Anthropic's NEW Claude for Small Business | Absolute Beginner Tutorial transcript

So, Enthropic just launched Cloud for small business plugins and is designed to help small business owners take full advantage of cloud in their day-to-day operations without the technical knowledge requirements and completely no code. It is one of the easiest and most powerful way to make use of AI to automate operations like accounting, design, marketing, sales, and many more. By the end of this video, you'll know how to set up Cloud for small business on your computer.

Master the various concepts of Plot Co, and be able to start using it for your business right away and not just as a cool demo. I'm going to cover at least two different use cases for small business today. Marketing campaign automation and sales outreach automation. And if you want to go a bit further and add social media creation, you can check out my other video which I've made because that takes a few more steps. First off, what's Cloud for small business?

Well, it's actually not a new product from what Cloud already has, which is Co-work and Desktop. It's simply a bundle plugin or a package of skills and connectors that small business will find useful when using cloud co-work. And if you're completely new to the concept of skills and connectors, don't worry. I'll cover that in simple terms when we're setting it up. Real quick, if you find videos like these useful, please hit that like button and consider subscribing.

It really does help a lot. For those who are completely new to the suite of cloud products, here's a quick breakdown. You've got cloud chat, cloud co-work, and cloud code. And maybe not so importantly, cloud design. Cloud chat is cloud in its most simplest form, which is just a chat interface that you can chat with when you type in ww.cloud.com. This is the equivalent of chatgpt interface. Cloud co-work. While chatting with Claude is great, it's not very useful because Claude can't actually do any work or the task that you assigned it to.

This is where Claude took it up a notch with Claude co-work. Instead of just chatting with you, it's able to access tools and create multi-step actions to achieve highle goals. So, for example, if you're a contractor or real estate agent, you can connect it to your calendar, emails, Canva, and you can technically ask it to do something like this. Prep me for my upcoming client meetings today with a brief and put together a personalized PowerPoint for them. co-work will figure out what it needs to check your client meetings by invoking Google calendar.

Find out who you're meeting. Do a LinkedIn or web search on the client, generate an internal client brief for you, and lastly, use Canva to generate presentation deck. The best thing, you can schedule this to run on schedule every morning on co-work. That's not all. Memory of this task, which is your preference, what you want to say on your brief and whether you want it to be presented a certain way will be persistent on cloud co-work project cloud code.

It is essentially running on the same backbone, but instead of chatting with you, it actually codes for you. It lives in your terminal. You point it at your codebase, describe what you want in English, and it writes, refactor, debugs, and code across multiple files. Not super relevant for most small business owners, but if you ever want to build something and are relatively comfortable with working at terminal, it might be pretty interesting to check out.

Number four, cloud design. Cloud design is Anthropic's newest product. Basically, a designer that sits right next to co-work. I'm mentioning here because it could actually work step by step beautifully with co-work to generate brands, PowerPoint decks, Canva, PDF, HTML. I won't go too deep into it here because I've done a previous video and I'll link it up here and down in the description below. Now, Cloud for small business is basically a cloud cover setup with the pre-bundled plugins.

In order to get started, you first need to download Cloud Desktop. Now, what is the difference between Cloud Desktop and just going straight to the cloud website or your browser? Cloud Desktop is a local app that lives in your computer and store the context, memory, and files in your local system that you own instead of the cloud. Co-work only runs on cloud desktop. So, this is a hard requirement. So, if you don't already have Cloud Desktop downloaded, go over to cloud.com/d download.

I'll link it in the description below as well and essentially download it to whatever system that you're currently using. And the second thing that you need is you need at least a pro subscription to Cloud AI. So, Cloud Co is not available in the free tier. So, you need to subscribe to the pro plan. It's about $20 US per month in my region. It's definitely well worth the price in my opinion, but you can try it out for a month and see how you feel about it as you go.

If it doesn't help your business after the first month, you know, you can always unsubscribe, right? So, go ahead and download Cloud Desktop and subscribe to the pro plan and then you can get going with the setup. So, once you have Cloud Desktop downloaded, open it up as an app within your system and not just from the browser. And you'll see that it'll pop up as a separate app and it will look something like this. And notice that on your lefth hand panel you have chat, you have co-work and you have code, right?

The difference of which we have gone through earlier. Now what you want to do is the first thing go over and toggle over to co-work. This is to actually customize and connect your small business plugins into your cloud desktop instance. So here on the left hand panel you want to go over to customize. So inside customize you'll see on the left hand side panel that you have skills connectors and personal plugins. Now don't worry under personal plugins probably be empty right now.

I just have some plugins over here already. So, what you want to do first is to hit the plus sign on the personal plugins. And here you want to hit browse plugins. Okay. So, plugins again it is just a bundle of connectors and skills. So, what you want to do is type in small and small business plugins will just appear right here. And what you can do is click into it and it'll tell you what it's about. You know, pre-built small business workflows da da.

And what you want to do is just hit install, right? And it's as easy as that. Now, again, I've mentioned the word skills and connectors, right? So skills is basically just a recipe book on how you want AI to do certain tasks. So just imagine the task like you know maybe cooking a plate of carbonara right so there's a certain way that you want your carbonara to be cooked. So basically skills is just a recipe. You telling the AI that you want the carbonara to be cooked a certain way, you know, certain amount of salt, certain amount of pasta, certain amount of eggs, stuff like that, right?

Essentially, that's what skill is. It's what's your preference. It's how you want it to do. And also helps the AI because it now doesn't have to look into how to actually do this thing from scratch, right? Because you already have this pre-existing knowledge of how to cook a plate of carbonara. Of course, carbonara is analogy for task. you know, if you wanted to, let's say, go into QuickBooks and give me the last 30 days of payrolls, business expenses, uh, and stuff like that.

So, instead of figuring out how QuickBook works, how the infrastructure works, how the architecture works, what's payroll, what's business expense, it would just go into the skill, which is the recipe to understand how to do that particular task. So, that's skills and then connects is just basically the bridge between your clot desktop and the tools that you can use. So for example, if you wanted to do certain tasks in QuickBooks or HubSpot, you need to connect it to QuickBooks and Hopspot.

So that's basically it. Desk connectors and skills and plugins is just a bundle of this which Anthropic has put together and call it a small business plug-in. So when you download the plugin, what you're downloading is actually the pre-selected connectors and pre-selected skills as what's been shown here, right? Okay. So now that we have all that installed, what you want to do is to head back to skills and connectors.

And you probably want to start connecting it to a few things. So one, Gmail if you want it to be able to look into your emails. Google calendar is a popular one. Of course, the example that I cited earlier, which you know, you can go through your calendar, check your meetings, look into who you're meeting with. You definitely need to connect the Google calendar with that. And the way you would connect it is super easy.

Once you click plus, it's going to open up, you know, this popup in your browser. And what you want to do is just sign into your Google and approve. And you'll be able to have it connect to your calendar. and you'll be able to see what you have upcoming and be able to plan it for you. And that's one way to, you know, kind of scroll through all these connectors and connect any tools that you find will be useful for a small business.

But in particular, when we're referencing just the plugins, you want to go out of this directory and again on the left hand side bar here, go into small business. And you see that there's these skills that's been pre-downloaded or pre-installed again because it's part of the bundle that comes under small business. And you have connectors as well. And here you can see that a lot of the connectors are not actually connected yet.

Right? So that's the really the second step that you're going to take which is install. You know if you have QuickBooks running you want to install that with your QuickBooks. I already have connected it with my HubSpot and Canva. And again when we say install it's a super easy connect right. So when you hit install what happens is it's going to pop up a browser again and ask for authentication and you just sign in right especially if you're using Google signin.

That's super simple. Okay. So now they're assuming you've result the connections that you want. I'm just going to quickly show you. As you can see, I have HubSpot and Canva already connected here. But just with those two, I'm going to ask it to create some email campaigns or email marketing campaigns which I want to automate basically. Right? In the past, maybe you have somebody who is in charge of emailing, coming up with the graphics, coming up with the content, the idea, etc.

And I just want to automate the whole thing and basically run the email campaign through HubSpot, right? So the way I would do that is I would go back to my co-work instance of Windows here and here there are a couple things just want to go through this right. So you have projects and you have scheduled you have live artifacts dispatch and customize. We already know what customize is projects is basically where all of the contacts to that particular project live.

Like for example, if you have a business called ABC on business, right? And you want to run email campaigns. You want this project to just be about email campaigning and the memories and the context that are important to that project is essentially how you want your emails to sound like, what are the typical CTAs in terms of graphic, what does the brand color look like, etc., etc. Now, all that should be under one project.

So, for example, I can create new project. And here I can say start from scratch. And this is ABC email marketing campaign. And you can tell it instructions etc. And if you already have some files or you know previous reference points of the emails that you've sent and you want it to sound exactly the same way, you can drop it into here and it will essentially be able to refer to that. Right? So we're going to hit create here and you'll see that under contacts on your right hand side here.

This actually lives in your computer. Right? So the memory and right now there's nothing as you go along it's going to create folders going to create directories and of course there's a good way best practice way to do this you know how to structure the directories how to architect it such that it is most efficient but not going to get into the weeds here today but just want to let you know that all the memories and contexts that you're giving it actually lives in your local system.

So you're not actually putting it on the cloud, right? One thing is you can add instructions here, right? So you can tell it, you know, what this project's about about email marketing campaign, etc. You don't have to right off the bat, but if you want to, you can. So here I'm just going to ask I want you to create three email marketing campaign banner for ABC, a real estate agent in Singapore. And so I'm just going to say this is a fictitious real estate agent because I don't want it to go into the internet and try to find ABC real estate agent, which does not exist.

The campaign banner should be high impact with CTA to meet with the agent. Use Canva to create the design. Share it before sequencing it on HubSpot. So, this is a pretty bad prompt because I'm giving it no context as to the company uh as to the target market and as to how the brand or messaging or the angle that it needs to take. Not to mention that on Canva, you know, what is the brand design? How does it look? What is the color?

I didn't give it any of that, but I'm just going to hit enter and let's see what it comes up with. Right? And of course, you don't have to use Canva for this. Again, one other way to do this is to actually tell it to come up with three ideas or three content outlines of what the email banner would look like, right? Together with the text maybe. And what you want to do is just to take the content of the email if you already like the content and take it over to cloud design.

And again, if you're not familiar with cloud design, I did a previous video with that you can check out. and basically take those content and paste it into cloud design and it will be able to do a good job designing these emails as well. Right? So, all right. So, it's asking me some questions. What segment of saying for real estate does ABC focus on? I say luxury condos wasn't narrative d awareness value CTA. Okay. Book free consultation.

Oh, okay. See, it's asking me for at least some directions in terms of the design, right? So, that's to the teal cream color. All right. So, it's doing all of that and is accessing a Canva for it to be able to do that. Again, if you want to connect it to Canva, what you want to do is essentially just hit install earlier and it will just pop up in your web browser to your Canva, right? So, if you're already logged into Canva on your browser, it would just have a popup and you just have to authorize.

Yep. So, it's using Canva and generating design. And again, this all happens straight from your cloud desktop. So, it's asking me for a lot of information on directions, which is great. So it's coming up with a few templates on how that might look like. So email one generated with four candidates. Then I'll generate email two the same aesthetic family awareness better candidates option one. So I can actually so for example see it's giving me the options here and these are actually generated inside canva right.

So if I hit open link what happens is I can actually see what is generated on Canva. But of course okay let's come back to here. Which email should I use? Option one. All right, let's choose option A, right? The one that we just saw. I have not even checked out, you know, B2D, but let's just go with option A. So, it's asking me for a lot of directional information, which is great, just to be sure that it's going down the right path, right?

So, it's asking me for a bunch of, you know, decisions in terms of design again. But what I want to direct our attention to is a progress bar over here on the top right hand side. As you can see, I forgot to mention earlier, the moment you give it a task, it is actually going to break it down. at least in co-work is going to break it down into steps of how it's going or deciding to accomplish that task, right? So, breaking it down in small digestible steps.

So, you'll go through these steps so that you know you kind of have an idea of what the progress is and if it's going into again the right direction, right? And as it's going through that, it's also building up memories within the project. So, it's going to have context memories that is going to essentially populate inside the project memory. So you know the next time you come back to this project it's going to remember that hey the last time he actually preferred this particular option this particular color this particular style so you don't have to keep telling it something of course if you wanted to change then tell it that you know I prefer this now and it will again remember that right so the way to interact with it in my experience is to engage it like you would uh a new intern in your company right so a brilliant new intern but it doesn't know a lot doesn't know your preference doesn't know how things work so you need to just Tell it so when it makes mistake and expect it to make mistake right what you want to do is just you would like any employee correct it tell it what to do and it will be able to improve from there okay so it looks like it's created a couple of email templates here which you know we might want to go in and look at let's take a look at what it's come up with right so it's come up with this email banner it's not very good there no images right so let's look at the first one actually and I believe it's not putting in.

Yeah, there you go. So, this is better, but it's again not putting in any images right now because it was not sure if I wanted to generate its own images or it wants to use something that you already have, right? So, a lot of times AI might get ahead of itself and create fictitious images and put it in your banner, which in this case, Claude is not doing, which is great because most of the real businesses out there, you already have your photos, you already have your business images that you want to use, right?

And you want to use those instead of just you know random AI generated images because people can tell right and especially if you're selling a house you might want to show the particular unit that you're selling right so this is the same discovery dream property d okay cool so that's the you know marketing design etc of course at the end of it it's asking me whether we want to tweak it before it's pushing it to HubSpot you know whether anything that needs to be of course I'm not going to push it to HubSpot but if you were to push it past HubSpot what will happen is it's going to create a sequence or a marketing campaign depending on the number of emails, etc.

So, it's going to be able to know how to do that automatically and be able to create it, share the link with you. And of course, the first few times you're going to want to go into the link, make sure everything's okay, if we're sending it into the right audience, etc. And we're not going to do a deep dive on HubSpot on the session because it's going to make the video way too long. But yeah, let me know if you guys would like to have that because I'm also not sure how many people are actually using HubSpot as a CRM.

Okay. So the second use case that we have is the sales outreach. So again I've created a project a blank new slate project called ABC sales outreach. Right. So here I wanted to say I want you to find 10 prospects contacts of ABC a marketing agency in Austin Texas fictitious that focuses on AI automation. ICPS are typically small physical businesses use Apollo for search and enrichment before sequencing it out on Lamblist is the outbound sequencing that we're using.

But actually you can use that or you can use Apollo as the sequencer also, right? Okay, maybe not use Lambdas here. Let's use HubSpot again because we already have HubSpot connected. So we're going to hit send on that. So all right, before I kick off the Apollo search, I need to narrow down a couple things so we don't waste credits pulling the wrong contact. So great. Okay, so it's asking me which small business I should target.

Let's say health and wellness. Where should a prospect? Oh, Austin Metro. Which decision maker titles? I only want to talk to the owner founder. Should I push these contacts into HubSpot to first today? Just deliver and reach list. All right, let's deliver the list first before pushing it. I don't want it automatically kickstarting and outreach for a fictitious company. Right. So Apollo, if you guys are not familiar with it, this is one of the data enrichment platform that you can use.

Again, you can use any other tools, right? So Apollo just happens to be the one that I'm using. But if you're new to even data enrichment, so basically it's a platform that has a congregation of this information and data uh about people about contacts, their emails, their phone numbers. So what problem does it solve? Well, it solves the problem of prospecting, right? Because if you're prospecting, for example, to small businesses and you don't know who the owners are, but you don't know their emails, phone numbers, how are you going to reach out to them, right?

So this is the problem that Apollo is solving. It's finding out the number of small business founders that are in the Texas Austin area for this example and finding out what their emails are, their phone numbers are so that I could run some outreach to them, right? It's asking me for some permission on Apollo to use the people API search. So, I'm going to hit approve on that. So, you know, you're going to get a lot of approval steps uh as you're using it, especially your first time.

And you just want to hit approve on that and let it do its thing. So, great. It's actually coming back with the 10 prospect candidates, you know, in the Texas Austin area. And these are owners and company names and the verticals and industries that they're in. And there are some of the, you know, contact details later on that it's going to pull. I'm blurring this out because these are obviously personal details, personal contacts.

I don't want to expose it to the internet. Essentially, what I'm trying to show is it's able to use Apollo and any other tools to enrich the leads, find the leads, and be able to do prospecting on your behalf. Right? So you go one step further into this is of course you know ask it to draft emails content which it can do very well again in the same way that we did with the marketing campaigns tell it how you want the email to sound like before actually pushing it into HubSpot or any other emailing tool that you're using to actually outreach to these guys.

And if you want a full rundown of a B2B sales outreach uh I did another video which did a comprehensive rundown again because these are multi-steps and I don't want to keep the video too long. If you really want to go into that particular use case, check out that video. I'll link it up here and down in the description below. So yeah, that's it. That's a quick rundown on what Cloud for small business is. And again, this might not be a new product from Anthropic.

It's more of a bundle of existing stuff with the connectives and the skills and calling it something that is friendlier for nontechnical folks. I personally think it is a great step for you to take if you're a small business owner and you don't really have the time to really deep dive into the very technical stuff, but you not want to be able to leverage AI in the best way possible, in the simplest way possible across for small business is really kind of the best way to go.

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