10 Claude Skills That Make Claude 10x Better transcript

Claude skills will completely change how you use Claude right now, and I think they're the most underrated and one of the most powerful features inside of Claude. But, most people are not using them at all, and the people that are using them, I don't think they're using it anywhere near their full potential. And the biggest problem is people don't know what skills they should build. So, in this one video, I wanted to share the 10 best skills that I use in my business right now day-to-day that has completely changed the outputs I get from Claude.

And along with the video, I also made this guide here. This is a complete guide to skills, but I also have the exact prompt for every skill that I'm about to show you. So, you could build your own with the same prompts I'm using in this video, and I have the skills.md file, which is a technical file you need if you prefer just to use that and not go through building the skill process since I've already built all these for myself.

So, I'll put a link in the description to this free guide, too, if you want to follow along with it. So, jump into your Claude account. You could use the desktop app, and you could use the website version of it here. One thing we have to turn on to make sure skills are actually working, you have to go to your settings right over here, and then on the left side, there's capabilities. There is one thing that has to be turned on under code execution.

Just toggle this on to blue because technically skills will have to write code in the background. You don't have to worry about it, but that's how skills get activated. And then, under the customize section, there's the skills page. This is all the skills that you will create that will all appear over here. You could customize and edit and delete any of them from here. And if you go to the browse tab, they also have skills that Anthropic, the company behind Claude, makes.

So, any of these could be installed on your account, too. And the nice thing with skills is they don't really slow down your Claude account. You could have 50, 60, 70 different skills. They're in the background, and Claude will only bring them into chat when he needs it to, and if you directly call for it, which I will show you. If you're brand new to skills, they're just a set of instructions that your account will remember, so things can be repeatable.

So, you could write things in your brand voice every single time that actually sounds like you, or create presentations, or dashboards, or websites that are on brand. Those are a lot of the examples I'm about to show you. Now, I'm going to start with this skill, which is to build an interactive dashboard, but every time you create a dashboard inside of Claude, it's going to look different. This skill allows you to create one that is on brand, so all your dashboard always looks the same.

Now, the way I use it is a lot of times I mess with CSV file, any type of Excel sheet, for example, that has data. Those are not really great to view for anyone that is not super technical, not super into spreadsheets. So, we want to create a polished interactive dashboard, right? That is not just static charts and static columns and rows. I'm going to copy and paste this prompt to build it. Ultimately, a lot of these end up making what's called a skill.md file, which kind of looks like this.

So, I included that here, too, if you prefer that, but a lot of times you could just pause it here and read the prompt, or you just get this guide here and copy and paste the prompt into your Claude account. And you don't have to do anything specific to create a skill on the customize tab. Technically, if you go here, you could press add, and you could create a skill with Claude. It will interview you. You could upload a skill if you found them with that MD file, for example.

You could write instructions. They also have a new thing, which I'm making a dedicated video for, where you record your screen, and it will learn a skill that way by being able to watch what you did, and then repeat it. That works for things that are kind of repeatable type of tasks. But, you don't have to do any of that because you could just say use a skill creator skill to build a skill that turns a CSV into a polished dashboard.

And I kind of told it exactly what I want. I'm going to send this out here. Now, typically when you build a skill, it will show you a demo output of what that skill will do, and then it will give you this right here to save that skill. So, you want to be able to save that skill here to your account, and this is the name of that skill, which you could call if you want, but typically it's going to know every time you want to turn a CSV into a dashboard, it's going to know to call that skill.

You could always update a skill, too, if you want to make any changes to it later. You'll always find that under the customize tab. Now, if I go to new, I could just type in a prompt like this, turn this CSV into an interactive dashboard. Now, by default, it will do that even without a skill, but the whole point of the skill is I have something that follows exactly what I want to happen with that dashboard. The colors, the style, the layout, all that was part of my skill.

So, I'll just upload a sample CSV file here, which looks like this. So, this knows, first, clean up the data, fix any broken rows, handle any missing values, and then build me the dashboard. And here is that interactive dashboard. Again, it looks exactly like when I made the skill, right? That's the whole point of building these once, and now you're going to get this kind of dashboard every time I give it a CSV to turn into a dashboard.

Now, what's nice about these is these are called artifacts, these dashboards, so you could just publish and copy the link and share it with anyone you want. Now, the next one is one of my favorites. If you create any kind of content, this is a skill that is going to be a content engine. And I'm going to use this prompt here to use again the skill creator to build me a skill that turns a raw transcript into a week's worth of content that sounds like me.

So, it needs to understand my brand voice, for example, and it needs to understand that what type of content that I'm asking for. In this case, it's a X thread, it's something for our blog SEO blog post, for example. So, it's very plain here, but that's what I recommend you do is typically build these skills with a prompt, rather than just downloading a skill.md file, because then you could really control this prompt and customize it for exactly what you want, rather than a skill someone else has created.

This is the whole point of these, that they're customized. Now, just to show you the skill that it creates, it has a lot of information that you would otherwise have to prompt every single time. You would have to repeat yourself. You would have to upload an example of what a LinkedIn post for you looks like. This has all of that in this file, and a lot of times it's not just a .md file. It has other elements to a skill that it creates behind the scene.

But now, let's take this for a spin. We'll go out and do a new chat. The one thing I wanted to show you is if you wanted to specifically bring a skill, you could press slash, and you'll bring a skill this way if you wanted to bring it that way. But by default, a lot of times, if you create that skill, it will know to use that skill if your prompt needs that skill. And all I have to do now with a new prompt is to say use my voice profile and turn this transcript into a week worth of content here.

And I'm going to just upload a transcript to a video, and the output is exactly what I was looking for based on that skill. So, by the way, if you used custom GPTs back in the day to create these type of repeatable task with a set of instructions, skills are a much more powerful version of that. So, I would recreate what you've created with custom GPTs if you use that inside of ChatGPT inside of Claude now with skills.

Now, if you do any type of research using any type of PDFs, for example, this deep research auditor is one of my favorites. This tells Claude to analyze PDF reports in a different ways to find internal contradictions within a PDF. A lot of times it turns individual pages on a PDF into an image, so you could see all the charts and analyzes it in a much better way in my experience, and it creates a really nice-looking layout of telling you exactly what it found as far as issues go with the PDF.

So, I'm going to build this one here and this time I won't show you the building process. Let me just show you with an example. I'll go to new and this time my prompt is going to be super short. I'm going to ask it to audit this report for internal contradictions. This knows to call up that skill and that skill tells it exactly what kind of output I want from it. So, I just have to upload that report. It's just a simple PDF report, but it could do it with much larger reports, too.

And this one creates this type of dashboard here. So, it will tell me what the findings are and I could filter it by high, medium, and low and it always creates this type of dashboard. So, every time I have a PDF and I don't know really where it came from or maybe it was AI generated and it has a lot of issues, this is the type of prompt I like to run it through here. Now, this one is really useful because if you've used AI, you know that AI almost always agrees with you, right?

It pats you on the back, you're always right. So, if you build one that works as a business partner, this skill is going to tell you where your flaws are in your thinking, something that is just not the default of AI. So, this one will pressure test a big business decisions before I would make it here and I kind of told it exactly the different parts I wanted to test out. So, I'll build this one and here's the prompt I like to use to test this one now that the skill is built.

I'm weighing a big decision, interview me one question at a time, play devil's advocate for me, and then give me a one-page decision memo. This is really useful. It may take a little while, right? Because it has to ask you what questions and so on, but I love this one question interview format. I use it all the time with AI anyway, but now it pulls in that skill that really knows what I'm trying to get at here. Now, I use AI for meeting notes all the time.

I use an app called Granola for example that does this for me. I have it built in inside of Google Meets and Zoom also that takes meeting notes for me. So, this one you will paste a transcript for any type of meeting notes, even voice memo, and then this will go to work. What it does is it turns raw transcripts or even missing notes into actionable steps. Now, for this one, I usually just say turn these meeting transcripts into a clean recap.

It knows what to do from there, and I upload the transcript. And this gives me a full summary. It gives me all the decisions that were made on the call. It gives me the action items and assigns it to the different owners here and anything that is left as open questions. Next one is on-brand email writer. If you use Claude, it's probably your favorite AI tool for writing. In my case, I've used Claude for writing ever since it came out.

It's been my favorite and my go-to AI tool for writing. I just like its natural tone. But with email, I need to tell it more specifically how to write because a lot of times even with Claude, emails still sound like AI wrote them. They kind of sound like a template. Well, this kind of fixes that, this prompt here for this skill. And you could build on this as much as you want to here to make it your own. But this will become your brand new email writer here inside of Claude, and you'll pull this skill every time you write an email.

On-brand presentations, this one probably saves me a lot of manual time more than any other ones because I create a lot of presentations. I create it to teach. I create inside of my company. I create it to show things to my team, to leadership. There's a lot of presentations that we typically have to make, but they have to look consistent, right? We can't just have Claude make a presentation and it looks different different fonts different colors every time.

You want to create one that's on-brand. So, this skill will be able to create one on-brand. And with this one, you also may want to use Claude again to create this type of a brand kit. So, I actually asked Claude to go to our website and create a brand kit for me, and I used Claude co-work for that. It saved that brand kit, and then I used this prompt, I combined it with that brand kit, so it knows our logos and things like that, and I give it a file that is our logo, so it has all of that.

So, now it could create an on-brand presentation. Let me show you what the result of that looks like. And my prompt is going to be really simple because it knows that I want one idea per slide. All those type of details, our brand kit, our logo, all that is already part of the skill. So, I said, "Turn this rough outline into a finished presentation." In this case, I'm actually created this multiple different times, and this is the one I have for this specific brand here.

And as you could see, this presentation knows our brand logo here, it knows our brand colors here. It also followed my specific instructions to have one idea per slide, really clean here, and you could make this look any way you want. The one other thing you could do is when you build these, upload an existing presentation that you made yourself, and it will be able to replicate that really, really closely. Now, if you have any competitors, this competitor teardown skill is really useful because you could tell it to go look at a specific competitor website and give you an actual plan, right?

A lot of times you may look at a website, but you don't have really any clear takeaways on exactly what to do. Well, this kind of helps you do exactly that. So, you could build the skill with a prompt that will create a structured teardown of a competitor. And in this case, it gave me a super comprehensive breakdown of just a couple of brands that I gave it here, but really useful and it's in a Word doc here, so it's fully shareable and editable.

Now, this next one here is if you make any type of YouTube videos because if you know anything about YouTube videos, really one of the main important parts of a YouTube video is the packaging of it. That's your title, your description, your thumbnails. Well, this skill teaches exactly how you want those to be created. So, then it could do it every single time, right? And I have a really simple prompt for this one, but every time now I give it a video transcript, once the skill is saved to my account, it knows to give me exactly the type of title and the type of description that I'm looking for.

So, then it's just simple copy and paste from there. So, and once that skill is saved, all I have to say is build a full YouTube publishing package from the transcript and I copy and paste the transcript. The nice thing is YouTube transcribes the videos as you're uploading the video, so you could do the title and all the packaging after the transcription is auto complete. So, I got that from my YouTube channel here. Now, you give me a bunch of different titles.

This is the one I actually ended up going with for that specific video, but the Claude features nobody's talking about is also a really useful one. He gave me the description I could copy and paste from here. Okay, this last one here comes in really handy, even though Claude is getting better and better with memory, this one is a skill to help with its long-term memory, especially if you use projects. Projects have their own contained memory.

What this skill does is it creates another file dedicated to memory, and then as you have a longer conversation, sometimes it forgets what you said earlier. Well, this keeps saving things to this file here with this skill. This one I obviously can't show you here, but just copy and paste the prompt or pause it here to read the prompt to tell it to create a file to retain more information for specific projects. Again, this document is linked in the description.

There's a few more on here that I didn't get to, but pretty much everyone I covered in this video, the prompt, the skill, the input, how to use it, and just the .md text file here is included here and is free to access. And if you haven't checked out my other Claude video I just made, that's 12 different ways to use Claude like a pro, but it's really not about skills. It's about different parts of Claude I didn't cover in this video.

So, I'll put that video right over here. Thanks for watching this one.