Big Idea

The argument in one line.

A skill only becomes useful once it reads from a shared business-context memory and gets scheduled to run on its own, which turns a one-off prompt into a standing automation instead of a party trick.

Who This Is For

Read if. Skip if.

READ IF YOU ARE…

You run a small business or agency and already use Claude but keep re-typing the same instructions for recurring tasks like inbox triage or reporting.
You want a concrete list of which prebuilt Claude skills are worth installing instead of browsing all 44 yourself.
You're comfortable connecting business tools (Gmail, Stripe, accounting software, a CRM) to an AI assistant and want to see what that actually unlocks.

SKIP IF…

You don't have a Claude account with plugin/skill access, since this is a walkthrough of a specific plugin install, not a general AI primer.
You're looking for a coding or developer-tools video; every example here is a business-operations task (email, invoicing, hiring, reporting).

TL;DR

The full version, fast.

Anthropic expanded its Claude small-business plugin to 44 skills and 35 connectors, installed from Customize > Plugins > Discover by searching "small business." A skill is just a saved instruction set you trigger with a slash command instead of re-explaining the task each time. Ben starts with the SMB Onboard skill, which interviews you about your business and saves the answers to Claude's memory (tools, brand colors, headaches) so every other skill inherits that context automatically. He then ranks his 10 most useful skills: inbox manager, report builder, month-end prep, proposal builder, invoice chase, speed-to-lead, hiring screener, Marketing Monday, and review reputation. Each gets stronger when customized in plain English or trained via a new screen-record-and-narrate feature, and each can be put on Claude's Scheduled Tasks so it runs daily or weekly with no prompting.

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Chapters

Where the time goes.

00:00 – 00:37

01 · Intro

Ben states the plugin now has 44 skills and 35 connectors, previews the top 10, customization, and running skills autonomously.

00:37 – 01:23

02 · Installing the plugin

Install path: Customize tab > Plugins > Discover > search 'small business' > Add; all skills enable into the account at once.

01:23 – 02:24

03 · What are skills?

A skill is a reusable instruction set triggered with a slash command; example given is the inbox-manager skill's four-step process.

02:24 – 03:19

04 · Skill #1: SMB Onboard

Run this first. It interviews the owner and writes a business-context file to Claude's memory that every other skill reads from.

03:19 – 04:24

05 · Skill #2: Inbox Manager

Builds a voice profile from past sent emails, categorizes the inbox, drafts replies, and produces a prioritized dashboard in the owner's brand style.

04:24 – 06:54

06 · Customize and schedule skills

Shows plain-English customization (a sponsorship-email rule), the new Record-a-Skill screen-and-voice training feature, and scheduling the skill to run every morning at 9am.

06:54 – 08:01

07 · Skill #3: Report Builder

Asks clarifying questions, checks connected tools and memory, and builds a weekly metrics dashboard that can auto-schedule and post to Slack.

08:01 – 08:40

08 · Skill #4: Month-End Prep

Connects to accounting software for a P&L; without a supported tool it falls back to pulling expenses from email and revenue from Stripe, still exporting an Excel sheet and one-page PDF.

08:40 – 09:39

09 · Skill #5: Proposal Builder

Pulls a Fireflies meeting transcript plus memory to draft a client proposal, then rebuilds it to match an uploaded template for future brand consistency.

09:39 – 10:09

10 · Skill #6: Invoice Chase

Goes through Stripe/accounting data for overdue invoices and drafts tone-matched reminder emails based on each customer's payment history.

10:09 – 11:07

11 · Skill #7: Speed-to-Lead

Watches inbound channels over a lookback window, drafts lead replies, and is recommended on a 3-hour or 24-hour schedule to cut response time.

11:07 – 11:53

12 · Skill #8: Hiring Screener

Scores a CSV of 205 applicants against a stated rubric using batched sub-agents, returning a ranked shortlist: 23 interviews, 38 maybes, 134 nos.

11:53 – 12:27

13 · Skill #9: Marketing Monday

Weekly marketing/growth briefing covering customer sentiment, competitor activity, and priorities for the week, usable out of the box.

12:27 – 13:39

14 · Skill #10: Review Reputation

Aggregates reviews and comments across platforms (Google, YouTube, email, Facebook, community) into themed buckets and drafts replies.

Atomic Insights

Lines worth screenshotting.

Anthropic's updated small-business plugin now ships 44 skills and 35 connectors, up from a smaller original set, installed from Customize > Plugins > Discover by searching 'small business.'
A skill is a saved instruction set triggered with a slash command, so a four-step process like 'pull emails, sort into buckets, extract the ask, draft a reply' runs the same way every time instead of being re-explained.
The SMB Onboard skill should run first: it interviews you about your business, then writes a business-context file to Claude's memory that every other skill in the plugin reads from automatically.
That memory file stores concrete details, brand hex colors included, so dashboards and reports the other skills generate come out in the owner's actual brand style without being asked.
Customizing a skill is just talking to Claude in plain English; telling it 'sponsorship emails get marked read, no reply needed' rewrote the entire inbox-manager skill in seconds.
A newer 'Record a Skill' feature lets you screen-share yourself doing the task while narrating why, and Claude rebuilds the skill from the screen actions plus the voice transcript.
Every skill in the plugin can be pushed onto Claude's Scheduled Tasks feature with a plain request like 'run this every day at 9am,' turning a manual prompt into a standing automation.
The report-builder skill cross-references connected tools and memory to build a metrics dashboard, and can be extended with one more instruction to auto-post the result into Slack.
Month-end prep normally connects straight to QuickBooks, Xero, or Zoho Books, but when none of those fit (a Brazilian company in this case) it fell back to pulling expenses from email and revenue from Stripe and still produced a one-page P&L PDF plus an Excel sheet.
The proposal-builder skill pulled the actual discovery call transcript from Fireflies and combined it with the saved business context to draft a client proposal with no manual input beyond naming the client.
Feeding an existing proposal template into the proposal-builder skill and asking Claude to rebuild it to match locks every future proposal into that brand's exact style and structure.
The hiring-screener skill batches out sub-agents to score each applicant against a stated rubric; on a 205-applicant CSV it returned 23 interview-worthy, 38 maybes, and 134 nos with a summary for each.
The speed-to-lead skill watches inbound channels (web form, CRM, email) over a lookback window and drafts replies to new leads; scheduling it to run every 3 hours instead of daily is presented as the way to actually cut response time.
The invoice-chase skill drafts payment reminders whose tone is matched to each customer's payment history, gentler for good payers, firmer for repeat late ones, pulled straight from Stripe and the accounting ledger.

Takeaway

Run onboarding first, then customize and schedule everything else

WHAT TO LEARN

A skill only compounds once it reads from a shared memory of your business and gets put on a recurring schedule, which is what turns a one-off AI demo into a standing automation.

02Installing the plugin

The install step for a bundled skill set is just search-and-add; it isn't where the real setup effort goes.
Enabling a plugin can turn on dozens of skills at once, so the discovery problem shifts to figuring out which ones are actually worth using.

03What are skills?

A skill is worth having when the underlying task is a repeated multi-step process (pull, sort, extract, draft) you'd otherwise re-explain every time.
Naming the skill (typing a slash command) is meant to replace prompting from scratch, which only pays off if the task recurs.

04Skill #1: SMB Onboard

Run the onboarding skill before any other skill in a plugin bundle; the context it saves is what makes every later skill feel personalized instead of generic.
A one-time interview about your business (tools, brand, cadence) is worth the upfront time if every downstream automation reuses the answers.

05Skill #2: Inbox Manager

An automation that mimics your voice needs real samples of your own past output (sent emails) to build from, not just instructions.
A dashboard-style output (prioritized, with draftable replies) is more useful than raw automation, because it keeps a human in the approval loop.

06Customize and schedule skills

Customizing an AI skill can be as simple as stating one business rule in plain English and asking it to update the skill, no prompt engineering required.
Screen-recording yourself doing a task while narrating your reasoning is a viable way to transfer tacit judgment into an automation, not just the visible steps.
Putting a working skill on a recurring schedule is what actually removes you from the loop; without that step you're still the one triggering it.

07Skill #3: Report Builder

A reporting automation gets meaningfully better once it reads from both your connected data sources and your saved business context, not just one or the other.
Small extensions (post to Slack, share via a live doc) turn a report you have to open into one that reaches the people who need it automatically.

08Skill #4: Month-End Prep

When the 'ideal' integration isn't available (no supported accounting platform), a workable fallback is pulling the same signals from adjacent tools already connected (email for expenses, Stripe for revenue).
Exporting the same result in two formats (spreadsheet and one-page PDF) covers both the person who wants to dig in and the person who just wants the summary.

09Skill #5: Proposal Builder

Pulling directly from a call transcript rather than a manual brief cuts out the step where details get lost translating a conversation into a written brief.
Feeding an existing template into a skill and asking it to match that template is a faster way to get consistent brand output than describing your style in words.

10Skill #6: Invoice Chase

Matching a reminder's tone to the specific customer's payment history (gentle for good payers, firm for repeat late ones) is a small touch that avoids treating every account the same.
An invoicing automation that queues drafts for approval rather than sending automatically is a safer default for anything touching money and customer relationships.

11Skill #7: Speed-to-Lead

Scheduling frequency is a lever you control: the same lead-response skill run every 3 hours instead of daily meaningfully changes the outcome it's optimizing for.
A lookback window (last 24 hours) is a simple guardrail that keeps a recurring automation from re-processing things it already handled.

12Skill #8: Hiring Screener

Before trusting any automation to score or triage people or money (candidates, leads, invoices), get it to state its rubric or criteria first so its judgment is checkable.
A batch-scoring task with hundreds of items (200+ job applicants) is a good fit for sub-agents scoring in parallel against one fixed rubric rather than a single pass through everything.

13Skill #9: Marketing Monday

Some reporting skills are useful straight out of the box with zero customization when the underlying question (how did this week go) is generic enough.

14Skill #10: Review Reputation

Aggregating scattered reputation signals (reviews, comments, mentions) into themed buckets turns noise you'd otherwise never read into something actionable.

Glossary

Terms worth knowing.

Skill (Claude): A saved, reusable instruction set for Claude that you trigger with a slash command instead of typing out the same multi-step prompt every time.
SMB Onboard skill: The onboarding skill in Anthropic's small-business plugin that interviews the owner about their business and writes the answers to Claude's memory for other skills to reuse.
Record a Skill: A feature that captures a screen recording plus a spoken narration of you performing a task, then rebuilds the relevant skill's instructions to match what you actually did.
Scheduled Tasks: Claude's built-in feature for running a chosen skill automatically on a recurring schedule (daily, weekly, every few hours) without a manual prompt.
Connector: An integration that gives Claude read/write access to an outside tool, such as Gmail, Stripe, or an accounting platform, so a skill can act on real business data.
Business context memory: A file Claude keeps in its memory, built by the SMB Onboard skill, holding facts about the business (tools connected, brand colors, headaches, cadence) that other skills pull from automatically.

Resources

Things they pointed at.

08:01toolQuickBooks / Xero / Zoho Books

08:40toolFireflies

09:39toolStripe

06:54toolSlack

00:00toolWispr Flow ↗

00:00tooln8n ↗

00:00toolRelevance AI ↗

00:00toolMake.com ↗

00:00toolApify ↗

07:27productBen's AI Accelerator community ↗

Quotables

Lines you could clip.

00:00

“Anthropic just released a new plugin with 44 skills specific to small businesses.”

clean cold open stating the whole premise→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote

04:24

“I don't do any sponsorships right now, so for sponsorship emails, just mark them as read. They don't need any response. Please customize the skill with this rule.”

shows the entire customization loop is one plain-English sentence→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote

11:07

“It spins up some batches of sub-agents here to score each of the applicants and then again creates a nice dashboard with a short list.”

concrete proof point (205 applicants scored automatically)→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote

The Script

Word for word.

Read-along

Don't just watch it. Burn it in.

See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.

Tropic just released a new plugin with 44 skills specific to small businesses. I've been testing these new skills and some of them are really useful. So in this video, I'll show you how to install this plugin and what these skills can help you automate.

I'll show you the best 10 skills to use and show you how to customize them easily to make them even better for you. And I'll explain how to run these skills autonomously so cloud can automate your tasks without you. Now, if you don't know me yet, I'm Ben.

I'm a three -time founder and now run an AI agency and one of the largest AI communities for professionals and business owners, where I teach how to use AI to actually automate work or build an AI business. Now, as I said, Cloud just updated their existing small business plugin. this updated plugin now includes a set of 44 skills and 35 connectors now some of these existed already but they launched a lot of new useful ones now you can find and install this plugin easily by just going into your cloud account going to the customize tab here then select plugins select discover here and then just search for small business then the small business plugin will appear and if you haven't installed it yet you'll have a button here with plus or add and once you click that all of the skills will automatically be enabled into your account now you can see we have many skills here crm autopilot speed delete payroll prep smb onboard lead finder etc And we have some new connectors that we didn't have before.

Now, if you're still unfamiliar with skills, skills are essentially reusable instruction sets for Cloud on how to do a specific task. For example, in this inbox manager skill, you can see it as a preset instruction on how to manage an inbox. For example, first, pulling all the emails.

Step two, sorting them into buckets. Step three, extract what it's actually asking each email. And step four, drafting replies.

And this means that as soon as we want to clean... Our email inbox, instead of having to prompt it what to do each time, we can just run the email manager skill with just typing a slash and then typing the name of the skill. So in this case, inbox manager.

Cloud then reads the instruction, knows exactly what to do and can clean up your email inbox. now not all of these skills are going to be useful for you specifically that's why you want to go through them and see which ones are useful for you but i'll show you the 10 most useful ones i found and i'll show you how to customize them to make them even better for you and i'll show you how to run them automatically so you can automate these tasks without you even being there but before that let me show you the most important skill to run first especially if you're new to working with skills inside of cloud which is the smb onboard skill now as soon as you've activated the plugin you can just type in slash smb onboard to run this skill and the SMB onboarding skill essentially helps you connect your softwares with cloud if you haven't yet but maybe more importantly it will ask you a couple of questions to learn about your business and then it will create this business context file with more information around you and your business and it will save this inside of your cloud memory so you can see here in my memory that it saved some of this business context with information around me and my business and now every other skill that I'm going to run from this SMB plug

is going to pull this context from the memory to make your skills more relevant and better aligned with your business. It even, for example, saves my brand colors. So all of the reports or dashboards that these skills will create will automatically be in my style.

Which brings me to the second skill that I think is useful for most people, which is the inbox manager skill. Now, of course, this is one of the most common use cases for people with cloud, but surprisingly, many people are still prompting cloud manually to do this every time. Now, this skill will solve that.

And when you... run it you can see it first goes through your email inbox that of course you need to have connected you can then it actually first builds a voice profile for you based on your past email replies.

So you can actually mimic your tone of voice. It then categorizes all the emails and drafts replies when necessary. It will then give you a quick overview and an entire dashboard where it prioritizes the emails to get back to.

And it will also draft replies directly in this dashboard, which you can easily copy and paste to answer your emails quickly. That also actually read the business context from my memory. So it already knew, for example, my brand style.

So I created this entire dashboard in my brand style. Now, although this skill is pretty impressive, it becomes far more powerful when you customize it and teach Claude a little bit more about how you manage your inbox specifically. Now we can really easily customize these skills by just telling Claude.

For example, here I said, I don't do any sponsorships right now. So for sponsorship emails, just mark them as red. They don't need any response.

Please customize the skill with this rule. Claude then updates the entire skill in seconds. it even better for you and you can just save that new skill then if you click here on save plugin now an even better way to personalize these skills is to actually use a new feature called the record a skill feature with this feature we can essentially screen share and show how you clean your email inbox at the beginning of the recording you can just say something like Please customize the inbox skill based on how I clean my email inbox.

You can then just go through your own email inbox, clean it yourself and explain why you do what you do while doing it because it will also record your voice transcript. It can track clicks and everything you're doing here. And once you're done, you just click done and Cloud can customize the entire skill based on exactly how you manage your inbox or clean your inbox by looking at exactly what you did on your screen and the voice transcript.

Now, I've done this with my own inbox manager skill, and honestly, it's really impressive what you get out of this. So highly recommend doing this if you want to get a really good skill out of this. And then lastly, if you want to let this skill run automatically every morning before you start your day, for example, you can also easily schedule this skill to run autonomously through Cloud's schedule task feature.

Again, you can just tell Cloud something like, can you schedule this skill to run every day at 9 a .m.? It will then create the schedule task here, as you can see, which you can also find in your schedule task list. It already pre -filled out the prompt that it runs then every day at 9 a .m.

that instructs it to use the specific skill, in this case, the inbox manager. And then every morning you can just go here into your schedule task tab where you already find your pre -done email triage. So the next skill is the report builder skill.

But before showing you that one very quickly, if you enjoy this type of content, you'll really enjoy my AI accelerator community where I just launched three new beginner to advanced cloud courses that walk you through step -by -step how to use cloud to automate your work. as a non -technical professional or business owner.

We also have unlimited one -on -one live tech help with AI experts to help you with any problem you might face. And we have a big library of skills and plugins across all business departments that you can use and customize for yourself. We have multiple weekly Q &As with me and my team and a big community of professionals and business owners actively using AI to automate their work.

So if you want to dive deeper into this, definitely check it out in the link in description below. Now, there are actually a couple of interesting reporting skills inside of the plugin, like the Monday... brief, the business pulse skills and some others, but I find the report builder scale the most useful one.

It will first start asking you some questions about what you want inside of your report. It will check which connectors you have connected. It also reads the memory again, so it knows about your business context.

And then based on that, it will create a report or dashboard with all the important metrics for your business over the last week. Now I have to blur out some of this information because of course this is private data. It will also automatically create.

scheduled task so this runs on a weekly basis automatically now honestly it's surprisingly good already after just reading some of your business context and pulling data from your softwares but of course this one becomes far stronger if you customize it so again you can just tell cloud what kind of metrics or things you want to include in this report and tell it to update the skill with your changes you could also easily add in one more step to this skill for example to send this report automatically to a slack channel so your entire team can access it or if your team already works in cloud you can just share this through the live artifact feature by sharing it with the team now the next one i think very useful for most small businesses too is the month end prep which can basically help you automate your accounting so of course you can connect cloud to quickbook zero or any other accounting software you have they basically will create a pnl in excel and as a one -page pdf now in my case i have a brazilian company so i can't use quickbook zero or any of these so i just let it pull all the expenses from my email inbox and the revenue from my stripe and again it gives me a one

page or PDF, which you can download to with profit and losses, what's sold, the expenses, et cetera. And it also delivers it into an Excel sheet or a spreadsheet in a PNL format like this. So very useful if you want to speed up your accounting workflows.

Now, the next one is the Proposer Builder skill, which I was really impressed by too. Now, when you run it, of course, it will first ask you who you want to create this proposal for. In this case, I just told it to go through Fireflies and find the last meeting between my sales rep and a client.

And then based on the meeting transcript alone and my business context from my memory, I was really impressed with the proposal it was able to generate right away. You can see it looks pretty professional and honestly pretty good. Now, of course, this skill...

gets especially powerful if you customize it. And the best way to do it is to just throw in an existing proposal template that you already use. For example, I did that here.

I threw in an existing one that I already have. And then just tell Cloud to update the scale based on my proposal template. Cloud then rebuild the proposal in exactly my brand style.

And of course, according to the structure we use for these proposals. And of course, it updated the scale with this change. So every future proposal I generate will now be automatically generated into my style and structure.

And the next one is the invoice chase skill. Again, I think very useful for many small business owners. You can basically go through your accounting softwares or your payment processor to draft reminder emails to follow up with customers with overdue invoices.

Now it works pretty well out of the box without customization in my experience. So in my case, it goes through Stripe and checks overdue invoices. Now in my case, there aren't really any overdue ones.

So it's not drafting any replies or reminder emails. But if it has it will actually do that. Then the next one is one of the most common automations we deliver to clients in our agency, which is a speed to lead skill.

Now, again, of course, very important for small business owners and can really work with any software where you might receive inbound inquiries. For example, could be a web form, could be your CRM or could be your email. Now, I will first ask you how far back it should look for new leads.

And what I would recommend is if you're going to use this to probably do the last 24 hours or even less and then create a scheduled task out of this. so it watches for new inquiries every day for all the new incoming leads over the last 24 hours. And again, it gives you a dashboard with everything that came in and drafts replies for any potential lead you might want to respond to.

Now, of course, you can easily customize this to actually send out the messages directly to get back to leads even faster. And of course, you can schedule this skill to run automatically every 24 hours to get back to leads. You can even schedule it to run every three hours, let's say, to increase your response times.

So the next one is... the hiring screener skill which can basically turn a list of applications and turn it into a ranked short list of candidates now i already use this for myself for a new customer support role on hiring and honestly it's quite useful when you run it of course it will ask you where to pull the candidates from and what your hiring criteria are so i gave it my criteria and threw in a csv sheet with more than 200 applicants it then spins up some batches of sub agents here to score each of the applicants and then again creates a nice dashboard with a short list in my case 23 potential interviews, 38 maybes and 134 nos.

It also gives a brief summary of each one and prioritizes the best one. And of course, becomes more powerful if you customize it, embed your criteria or embed even an extra research step to find some more information on these candidates. Now, the last two skills are for marketing use cases.

The first one that I quite liked was the Marketing Monday skill, which delivers a weekly growth or marketing briefing inside of a nice dashboard like this. Now, it worked very well for me out of the box without me. customizing anything gave me a very solid overview and dashboard of my week in marketing it also gives you an overview of what customers have said what competitors have done and some priorities for this week but these reporting skills can just get far more powerful if you customize them a bit for your specific use case and of course you can also schedule this one to run automatically every week and then lastly one more that i think is very valuable for small business owners which is the review reputation skill also works very well out of the box it basically goes out and aggregates all your reviews across all platforms like Google reviews, et cetera, wherever you live to get a better idea of your reputation across the brand and also draft replies to potential comments or reviews you might want to get back to.

Now, in my case, it went through YouTube, my email inbox and Google Facebook reviews, and then categorizes any potential problem into buckets with examples. So I definitely recommend checking out some of the other skills because there are some really useful other ones. Now, if you want to dive deeper into AI.

definitely check out my AI Accelerator where you get access to full beginner to advanced cloud courses. We have a big library of skills ourselves across all business departments that you can use and customize for yourself. We also have unlimited one -on -one live tech help with AI experts to help you out with any problems you might face at any time.

We have multiple weekly Q &As and a big community of professionals and business owners actively using cloud to automate their work. So if you want to dive deeper into this, definitely check it out in the link in the description. And if you want to learn more about how to build and use skills effectively, you can also check out the video here.

The Hook

The bait, then the rug-pull.

Anthropic quietly expanded its small-business plugin to 44 skills and 35 connectors, and Ben spends the video finding out which ones are worth actually installing, down to the memory file that even captured his stray typed note, 'I'm in my pottery era.'

Frameworks

Named ideas worth stealing.

03:19list

Ben's 10 skills worth installing

SMB Onboard
Inbox Manager
Report Builder
Month-End Prep
Proposal Builder
Invoice Chase
Speed-to-Lead
Hiring Screener
Marketing Monday
Review Reputation

Ben's curated top-10 shortlist out of the plugin's 44 skills, run in this order starting with the onboarding skill that seeds every other skill's context.

Steal fordeciding which of a large prebuilt skill/plugin library to actually turn on first

CTA Breakdown