swipe file loaded into a Claude project gives you a trained marketing co-pilot for every campaign.
- Moving from Claude to Claude Code is just a CLAUDE.md handoff, not a context restart.
- You can retarget your own email list on Facebook as a lookalike audience without paying for cold traffic.
- Using AI for efficiency gains right now is the wrong play. Use it to run five campaigns where you ran one.
- The context window limit in Claude Code is not a bug; it forces the good habit of chunked, focused work.
- A webinar is a selling event, not a pitch. The learning event itself moves people from warm to buying.
- Off-the-shelf tools still beat custom builds in many workflows. Ask Claude before you spend three days building something.
- CEOs who treat promotion as optional need a co-founder who treats it as essential, or the company will not grow.
Build nothing until you know how you will sell it.
WHAT TO LEARN
Every AI tool you use to build is also available to your competitors, which means promotion is now the only durable advantage a solo founder has.
01The Founder Real Job Is Promotion
- Founders who become known are not the ones who built the best product; they are the ones who showed up everywhere promoting it.
- Treating AI tool mastery as the job itself is a form of procrastination that feels productive because it produces real things nobody uses.
02The Promoter Blueprint
- The Promoter Blueprint is a loop: traffic, holding pattern, selling event, conversion, and then non-buyers return to the holding pattern for the next campaign.
- A holding pattern (newsletter, podcast, social) is where you build trust over time, not where you close sales. Mixing those two kills both.
- A selling event must be deliberately activated. Posting into your holding pattern is not a selling event, even if someone buys.
- You can retarget your own email list as a lookalike audience on paid platforms without buying cold traffic.
03Inside Claude: Jonathan's Podcast Workflow
- Moving from Claude to Claude Code is just a context export. Generate a CLAUDE.md file in the chat, drop it in a folder, and Claude Code inherits the full project history.
- Loading a swipe file of competitor emails into a Claude project creates a trained marketing assistant that can generate campaign-specific lead magnet ideas in seconds.
04Scale Up, Abundance Over Efficiency
- The current AI moment rewards output volume over optimization. Running five campaigns with a small team beats running one perfect campaign alone.
- Over-preparation is the clearest early signal that a founder will move slowly. The tools are forgiving enough to learn on a live, real project.
- Ask Claude whether an off-the-shelf solution exists before spending days building a custom tool. The answer is often yes, and it is available immediately.
Terms worth knowing.
- Holding Pattern
- The ongoing content or channel (newsletter, podcast, social feed) where you keep warm leads engaged between selling events. The goal is attention and trust, not conversion.
- Selling Event
- A deliberate, time-bounded campaign designed to move people from the holding pattern to a purchase, free trial, or booked call. Examples include webinars, email sequences, and retargeting campaigns.
- Promoter Blueprint
- Jonathan Courtney's four-step revenue framework: traffic to holding pattern to selling event to conversion, with a loop back for non-converters.
- Vibe marketing
- Using AI tools to execute marketing campaigns the way vibe coding uses AI to build software, focusing on speed of iteration over perfection of craft.
- CLAUDE.md
- A project context file used in Claude Code that carries the full background, instructions, and goals of a project so each new session starts with full context rather than from scratch.
- WhisperFlow
- A voice dictation tool that lets users talk their prompts to Claude instead of typing, enabling faster, more natural iteration on complex marketing and strategy tasks.
Things they pointed at.
25:37toolWhisperFlow
Lines you could clip.
07:37
“Imagine you start a restaurant. You spend an entire year augmenting every machine so it all works automated, makes the perfect food. But you literally never told even one person this place exists.”
05:05
“These AI tools, if used wrong, you can just lose loads of time. These can be procrastination machines that you are basically building for yourself.”
39:07
“I do not think being efficient right now is the play. I think the play is scaling up like crazy.”
19:25
“When I see that an extra 5,000 people joined the newsletter, I say that means another 200 will turn up to the next webinar, and that means another 12 people will buy something. And so the machinery starts to make sense.”
06:53
“Your job description is not I am gonna use AI tools and get really good at them. If you are not able to promote those things, no one is gonna use them.”
Where the conversation goes.
00:00 – 09:23denseThe Builder Trap
09:23 – 19:38densePromoter Blueprint Framework
19:38 – 22:52steadyAI integration with the framework
22:52 – 28:01denseClaude project setup and podcast prep workflow
28:01 – 30:14denseClaude to Claude Code handoff
30:14 – 35:15denseMarketing brain project and live lead magnet demo
35:15 – 43:40steadyAbundance vs efficiency mindset
43:40 – 44:45sparseClosing advice
Word for word.
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metaphoranalogystory
00:00So you vibe coded a project, but then when you launch it, it's just crickets. No customers, no revenue, no passive income, nothing.
00:08Well, today's episode, we bring in Jonathan, a k a mister Jice Cream Courtney, who teaches us, hey.
00:15How do you actually use AI to generate revenue to your Vibe Coded project? He starts the episode off with the foundations. He talks about what you need to know, non AI related, in order to build a business.
00:28After that, we get to the fun share your screen, Claude code, Claude, little tips and tricks and what you can do. But I encourage you to listen to the whole episode because I think people who listen to the whole episode are gonna be a dangerous weapon, who understand not just how to vibe code, but how to get customers to your vibe coded project.
00:57We are back on the Startup Ideas podcast with Jonathan J ice cream, J ice cream. Hey. They did the ice Courtney,
01:05welcome back. Jai mister Jai scream, by the end of this episode, what are people gonna learn? What people are gonna learn is how to actually make money using the AI tools and get users while also using the AI tools as sort of like a support.
01:20And I think it the reason I wanna talk about this is because there's a huge conversation around how to technically use all these tools, all of the cool use cases. I mean, I sit down and just watch your tutorials and then just go and do that stuff, but I think what's missing from the conversation a little bit is the practical element of, well, what's the point in having a business that's not making any money?
01:44So I wanna go into that side of it. I wanna show you kinda what the job of a CEO is.
01:50I wanna, like, remind maybe the some parts of the audience what the job of a CEO is, And I also wanna show, like, my blueprint for
01:58getting customers to buy things. Okay. So, basically, there's a lot of people who have vibe coded a thing, and they put it out there and it's crickets.
02:10And what you're going to show people is how to go from crickets to dollar signs.
02:17I wish there was something that would rhyme with crickets. Crickets to money rickets.
02:26Yes. Exactly. Crickets to dollar signs.
02:29I mean, I I would say that I use these tools, like, 20% of how much you and your audience use these tools because most of my time is focused as a CEO on how do I actually make money, how do I get users, how do I increase revenue for myself and clients. And so I just wanna bring that cold money angle to all of this, and, you know, most of the hardcore vibe coding stuff leave to you guys to make the cool products.
02:56Yeah. And for the people listening, watching this man named Jay Ice Cream, and you're like, why should I trust this guy with like an hour of my time? You know, this guy looks like a German, more a Berlin version of Greg Eisenberg.
03:11Like, who is he? Is he even real? The answer is you've made millions of dollars using a lot of these techniques.
03:18Right? Yes. I run a couple of businesses.
03:22Some of them are, like, multi 7 figures. Some of them are 7 figures.
03:27For example, facilitator.com is an example of one of my businesses that's out there, that's public, that people know about. I, like, build businesses in, like, the enterprise space, in the, like, b to c space, and also help other people, like, you know, sell their stuff as well.
03:45So I do spend a lot of my time trying to figure out how to make money and how to sell stuff and how to turn something that's not selling into something that's selling. That's what I have been doing for the last fourteen years.
03:59Oh, yeah. My main business is called AJ and Smart. If you wanna, like, find the main
04:04thing of it. Well, thank you for your life story. Let's get into it.
04:10Oh, shit. Okay. Look.
04:12I before we get into this, I think that what's really important is to understand, I really want people to understand if you're running a business, if you consider yourself the CEO of the business, there's a massive misconception out there.
04:25I'm I'm on x all the time. I see this misconception building up that a like, building stuff, being able to build stuff, and being able to build, like, super complex systems using AI tools is basically your job, and then somehow you make money.
04:40And I have a lot of CEO friends. They're really excited about all the AI stuff. And what I always ask is, like, so cool.
04:47You spent, like, four or five days doing all this stuff. You know, you've built all these cool systems. You've you've built all these automations.
04:54And are you making more money now, or are you making any money now? And I think these AI tools, if used wrong, and if you don't really understand your role as a CEO or as an entrepreneur, you can just lose loads of time, like, procrastinating.
05:10These can be that you're basically building for yourself. And so for me, I wanna point people in the direction of the most successful people in the AI space. What do you know the name of the CEO of Antropic?
05:25Yeah.
05:26Do you know how he looks? Do you know how he looks? Okay.
05:29He's bald. Right? He's actually not.
05:32He's not.
05:33You're just That was a good guess. Right? CEO bald.
05:37Yeah. CEO bald. Okay.
05:38You know who the CEO of OpenAI is? Yeah. Sam Altman.
05:42Good head of hair. Cool. Do you know the levels.iox account?
05:47What's that guy's name? Peter Levels. Okay.
05:51All of these people are, like, big in the AI space. Right? They're all entrepreneurs.
05:55They're all CEOs. And something that they all have in common that no one ever points out is that these guys, at least 50% of their job is promoting their businesses.
06:06And so for me, what I wanna get in your head as a CEO or as an entrepreneur, if you're the person who's the founder, CEO, entrepreneur, your job is to promote your business.
06:17Of course, you wanna build all the cool stuff. Of course, you wanna make the thing, but your actual key job and then you build around yourself and and build things that support that, your key job is getting out there and promoting your business. And so when you look at someone that levels when you look at Peter Levels, when you look at his ex account today, the very first thing he has posted there is essentially a long form promotion for his photo AI tool.
06:42But people on x and people who are using all these AI tools, they're like, marketing sucks. Like, all you have to do is build it, and then people will come to it.
06:51You just have to build great shit, and then people will that's not actually what's happening in real life. It's completely counterintuitive to the fact that you know the names of all the people who build all of your favorite tools because they're on every podcast, because they're out there all the time making themselves known.
07:08And so this is what I really wanna get across here just as, like, a preamble, is that your job as CEO is not your your job description is not, hey.
07:19I'm gonna use AI tools and get really good at them. Your job is not, hey. I'm gonna build cool, like, little products.
07:25If you are not able to promote those things, no one's gonna use them, and it becomes completely, like, a little self contained procrastination station that you're building for yourself.
07:37Like, a analogy that I use for my friends is, imagine you start a restaurant. You're like, this is gonna be the best restaurant ever. You spend an entire year augmenting every machine so it all works automated.
07:48It makes the perfect food. You know, you've got the perfect system set up. You can book everything.
07:53It's so easy. You just go online, but you'd literally never told even one person this place exists.
07:58That will die pretty quick even though you get to do your little fun procrastination thing. All that being said, I love all the AI tools. I'm gonna show you how I'm gonna use the how I use them, but I wanna show you how I actually use them in line with what my job is as a CEO, which is, actually, it's my job to get users.
08:17It's actually my job to make money. It's actually my job to make deals, while at the same time, I happen to be the person who also makes a lot of the stuff that we sell.
08:26And so if you're making a cool thing, if you're making a cool product, like, for example, Greg has ideabrowser.com, yet, Greg, how much of your time do you spend promoting all your businesses?
08:38I mean, this podcast is a huge part of your job. Right? Yeah.
08:44It is. This is something I think that has gotten a little bit twisted in the whole, like, builder space because people don't realize, oh, like, Greg and Peter put crazy effort into making sure that their content is useful and valuable so that people know about them, and therefore, people can figure out what it is that they are offering to the world.
09:08And if you were never to do a podcast and if if you were never to create any content, no one would have a clue about any of this stuff. And so for me, I just wanna get that baseline before I go into showing how I would recommend thinking about selling stuff.
09:22So let's open I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna share my screen, and I'm gonna show you a beautiful vibe coded blueprint for how I think about selling the whole or how I think about, like, selling stuff in general.
09:37So this is so I I put this together earlier just as, like, a I mean, this is how I show it just to show hold up to the screen. This is how I show it to my, like, clients, like, literally scrawled on a piece of paper. I But was like, I'm going on Greg's podcast.
09:50I'm gonna actually show this in a fancy vibe coded way. So and what I'm also gonna do is show the AI use cases for these steps as well, but I wanna I want there's no point in me doing this until people really understand the basics and understand how money is made in this, you know, selling products space.
10:11The first thing, you talk about this. You talk about this all the time, but I'm just gonna, like, really take a step back and show the key ideas. The first step is you need to figure out how to get traffic from somewhere, and the only two categories of getting traffic are organic or paid.
10:27So either you're out here like me right now going on other people's podcasts, you're running events and networking, you're doing posts on social media, free content, or you're paying for ads on Meta, TikTok, YouTube, whatever, I always recommend push that traffic not straight into the product, like, not, hey.
10:47Just buy my product. I always recommend push them into a holding pattern. So step two is the holding pattern.
10:53And the holding pattern is basically where you're just slowly warming people up, and it's like your email newsletter. It could be your podcast. So your podcast, for example, the Start Up Ideas podcast, is a great place that people get value from.
11:07You don't need to promote a lot of stuff there, but you're keeping people sort of in your space, in your world, and the attention is on you, YouTube content, posts on x that keep people engaged.
11:21This is basically the holding pattern, and that's almost like your daily content, your weekly content. The next thing, and I think I would say a lot of people on x are okay at the first two, so they know how to, you know, post and, you know, create a lot of followers, create a lot of engagement.
11:41But I almost see nobody who's good at moving people from now I have some people listening to me to that turning into money. And so that's the next step.
11:53The next step is thinking, okay. I've got all of these people. They're watching what I'm doing.
11:58They're excited about what I'm doing. How do I move them to a selling event? And a selling event is something like, for example, a webinar.
12:07I talk about these all the time. So you could do a live demo of your product and show people how it's being used. You see, like, uh, companies like Superhuman doing this all the time.
12:17You see almost all the AI companies doing demos where you can see how these products work, and you don't even necessarily need to do a pitch at the end. It's just you now see how this product works.
12:28You now see how valuable it is. That's a live workshop. That's a live webinar.
12:32That's a live demo. I'm running these all of the time for myself and my clients and my partners. Second thing is an email campaign.
12:38This could be as simple as, like, a string of three or four emails that lead people in your holding pattern to actually making a purchase, and you see these all the time. You can see the examples of this all over the place.
12:50And by the way, I just got hit with a webinar campaign from Superhuman today because they want me to buy Superhuman teams or they want me to upgrade to Superhuman teams, and so I just got hit with a campaign to get me on one of their webinars. The other thing is if you wanna pay, and a lot of people don't realize this, you can retarget people with a paid campaign that are already in your world.
13:16So let's say you have, like, a couple of thousand emails that you've collected, you can actually put those into Facebook, and again, it's not like they take the exact email.
13:27It's not like it all perfectly lines up. You create a lookalike audience. And those emails can be used to retarget people on other platforms or similar types of people on other other platforms to push them towards something.
13:41And the last thing, which people don't really think about, if you're building a holding pattern and for me, if I look into my email, like, okay.
13:50Let's see the last 30 people who signed up. Oh, this person has an email address at Microsoft dot com. We work with enterprise clients.
13:59Let me see if I can reach out to this person and jump on a call with them and see if they would be interested in working with us. And so the selling event, which a lot of people just call campaigns, are the bridge between I'm holding people in this space to now I'm moving them over to they're buying something from me, they're getting a free trial, or they're booking a call with me because they wanna buy something expensive.
14:23And if it if they don't convert, which most won't convert, they go back into the holding pattern, and they stay there until the next selling event. And if you look at an at the example of Levels Peter Levels x account, you could even take a look at, like, you know, Jason Fried's x account or any of the people that you associate with selling really great, interesting digital products who you wouldn't consider to be very marketing heavy.
14:53They are, you know, going on other people's podcasts to generate traffic, which pushes people into their world, whether that's their x account or newsletter or their YouTube channels or whatever it is, or the pod their own podcast.
15:07So it's from their traffic to your traffic, and they keep people there. This is where they're posting, like, their personal stuff, and, like, Peter is always posting about, like, how to how to cook steaks in an air fryer, and all of this stuff is happening there.
15:21That's not where you're generating traffic in the first place, but that's where that's happening. And then every so often, you'll see them make a clear push to selling.
15:30A clear push to, okay, I wanna have people push towards this thing now. And you saw, uh, on Peter's account, he did this e girl, uh, post, which is now pinned on his account as we speak, and then he posted the bump in sales that happened after he did that post.
15:49And so I'm not saying by the way that he's cynically sitting there and being like, this is specifically a sales campaign, and this is how much I'm gonna make, whatever. Not that that would be a bad thing or anything. It's just that this is an activity that he's that that's happening from the holding pattern.
16:09It's an activity that's not just happening randomly from an ad. He's not he's not doing his sales pitch on podcasts that when he goes on other people's podcasts. He's going on other people's podcasts, and people get confused about this, by the way.
16:22Like, why is this person like, why is the CEO of Antropic right now at Davos getting interviewed by Bloomberg?
16:30Right? Is it is it for the good of human no. Like, his job is he's a promoter.
16:35He's moving people from here to the holding pattern, to their world, to understand it. When I'm watching the interview with the the CEO of Antropic, Darius, I am thinking he's doing a really good job at doing this sort of prepitch to enterprises who are now going to understand, oh, Claude is the enterprise AI company, and so he's bringing people, he's creating that attention, bringing people into that holding pattern.
17:00And the selling events for Entropic, I mean, they have an outreach team because they're actually the company that goes and tries to get these big enterprise deals. But, you know, you're following them on Twitter, you're on X, and then they post about Claude Cowork.
17:14You're in their world. You're in their sphere. You're hearing about these things.
17:18Again, those companies are huge. We don't have those types of budgets, but this is the general, I would say, loop that's happening the whole time.
17:28We're always trying to get new traffic, and let me do this in a meta way. I'm on your podcast now. I would like to get traffic.
17:35Right? I'm trying to expose myself to new people who might not know me yet.
17:42The next step is ideally, people are gonna start searching who I am because I'm not when you're on other people's content, you don't wanna make a pitch. So people are gonna, like, do the work themselves to figure out who I am, where I am, what I'm doing.
17:56They'll then fall into one of my holding patterns. It could be that they listen to the podcast, email newsletter, whatever it is.
18:03Eventually, as some of them have seen this week, because we did a big campaign, they're gonna get pushed towards something.
18:10Right now, it's a webinar, and that webinar will be pushed pushed them again towards some people doing enterprise calls with us, some people buying high or some people buying cheaper b to c products with us, and then 90% of the rest of them fall back into the holding pattern bucket.
18:28And as a promoter, ideally, you're waking up every morning, and you're able to understand that this is, the the , essentially.
18:41So for example, if there's no traffic coming in, if you're not doing any traffic building activities, then there's not gonna be enough people in your holding pattern because so that when you run a selling event, there won't be enough people in that selling event or campaign, which means you're not gonna have a lot of sales.
18:56And so for us, for example, like, we're running meta ads.
19:00I'm on this podcast. I'm always out there trying to get as many people into the holding pattern as possible. Our biggest holding pattern is our email newsletter.
19:10And when I see that an extra 5,000 people have joined the newsletter, mentally say that means another 200 people will turn up to the next webinar, and that means another 12 people will buy something.
19:23And so the machinery starts to make sense. And The motor, so to speak.
19:30Yeah. The oh, I should change it to the motor. And and, like, the by the way, look.
19:37Check this out. I also have this little toggle here, which is, well, how do you use AI in all of these things?
19:44The reason I didn't have AI here up front is because you this is the core element of your job as a CEO to make money, and then AI is supporting these elements.
19:56And I'll show you I'll turn it on, and I'll show you how I literally am using these tools. I'll open up the tools, and I'll show you how I'm doing this. I'll show you how I'm, like, creating a marketing campaign, and I'm showing you I'll show you how I'm using Quad in particular to support my marketing activities that make money or grow traffic or keep people in the holding pattern, etcetera, etcetera.
20:18So let's turn on the AI use cases.
20:26So for the audio listeners, what am I looking at? You are looking at I have flipped a switch which says show AI use cases, and so we're now in AI use case mode. And underneath each of the activities so let's say we're talking about let's say we're talking about going on other people's podcast, I have put a use case for how to use AI tools.
20:49And also in the background, there are very beautiful, like, stickers of me flying around all over the place, and the cursor has changed to an ice cream.
20:59So it's it's gotten pretty serious, I would say. Right. I'm loving what I'm seeing right now visually,
21:05and I never realized your before we get into this, I never realized how similar you look to Jesus.
21:14Oh, yeah. I've well, now with the hair like this, that the next one of these blueprints will be the Jesus blueprint.
21:20And so what you have here by the way, if you want, I put this as a Vercel. I made, like, a little Vercel version of this.
21:27I if you wanna put it in the in the description. We will. I vibe coded it in, like, twenty minutes, so it's probably barely holding itself together.
21:38But what I wanna show you actually is so I don't think we need to go into all of these things.
21:45Maybe people can look those up or or people can click on the link and they can see the ways to use AI for these things. I think the best thing what I know about your podcast, is people just wanna see inside the software and see how it's actually being used.
22:00So will I just jump in and show how I I'll show you in a very meta way how I prepared to go on your podcast today and how I also transitioned from using Claude standard to Claude code to go through the entire, like, flow of this.
22:20Sound good? Perfect. Sounds great.
22:22Cool. Let's jump into little baby cute Claude.
22:28Now what I'm gonna show you, most of your I think most of your listeners, since they're so technical already, they're gonna be like, yeah.
22:37I already know about this. But I know from talking to a lot of CEOs over the last two weeks, most people still don't understand how to use Claude properly, how to jump from Claude to Claude code when needed.
22:51So this is a project in Claude code called sorry.
22:55This is a project in Claude. This was my, essentially, marketing assistant today for going on your podcast.
23:03What I wanted to do was so you can see here in my little notebook, I just collected all of the physical notes that I had on this promoter concept that I wanted to talk about with you at the start of the podcast.
23:18And then I wanted to work with Claude to, number one, just create the graphic to explain to people.
23:26But number two, I wanted her to do some research on the last podcast episodes I did with you to figure out, like, what was working and what's not based on how how many views and how many comments, etcetera. But also, I wanted it to figure out, like, where in my angle, like, where in my script is it gonna lose people's attention, especially for your audience?
23:48And the other thing is I am I don't prepare for stuff. I'm like one of these classic ADHD entrepreneurs, and so usually I just wing it, and I wanted it to kind of work with me in a creating almost like an ADHD friendly kind of overview, because I don't wanna read a script either.
24:06And so the first thing I did here was I recorded just straight to my phone, like, a fifteen minute brain dump on all of the different things I was thinking about talking about in this podcast, and I dumped it into Claude, and I had it basically turn that into actually, it's back here.
24:28I had that I had it turn that into a ADHD friendly, scannable document that I could just read in the background while I'm talking to you so that I don't forget what to do.
24:43And that, uh, back let me just open that for you here. So let's open the HTML.
24:52So on another screen, I have the notes of the things I don't wanna forget in the background that I can fly through like this.
25:02You remember I I talked about Dario, about Jason Fried, about levels, And the process of doing this and and bringing up the blueprint, the process of doing this helped me also figure out, okay.
25:14When I'm when I was looking at this, I was like, maybe I should actually create the blueprint so that people understand what I'm talking about and create a visual of it. So step one is I dumped all of my verbal information into Claude, and probably like everyone else is doing, my my prompts are all done by WhisperFlow, so I'm talking to Claude as well.
25:40So if you're not using WhisperFlow or something like it, I would highly recommend using that. So you can just like so I dumped my transcript or I dropped my audio file in there, then I just talked to Claude for a while. And at the same time, while I was doing all these little projects I'll just go back here.
25:58Sorry. While I was doing all of this, I was having it teach itself instructions for this particular project.
26:08So at the end of every one of these chats so I gave it an initial instruction. It was like, I'm gonna be a guest on Greg Eisenberg's Start Up Ideas Podcast today. You're gonna be assisting me with putting together strong content dangle, strong ideas, and strong strategy for delivering the most value to his audience.
26:23This is currently the most popular episode I've done with Greg, and then I had it at the end of each chat. I said, hey, Claude.
26:31This was great. Now I want you to give me a pasteable set of instructions that I can put into your instructions for this podcast as we continue along with this episode.
26:42I also had it do in a separate chat. I had it do research on you, and so we also created a research document, so a research file.
26:52So it doesn't have to do that research fresh every single time in every single chat. It it already went through your x account. It already went through your YouTube account.
27:02And all of that led to me being able to create a really simple overview and then move on to, hey.
27:10Okay. Let's create an infographic that represents how I want to zoom out of the big picture for customers and show them how this whole creator flow works.
27:19And by the way, prompts, again, prompts of this detail are only really possible if you're able to verbally play with them and and just just talk them out.
27:31And the cool thing here, for anyone who doesn't already know how to do this, is in normal Claude, in the Claude project with all the context I'd given it, I had it build this blueprint for me, and when I was relatively happy with it so when it was at, like, this point where it, you know oh, so it's actually already oh, yeah.
27:52So it gave me this first simple version of it, and I was like, this is pretty fine. Then I asked it here. I said, cool.
28:00I'm gonna move this project over to Claude code. So I'm gonna take the HTML file, but what I need from you is to create a Claude MD file that gives you the Claude Claude code, the entire context of this project, as much context as possible. And so in this moment, I had to create the Claude MD file, the markdown file, and spit out the HTML file, downloaded all of them, and then I moved over to Claude code where I actually started building this little piece of software, this little piece of, like, one off marketing software.
28:32I'm sure your audience already deeply knows how all of this stuff works, but it's kinda fun anyway just to see how it got brought over. So here you go.
28:42So I created a I created a project folder then on my desktop, which was about this podcast. And I said, okay.
28:48I'm working on this promoter blueprint. Take a look at the claw claw CloudMD file to give yourself context. And then I wanted it to move into use asker quest ask user question mode or plan mode, and I had it just, like, grill me on the ideas for the podcast again, which gave me even more context to work with, which then spat out the blueprint or the promoter blueprint that I showed you even though we spelled it wrong.
29:16And then I had it put it on GitHub, spit it out to Vercel so that we are where we're at right now. It sounds like a lot of stuff, but all of that took about one hour, I would say, and almost all of it was happening in the background while I was doing other stuff as well.
29:35And so that's, like, a really super simple flow for any sort of CEO or marketer to go from, okay.
29:44I'm researching something to now I'm making a marketing element that I can use. In this case, I'm using it for the traffic part of my flow.
29:55And, I mean, if you wanna see a more complex setup, for example, if we go here, I'll show you, like, where I'm actually building how I'm actually building out campaigns at a deeper level, let's say.
30:13A campaign that will, I hope, make $450,000 this week will I can't guarantee that it'll make $450,000.
30:24I think it will, though. At least 350.
30:28Based on the hundreds of workshops and webinars you've done, you know, it sounds like from what we talked about, you know, it sounds like you're gonna do between 250 and $500,000.
30:42Yeah. It's usually in that range. We are really so we have, like, 4,000 webinar sign ups right now, so we're thinking we're hoping it can go much higher.
30:53So we're doing basically, this is my AJ and Smart marketing expert brain.
31:00So this is where I when I'm not, like, building something, when I don't need Cloud Code and, actually, I know I could just set up all of this on Cloud Code, but somehow I prefer using this interface when I'm just focusing on marketing stuff.
31:14It just I like to see the overview. So this is my marketing copywriting machine, essentially, and you can see I'm using it for a lot of a lot of stuff here.
31:26And it is my my first place I go to when I have a new email campaign that I wanna run, or when I have a new webinar that I wanna run.
31:38And the important element here is that I spent a lot of time setting up the files in the document. So I have the books that I've written. I've had I had one of my, like, favorite things here is a 17766 line doc, which is me finding other people's marketing emails and just compiling them, and then learning from them, having Claude essentially boil down the main learnings and add them to the Claude MD file, which I'm still playing around with so it doesn't get too overwhelmed.
32:15But let me just show you how I would normally then move from the traffic phase maybe to the, like, sell phase or something.
32:26So what I'll do here is I'll say, okay. So I just finished a podcast episode with Greg Eisenberg.
32:33The topic was how I use AI tools as a CEO, and what I wanna do I'm gonna give you the context of that.
32:42I'm gonna put the Claude MD file here so you have the context of what I talked about. What I wanna do is I wanna create a very simple, like, juicy, downloadable or lead magnet that I could send people to after this episode that will bring them into my newsletter.
33:00So it's gotta be something free. It's gotta be something relevant to this episode that I'm doing with Greg Eisenberg, and I just want you to pump out about three lead magnet examples.
33:13Let's go. And so what I'll do is I'll bring in the file that we are using, the CloudMD file, instruction file we're using for your project, just so that I bring that context in here as a one off thing.
33:30I don't wanna bring it and replace this entire context here, and I'll have Opus sort of come up with a first feel for it.
33:41And that it's not that you're, as the CEO, completely replacing your entire brain with Claude. You're once you the the the thing that your brain is there to do is look for these opportunities, is to think about, I'm in the traffic phase, I wanna move to the holding pattern phase.
33:59Let's see what it came up with. Okay. The promoter blueprint one pager, I think that would work well.
34:04So a PDF of the four step framework. That's pretty good. 50 prompts for the promoter CEO, a swipe file.
34:12The cave dweller audit, are you building or promoting? That's really great.
34:17A quick self assessment that exposes the builder trap. And why it works is provocative. That's actually pretty funny because one of the angles of this is, like, you don't wanna get stuck building stuff and not promoting.
34:29And so what I would do from here is then I would talk a little bit. I would take the transcript from this podcast if it was afterwards, and I would give it even more context, turn that into a lead magnet.
34:41Of course, I would then move to Claude Code to create the lead magnet landing page, and we're done. And so for me, this process used to be like me chatting with my team, which I still do, of course, but now we can do multiple projects at the same time.
34:58Me chatting with my team, then me asking a designer to make the landing to make this blueprint, then me going off and trying to figure out what's the best way to put together a landing page.
35:08Should we do it in ClickFunnels? Should we do it in Framer? Now this entire process of marketing for me that maybe it would be a week for us to okay.
35:19Let's say if let's say a full lead magnet campaign, two to three days to get it right. Now we're talking about half a day, and it just feels so much faster.
35:31You can make one off campaigns that feel super accustomed to the content you're creating.
35:38And basically, that's it. That's that's basically how I'm using it.
35:44Like, that's as far as I'm going. It's it's very lightweight.
35:48So I got a lot of thoughts. I think, you know, you kinda you kinda downplayed it. You're like, I know this audience, you know, knows these tools and stuff like that.
35:57I think that the way you use instructions, the way you're setting up projects, I think is it's helpful to see how other people are using it.
36:07You know? Dude, I learned it from your podcast. I helpful.
36:12Right? It's helpful. It's like even the even, like, the little tidbit around for marketing related projects, I just like to start with the the cloud interface, like, the Mac app is interesting.
36:25Yeah. I because it's I I'm getting better at moving or knowing when I wanna move between Claude code and Claude.
36:33One thing I will say is so a friend of mine who's running a company called Pipdex, they're like, he's gone thousands of levels deeper than me into all this Claude Code stuff, also watching your channel and learning from it.
36:46And his cofounder messaged me the other day, he was like, John, ask user question use the ask user question skill for designing your webinar and and ask it to, like, really grill you.
36:59And so what I did is I, like, trained a Claude project on the webinar structure that I like the best, and I have it do, like, a thirty minute ask user question flow on me, and the end results coming from that when I'm doing it in Claude code just because it's quicker, it feels quicker just hitting the one, two, three, whatever, is something that's making me feel like I might just move the whole thing to Cloud Code, but for now, I'm just feeling good about having the two separate interfaces.
37:31I mean, for context, eight months ago, you know, you
37:38barely knew what this stuff was. Right? Dude, I didn't know.
37:41I didn't remember, we met in May, and Yeah. We were in San Francisco, and I was going to all these AI events with you.
37:47And I was like, I'm basically using AI as a search engine. The end. Like, the search engine slash light assistant, and it's a couple of months later, and every single interaction, every single business process at AJ and Smart now has an AI automated element.
38:10But I will warn other CEOs out there, it's very easy to optimize for the wrong thing and end up spending it's it's okay if it's for fun, but don't be me and Laura.
38:25And one of the things Laura said, she she's running the business with me. She was like, I spent three days building this proposal builder, and then I asked Claude, would it be easier for me to use an off the shelf solution?
38:37And then Claude gave me an off the self solution off the shelf solution that we could've used from day one and have it all connected. And so there's the the the warning of you don't have to build everything completely custom and remembering your job as a promoter, remembering that your job is not just optimizing the crap out of everything.
38:58And the last thing, dude, we said this in May together on your podcast, and I think it's more true than ever now. I don't think being efficient right now is the is the play. I think the play is scaling up like crazy.
39:09So, like, for me, I don't think the play is, oh, all of these processes can now be done by AI, so I'm just gonna just do everything myself. I think the play is, if you already have a small team, keep them, and just now you have triple the size of the small team if everyone's using these tools.
39:28And you can do five campaigns a month instead of one. You can do so many more variations of Facebook ads instead of, like, what we used to do, like, updating them every six weeks.
39:38The I think the play right now is abundance and, like, going big instead of obsessive efficiency.
39:47And I think Claude Code allows you to really play big, like, really play very big. It's so exciting.
39:54There's like, I I basically feel like you can clone yourself and then just do more shit. The challenge is making sure you're doing stuff that actually hits your goals of revenue or users or whatever it is.
40:07Yeah. I feel like there's a lot of people who listen to this podcast, and they it's, their first time setting up Cloud Code, and they'll set up, like, a thousand skills, like, Cloud skills before, like, building one thing.
40:20It's like, dude, like, no. No. Like, you you could use things like skills.
40:26You could use, you know, sub agents. You could use Ralph Wiggum. You could use all these, like, advanced techniques.
40:33But to start with, you really just wanna figure out, okay, what is it what am I, you know, what does my team look like? Even if it's a team of one, what are the things what are the jobs to be done?
40:45Yeah. And how can I use this to create better products, to promote more, to experiment more, and then just start making it part of your daily routine?
40:58And over time, you're just you're gonna learn, oh, okay. Actually, I could put a skill over here. I'm gonna do one skill.
41:03And then over time, like, it doesn't need to be like, don't be that, you know, that person that measure twice as what's the expression? Measure twice, cut once.
41:13Yes. Just
41:15cut Cut. Just cut. Cut.
41:18Cut. Cut. There's no there's so when I meet other entrepreneurs, the biggest sign for me that they're going to move very slowly is too much preparation.
41:29And I think these tools are so good, you can go straight into a project with them. Like with Claude Code, I didn't I I didn't even do a test project.
41:38I was just like, I'm gonna see if I can make one of these campaign pages immediately. And I and by messing up and by for example, the first thing you might hit is, like, the context window becomes too long, and then it compresses, and then it forgets loads of stuff.
41:53And I'm like, what the hell? It's forgotten all the stuff I told it. And then you realize, oh, maybe, like, doing projects on Claude code is like doing little bits instead of all in one massive big mega prompt, and but I had to learn that by working with it on a real project.
42:10And so I definitely think less prep, more action, and an understanding, especially if you're a CEO or a founder, an understanding that your job is to grow your business, to make money, or to get investors, or to get users, and your job is not to be optimizing
42:27your admin before you're even making money. I'm gonna be doing a lot more episodes of the podcast that are, like, in this vein around Vibe marketing, basically.
42:37Like, how do you how do you use AI to get more customers? I'm happy that you set the foundation around, like, okay.
42:46Before you even do this, you know, sexy vibe marketing stuff, you kinda have to understand the foundation. But, you know, thanks for coming on and and dropping And the we'll include the link in the show notes description if you wanna use the ice cream cursor.
43:04By the way, was that that had to have been your idea.
43:08I just The ice Oh, yeah. Like, I so I was looking at it and it so it created I wanted there to be a toggle to show the AI use cases. And then when I when I clicked the toggle, I was like, this is boring.
43:18So then I did the cutout of my face and put it in the background, and then I was like, this is still boring. Let's add an ice cream to the cursor, and I just kept adding stuff. I mean, I created a planner for me and my friends to go on vacation.
43:30It's called the wet boy vacation planner, and it's the most demonic thing you've ever seen. And so for me, that's the fun of Claude Code is being able to just make very specific silly things as you're going on.
43:43So, yeah, that wasn't a Claude idea. Claude wouldn't recommend something like this.
43:48Yeah. We could do a whole episode on the Wet Boy summer vacation app for sure.
43:53So good. So good. Alright.
43:55Thanks a lot, man. I appreciate it. Anything you wanna leave people with?
43:59Honestly, if you just accept that your role as as a CEO is is you're a promoter, and don't be embarrassed about it. I know people get cringe about promoting themselves. If that's not what you want to do, find a cofounder who wants to do that.
44:13It is literally the job of a CEO. You're supposed to be out there talking about your business. And, again, it's not a problem if you don't wanna do it.
44:21You gotta have someone in the company doing that job. It just won't work if you don't have that type of person who's willing to take the role. And just believe in yourself, love yourself.
44:32You know, it's all good. Hello. You know, that kind of stuff.
44:38Alright. Perfect place to leave it. Thanks again, and and I'll catch you next time.
44:43See you. See you.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
You shipped the product. You optimized the stack. You vibe-coded something real. And then nothing happened. Jonathan Courtney has a name for the trap: the Builder. And he has a framework for escaping it that generated a quarter-million-dollar webinar campaign, designed largely inside Claude, in under an hour.
How they asked for the click.
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