A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Claude as a Food Blogger with Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju

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Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we are welcoming Shruti Bhaskaran Mukhanju from Urban Farmy. Shruti recently made the leap from a successful career in management consulting to become a full-time content creator with Urban Farmy. In this episode, Shruti walks us through how she's moved well beyond using Claude as a chatbot and has started treating it as a genuine business partner, delegating tasks, building custom skills, and creating systems that let her spend more time on the work only she can do. If you've been curious about AI but aren't sure how to actually integrate it into your workflow in a meaningful way, this episode is a great place to start. Björk and Shruti talk about the different stages of incorporating AI into your workflow, why custom skills are one of the most powerful AI features for food bloggers, And why auditing your AI workflows on a monthly basis is essential to getting the most out of the tools available to you. Whether you are totally new to using AI tools like Claude in your business or are looking to take them to the next level, this episode will be super valuable to you. Without further ado, I'm just going to let Björk take it away.

Shruti, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Björk. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, we're going to— this is going to be a conversation people might think it's going to go in one way because we're going to be talking about AI. And we talk about AI a lot on the podcast, and a lot of the context around AI is threats, AI overviews, AI crawling our sites and ingesting our content, all of which is happening, all of which is real. But with anything, there's always some opportunities that come along with it as well. And we're going to be talking about some of those opportunities, which I'm really excited about. But before we do that, I want to hear a little bit about your backstory. I'm going to spoil the lead here a little bit. You've done a TED Talk on food systems. Uh, you have a Substack talking about how food creators can use Claude. You were also previously at Boston Consulting Group and recently left to work on your content businesses full-time. And so this was a recent transition for you, which I'm also interested to talk about. Tell me a little bit about what you were doing before this and then what that transition looked like to jumping into doing this full-time. And people, there's a lot of people listening who want to do that. And so we're going to dig into that a little bit.

Yeah, so I'm Shruti. I run Urban Farmy, which is kind of foodie, but like farmy because my background is actually, has always been at the intersection of energy and agriculture. So, I kind of like to describe it as climate before the topic climate became cool. I have a background in energy engineering and then an MBA and a master's in food systems from Stanford. Worked at BCG for the last, well, 12, 13 years now. I was a partner at a $14 billion company where I was primarily focusing on food systems around the world. And the genesis of the blog was that I've traveled so much. I've been a vegetarian all my life. I think at this point I've been to 67 countries where I've like traveled extensively.

Yeah.

And every time I would go to these countries, I'd think, oh wow, like I should make a vegetarian version of this dish, or wow, this is a great dish. It started out sharing stuff that way, and then the pandemic happened, and I realized, wow, this is actually like a— this could be a business, you know, this could be something I do in the far-out future, but the far-out future is here now.

It's here, the future's here.

It's here, the future is here in so many ways. I actually quit, I officially handed in my laptop and my badge last week, so this is very—

Oh, wow, yeah.

Right now, right now.

Talk about how you made that decision. Like, how did you feel confident? Boston Consulting Group, obviously a really well-known company. It's a great job. Um, you know, you're a partner. What does it mean to be a partner at, at a, at BCG?

I, I mean, I was one down from basically like owning the company. Like, as a managing director, you own the company. And I was actually coming up on managing director election.

So you have like equity ownership in the company?

Kind of, yeah. It's, it's a complicated structure, but essentially, yeah, I, I had account teams that sat under me.

Yep. So you had an established position at a well-established company, really well-known company. It's a great job and made this decision to transition into being a content creator. What was that decision-making process like? And even like, how did you feel confident in making the decision from a numbers perspective?

Yeah, no, great question. I think, you know, I kind of like hearken every, it's been in the works probably for 2 to 3 years. And honestly, everybody that's ever been a consultant, a management consultant especially, It's constantly evaluating whether the job works 'cause it's a high reward, but also like it demands a lot from you in a way that I think it's, you know, when I was younger in the company, I was literally traveling Monday through Thursday every week. And then as I got older and more tenured, I was still doing that except I was flying to London one day, coming back, and then I was flying to Nairobi and then I would be back and I was in Boston. Crazy.

A grind.

And then I had a baby.

Yeah.

As it always goes with these things. And, you know, you realize there's a little human that's not gonna understand, like, oh, you know, when it was just me and my husband, he's also in a similarly kind of crazy career. And so he gets it and I got it and we just made it work. But it's impossible with a child. And of course, I think BCG was very, very like generous and supportive and they've done so much to make it work, but at some point it started feeling like I was kind of failing at everything.

Yeah.

Like I wasn't quite as present as a mom as I wanted to be. I couldn't fully kind of like, you know, go into the food systems work and be in Africa like every other week as I needed to be in order for it to be successful. I was running this business on the blog that was probably where my passions are, and I was like, well, I can't really fully be there either. And I have always been a writer and that was like the first thing that died, right? 'Cause you're like, well, between like me having my day job and my child and then this second day job, where is the time? And that started conversations with me and my husband because obviously it's a big kind of financial decision as well. We were an equal kind of dual ambition household.

Mm-hmm.

And it's not that I took a step back from ambition, but I said, look, every job has portions that you kind of don't want to do, but you have to in order to do more of the things you want to do. And I felt like that balance just shifted for me over time.

Yeah.

And so I spoke to my husband. It wasn't an easy decision. We went back and forth on it, and I realized I can either drag it out, but that's not really fair to anybody at the company. And the team that I worked with especially has been like a family to me. They've supported me through very high highs and very low lows, and I wanted to do it with integrity, so I went back after Christmas break in January and I said, I am quitting. And then there was a series of kind of conversations on, okay, there are all of these projects, all these clients that you own, like what's the change management cascade? How do we tell them that you are leaving and what are you gonna do? Why are you leaving? Can we like all align on how we deliver those messages? And then at my level, I essentially had you know, a garden leave or a transition period where I was technically on company payroll, but wasn't expected to work. So think of it as like a really long PTO, um, in order to make sure that, you know, all the files are handed over and things like that. So occasionally there'd be questions, but then, but then last week I handed everything in and I was like, done.

Yeah. So there's this transitionary period where you're not technically working, but you're available in case questions come up.

Exactly.

Makes a ton of sense. That is something that I think is so important to point out, which is, and I've felt this too, and I've tried to get more gentle with myself in realizing that I will have seasons where things shift and things change. It might be macro change. We have kids now. Okay, what does that mean for us as a family, as a couple, How are we going to shift and adjust? And for a long time, I think for us, the biggest marker of that was kids, but for a long time, it's just like ambition and it's like compounding ambition and that grows and grows and grows. And then for us, you get to this point where it's like, okay, suddenly there's like a tension with my ambition. And what does it look like to reconcile the tension with that ambition? And It's a hard thing to do, but I think what I've realized is like, oh, there'll be multiple versions of that in life as it relates to work. Even like, okay, now our kids are in school. What does that feel like? Okay, that's different. That shifts things. All that to say, I think it's important for us as CEOs of our life to think about like, okay, in your situation, CEO of your life, You had one client, BCG, uh, you know, 2 probably, 'cause you're working on your side hustle. Um, and, and then it's like, okay, I need to like shift what my, who my clients are. And now it's like you've gotten rid of your biggest client and now you're working on the smaller client, building that up. And potentially it will become, or maybe is like, you know, as it grows, will become your main client again. And I think it's important for us to just think about that and talk about that as creators, as life shifts and changes and adjusts. One of the interesting things that happens with any transition like that is you bring over all of the expertise that you had. And I know part of it was in food systems, but also part of it was operational. You have your MBA. And it's really interesting for me to have multiple interviews with people who have multiple careers.

Yeah.

To see, okay, what are the things that you are bringing over into this work that you're doing? And for you, my guess is there's the food systems part, but then there's also the operations piece. Um, and you've seen inside a lot of different organizations and people working together and have strong opinions on how to do that well and to do that efficiently. Talk about what you brought over into your creator business that existed from the work that you were doing at BCG.

Yeah, I kind of think of, I mean, I've spent basically my entire professional, adult professional life at BCG one way or another. I've quit and I came back and I've quit and I came back and I kept coming back because I think I always tell people, even when I'm recruiting, when I used to recruit for BCG, it rewires your brain because a normal person might say, okay, look, we have this project, let's say you are launching a cookbook or an ebook or whatever. I wanna launch it in 3 months, so I'm gonna try to get to 30% in the month, first month, you know, 60, 70% in the second month. I'll finish everything and then I'll do like a couple rounds of edits. That seems like a pretty linear, logical way to do things, but that's not how project-based consulting works because what'll happen is a client will hire us to come and deliver a project that would have normally taken them a year or 2 years, except we get to do it in 3 months. Which means the way that we used to work often, and there's pros and cons to this, and it's never as an individual entity, right? Like the benefit of a large corporation is that you do have teams and expertise that you can pull upon. Sure. We would say, okay, end of month 1, we actually have 100% answer, but it's V0 of the answer. And so, and then you bring in, okay, you bring this person who can provide input on this thing and this person who can provide input on this thing. And then you come to a V1 of the answer, and then you share that with the client, and then they tell you, okay, we like this, we don't like this.

Yeah.

Let's rev on that. And then, you know, by the time you hand in a final deliverable, it's maybe V15. And, you know, you always have like a separate folder somewhere in your SharePoint that's like VFFF because there's just so many iterations. And I really do think that that mindset and that kind of critical thinking in some ways to like take a big sounding problem and break it up into parts that can then you iterate on individually, but also collectively. It's probably the single biggest skill, mindset, system, whatever you wanna call it, that I think I applied to everything in my life, not just the blogging.

Yeah.

It was not just BCG or consulting. It wasn't just the blog. I think even vacation planning sometimes becomes like that. Which my husband has lots of thoughts about, but you know, you can take the girl out of that, but you can't take it out of the girl.

Yeah, right, right, right. So it's, I remember Mark Zuckerberg having, uh, he was in an interview and he talked about how a lot of his approach to any huge task is this realization that like any significant project is just breaking down, uh, that project into little steps. And it's like, that's You can do really incredible things if you're taking a few steps and moving it forward and breaking it down and saying like, okay, it's going to be massive undertaking to do a cookbook. But actually what it is is like 10,000 little things. And if you can put all of those together and work through it, then you'll get to the end eventually if you continue to work through it. Yeah. What we're going to be talking about today is like, you know, you'll have some of those small tasks and projects that exist within any, within the context of any work that we're doing as content creators, we now have some really powerful tools to either completely do that task for us or to like aid us in getting it done really quick if it's not completely doing it on its own. So talk to me about how you have started to integrate Claude within your day-to-day. Maybe talk about kind of what it looked like to start with. And then what it looks like now. So like, what was the entry point? And then fast forward a little bit and say, you know, paint a picture of what it could look like for creators to really be leveraging these tools.

Yeah, I think if I had to summarize it in a sentence, I would say that AI handles like the production overload, right? Like that would previously require small creators like myself. I don't have a team. It's just me and, you know, a couple contractors here and there or whatever, but essentially it helps me operate, like I have a high-end expert team that each has expertise in different areas. It started out, I mean, I think AI has been in the works for quite some time. My husband works in tech and he's also an engineer. So I think fundamentally our household is constantly like this early adopter insanity, right? Like we have, I think I counted last, 18 Google Home devices in a single house, which—

Perfect.

Yeah. Nobody needs that much, but we do.

Yeah.

You know, my husband's constantly tinkering. You know, he was like building these Raspberry Pi devices at one point. And so we would constantly talk about AI even before it kind of became a household name in some ways. And I think that's where it started, you know? And I started just like probably everybody else did, which is like the step 1, which is essentially using it as a chatbot, telling it to, hey, like write me a meta description for this post. Here's the post. Or write a pin description for this thing. But that's really like step 1. Step 1B might have been editing. So instead of just like asking it to generate stuff, you give it a lot more context, a lot more input, work in a project and say, here are 10 examples of my best writing, emulate that. Here's what I wanna say in an email, write a first draft. So there's like the editing creation with inputs, which was like, which came very soon after. But I think right now I'm probably in like a phase 3 or 4, which is 3, which is really like allowing AI to do tasks on my behalf. A lot of times it's like really mundane tasks. Like this morning, you know, I just finished this massive category overhaul on my website, right? I was like, okay, I had all of these like intermixed things and whatever. I cleaned up the taxonomy and now I'm like, okay, I have, you know, by course, by diet, by season. It's like very clean. Each post can only go in one of these places. It's MEC, as we would call it, mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive. So there shouldn't ever be a post that dies on the side because it didn't fit neatly anywhere.

Yeah.

And in the past, yes, you can export your set of posts and you can put it in a Google Sheet, but you'd still have to go in and manually do all of that. But now I have Claude connected to my Airtable, which has all of my posts in there. And I told Claude, here's the clean taxonomy, create columns, take your best guess based on what you know about the post, And what we have like discussed before and do a first pass, you know, it's not gonna be amazing. You know, it's not gonna be like 100% perfect, but that task would've taken me 5 hours.

Right. And probably would've been similarly, even though it's a human. Yeah, right. Like it might've, might've been the same quality output. You probably would've, like, for me, I would've started really sharp, you know, first 2 hours I'm really into it and then I start to drag a little bit and then I get sloppy.

Take a break and you're like, oh, I swear.

And then I'm like tired and then I'm like checking a World Cup score. Or, and like, and I think that's the thing that I'm reminding myself of, especially with work like that is like, I have the same potential to have like a sub-100% output, but if I can reserve my concerted effort for taking the output from 90 to 100, it's such a better use. Like it's so much easier to edit something than it is to create something. And I've talked about this on the podcast a decent amount before, but this idea of 10-80-10, which is a Dan Martell phrase that I heard from him, maybe exists in other places. I think that, I think AI is the best example of that where you are taking 10% of the time. Realistically, it's probably 2% of the time to shape the idea with like a long form. For me, it's like a long form rambly prompt, voice prompt. That's not bad. That is dumped into, for me it's like ChatGPT, Claude, or using Open Claude. We can talk about all those tools as well. And then it's like getting an input back based on that prompt. And sometimes it takes some time and you're checking back on it. But I really think your point around like, hey, it takes something that would've been 5 hours of your time, it gives you 85, 90% of that. And then you're able to shape the last 5 to 10% is such a great example of You know, giving a tool, uh, the ability to like use its, uh, best work. Like it's high, it's, it is knowledge. And I think we are leasing and renting this knowledge and it's like, how do we put it to work? And I feel like that's such a great example. So that was level 3, you said, what, what does level 4 look like?

Level 4 is actually co-opting AI as a thinking partner. It comes with guardrails, you know, it's gonna like tell you, and I think this is the, I think a lot of people tend to ask it for opinions, and especially these days I've seen a lot of like, oh my God, I hate it when it just agrees with me so much. And so, and this was true for me, and it's another example of something that I probably ported over from consulting, which is that, you know, you never, like consulting, you would never get to an answer where the answer was only touched by one perspective. or one person's perspective. Every single piece of like finished product would've had the hands and thoughts of, call it a dozen people. How, and you could do it, you know, if you have a big team and, you know, you, I think you've had like your general manager on the podcast and, you know, there's Lindsay, there's Emily, there's all these people that could potentially provide inputs.

Yeah.

Or if you're a solo creator, I think you can actually tap into AI to create a board of advisors. And—

That's great.

I do it at a project level. I primarily use Claude for my workflows, but I actually call on ChatGPT or Gemini within Claude, use, I mean, within Claude using API calls when I need like a second opinion, or Gemini is great at search compared to Claude. So like if I actually need real-time data on something, then I tend to pull on that. But essentially for every project I have, so a content project, an email project, a digital kind of funnel project, I set up a board of advisors and I will intentionally prompt it to be adversarial. I will tell it, beat it up, you know, tell me everything that is so wrong. Like if it's a content problem, you know, you could be, hey, like assume that you are a new vegetarian cook. what are all the things that you can mess up with this recipe the way I have it written right now?

Mm-hmm.

Or if you are cooking for a mixed diet household, which is something that a lot of my readers do, 'cause they're vegetarian, but maybe their family is not. What, how, how are, how are they thinking about that? You know, or if it's a product funnel, it's like, hey, like here's a screenshot of, you know, you don't even need to give a screenshot, but like pretend you are a marketing expert or a sales, like psychology expert, or you can, you can really bring in that expertise and force it to put that hat on and really like give you contrarian perspectives. And it doesn't need to be always contrarian, but usually it's a perspective that builds on your own intuition and helps shape and refine your intuition moving forward. And that's where, you know, it's never gonna be truly all AI. What AI can do is provide you with a bunch of inputs. You are still the owner of your business. So sometimes it'll say something and I'm like, hmm.

Yeah.

That's not, I'm gonna ignore that because of whatever reason. And sometimes the reason might just be, it doesn't feel good in my gut and I'm just not gonna do it.

Yep.

And that's okay. But I think that's in my head, probably level 3 or 4.

Yeah. Blind, it's like blind spot detection. It's, um, Exactly. You know, it's, it's, I love that idea of board of advisors. You know, one of the things that I did 10 years ago was thinking about who's my personal board of advisors, personal board of directors, like these, and I just met with one of my mentors this morning, like, who are the people that can kind of speak into my life? We can create a version of that within the context of our businesses. It's not going to be on the like human-to-human level, you know, like meeting with a mentor, but it is an expert level to say like, maybe it's a nutrition perspective, maybe it's like an SEO perspective. When you're doing that, are you creating that as like a project within Claude and then pre-building instructions for how that, how the response should happen within that project? Or are you doing it on a prompt basis where like you have a prompt that's built, it's on the project basis?

It's within a project. I use skills, which is essentially a repeatable workflow within Claude. And so I usually engineer skills and it's a common skill actually. It doesn't, I don't specify what the avatars are. I actually just gave it examples of what good looks like, like what was a good example of something that came up and tell it to use it as inspiration. But it's a common skill that actually lives across all of my projects. So, 'cause it lives at like, you know, I basically have the same thing on, you know, whatever replicated across your board. And I will, you know, you just use a hash slash whatever the name of the skill is. In my case, it just says like advisor. Okay.

Yep. And this is good, like 301. Can you explain the idea of, so in the 101 example, you have Claude and you click new chat and you say something like, what are some ideas for strawberries if I have that as an ingredient? Give me 10. Okay, it gives you 10. You can ask some follow-up questions. When are strawberries in season? Okay, it gives you some examples of what that might be. That's great. That's helpful. But what you might find as you start to do that is is that you'll have something that you want to do on a recurring basis. It's something that is like, for me, originally started with like, I would use TextExpander, which is this tool where you can like save a block of text. And then I would have like a prompt that I would often want to reference. And I would, you know, early on I would just like TextExpander, do that prompt. I'm like using this prompt all the time. But then this thing called skills came along, which allows you to essentially wrap up a skill, a repeatable thing that you want to do, and then call it in Claude whenever you want it to happen. So can you talk about for somebody who's never created a skill, how do you create a skill and what's a good first skill to create?

Oh, good question. Um, so I'm going to use Claude as an example, but you know, there are similar functionalities in other AIs as well. Claude itself has 3 components, right? So you have chat. which is where you're just having a conversation. I tend to think of that as like a scratchpad. You have a, it's a text message to a friend. You're not doing things, you're just chatting. And then Claude on desktop actually has Cowork, which is really as it sounds like. It's like having somebody sit next to you, have access to your laptop. It's like, you know, you go to Best Buy and you go to Geek Squad and you're like, help me fix this thing. And you know, you're watching them and you know, so they're not doing something completely crazy. But they can work on your laptop while you're watching them. And so that is probably where 90% of like the level 3, level 4 stuff happens. I tend to build my skills in code, but you don't need to be in code in order to have it work because co-work is just—

That would be the third area. Chat.

Exactly.

Co-work.

Co-work.

Code. And all of these are Claude. It's like little literal tabs.

Tabs essentially. Yeah, exactly.

The fourth that is probably worth mentioning as well, which isn't within the desktop app, is design. Which I've used and it's like really incredible. So there's within the desktop app, chat, cowork, code, and then if you go to the online version, you can get design, but you're working within Claude Cowork to create the skill.

Correct. That's right.

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The thing with Cowork is that, you know, in chat you have projects, so, but the projects live on the browser. You have to upload a bunch of things and it's static. So if you, let's say you had a brand guidelines document as a vegetarian blogger, let's say tomorrow I start eating fish and now I'm like, oh crap, I need to like update this. I have to basically remove that, re-upload something else. But when you work in Cowork and you have a project, it actually basically looks at actual files on your desktop, or you can point it into your Google Drive, which is what I've done. And so that way when I have projects, I'm, and it's not a good idea to create one project to rule them all because the way you write on your website might not be how you talk on your social media, right?

Mm-hmm.

Like those things have different kind of fidelities. And so I basically have a project for every kind of Type of content or like what am I doing with the business type of thing, and let's call it like social media, website, email.

Like even social media is broken up because Instagram, TikTok, Facebook.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So there's I have I believe I have a content which is really like bread and butter recipes that go on the site. So it's anything related to Urban Farming the site. I have email. I have Instagram. I have a business one, which is much more like the unfun things, like it's connected to QuickBooks or, you know, financing and things like that. I have—

And to pause real quick, I think this is another important piece. When you say connected to QuickBooks, uh, this is another 301 type, uh, conversation. You have Claude, or some people use ChatGPT. You can do it in ChatGPT as well, but we'll talk about it from the perspective of Claude. It's really, a lot of us use it within this chat interface, but it's actually really smart at interpreting any data as long as it has access to that data. And so what you've done is you're keeping your books. A lot of us are doing bookkeeping, even if it's just in a spreadsheet, you could do this, but let's say it's QuickBooks. You've said with your Claude account, you've connected Claude to QuickBooks, so then you can interact with your QuickBooks account from Claude. So—

Exactly.

Um, and that's really quickly as we're talking through the skill piece, how would somebody do that? Like if they want to connect QuickBooks to Claude, what does that look like?

There is a, so they're called connectors and it's essentially a plugin, right? Like for your Claude in the same way that like WordPress, I'm sure if you have, you know, a, a whatever, a ShortPixel, like it kind of is able to work with all the stuff on there and do things to it. It's very similar. So in this case, you click the plus. and there's a set of connect, it'll show up, right? It'll say, you know, in any Cowork window, when you click it, it'll tell you add this particular window to a specific project. It'll ask you whether you want to use a connector and they're toggled on or off. But like when you click on connectors, there's a bunch that are just like, it's like kind of like installing a browser extension. You can go search for it. QuickBooks has one that they have developed themselves. Kit has one now, if you're using ConvertKit or Kit for your email platform. Airtable has one, Canva has one, Gmail, Google Drive. So it's basically, think of it as like a literal connector that will help bridge the gap between your cloud where you're talking to and whatever's on the other side that you're trying to access the data from.

It's like a portal. Like it's like you have a pipe and the pipe now connects This place where you're working into this other source of data just for you. Like, obviously it's not, you know, that data doesn't get out. And, um, a super specific example of how I use a version of this, it has access to my email. Um, and I was like, oh, who, like, we've had long had these like shrubs that need to get like trimmed in our house. And I was like, but then I saw this lady and we have like a, a very like, uh, small HOA for like the shared areas. And she was doing landscaping. I was like, I wonder who that is. And there's like one kind of like patriarch of the neighborhood. And so just with a quick voice text, I was like, can you look through my email and find Mark's email and then draft an email to him asking who the person is that does the landscaping? I'll go in, review it before I send it. Like before I would've had to like make a note, like, okay. And then I would've had to go look up his information, write the email out. Oh, okay. Not a big deal to do that, but you do it 200 times in a day and actually it's like a huge time saver. Um, or similarly, this, you know, Jenna on our team asked me a question this morning about something related to the books. And instead of me having to go and figure it out, I took a screenshot of what she asked. I dropped it in and I said, we're trying to reconcile these 2 payments within Amazon Associates. You know, it has the login to Amazon Associates so it can see that. Okay, can you go and figure out like where the difference is from this and then answer the questions and I can take that back. And so these are all these things that you can do where you're removing these, this friction. And I think most people are still using these tools as just like a chat interface. And so all of that to say, like, let's get back to this idea of the skills. Uh, we, we're going through this process of, um, creating a skill. And so we talked about there's the chat interface, there's Cowork. There's code. If you log in online, there's design, which is super capable. But within the context of co-work, we're doing these things together. We find that we're doing something consistently repeated. We want to create a skill. Great. What do we do?

Yeah. So essentially you would just tell it to create a skill. And the way that this works is that all documents, text documents within Claude, and I guess like not so much ChatGPT, this might be a Claude-specific thing, are saved as Markdown files. Markdown is basically similar to how, you know, if you have a notepad on your laptop, it would like always save as .txt. It's very similar. It's just another format, like how Word is .doc or whatever. Markdown is just like more AI-readable formats. So eventually it'll create essentially what is a repeatable prompt. Except it is capable of learning and updating its memory over time. And so you have really like a one skill, you know, one place where this particular skill lives. A specific example I can give you is that I, you know, when I was still working in corporate, I couldn't really do social media 'cause there's lots of like—

Rules.

Legal constraints, things like that. So I was like never on, you know, you could never see my face anywhere, et cetera. And then once I quit BCG, I started taking over my own social media and that was, I finally like was like on May 1st, I was like, I'm doing this. A great example is that for hooks for reels, like I have a lot of video content that I was shooting because I love shooting videos, but then I was just like kind of not really thinking about it, just randomly posting things. And I said, okay, May is the month that I work in like quarterly sprints. Every quarter I take on one project and only one project because Otherwise nothing else gets done. And this quarter's project is Instagram and I'm still working on it. But for instance, I was like, okay, I wanna like come up with hooks. Here are hooks that are really good examples that I've seen that caught my attention. Here's some stuff that I learned by following X, Y, and Z people and what they've said. You know, I've like, I think at one point I gave it like a Food Blogger Pro podcast transcript from when you might have had, I think it was Lexi from Crowded Kitchen. And then Micah was on recently and it's just like, you know, taking, it's like basically a hodgepodge of like, here's everything that's probably rattling in my brain, right?

Yeah.

Except better because now I can actually give you the actual thing versus me paraphrasing something.

Right.

And then I said, okay, like take all of this and then I want you to write me a skill that's gonna give me, you know, hooks for any concept I give you. But the key is that you don't just write the skill. So I say, okay, here's all of this, process this and give me the text of the skill. It'll give you something. And then I'll say, okay, let's do a dry run. Here's a series that I'm developing. Here's like the, here's the full blog post for that thing. Here's what the video actually has. You know, it's 10 seconds, it starts with blah, blah, blah. So like a quick description. And I use WhisperFlow for this.

Yep. Which is a tool you can just talk.

Exactly. So it's like basically a dictaphone where I can, and with Pretty good. It has AI, so it like picks up stuff better than I think just the regular microphone. And so I just tell it a bunch of things and I said, okay, generate 10 hooks for me and it'll tell me. And then I was like, okay, but like really, like is this suspenseful enough for somebody to want to stay on this recipe? Like why would you? And you go back and forth until you get to a point where you're like, okay, I got it. Like this is a good set of hooks. And then I will usually tell it, okay, now go back. Look at our conversation. What would you, what did you learn and what would you change? Sometimes I will repeat this process 3 to 5 times with different people.

You're revising the skill, you're working together.

Exactly. So it's like working with a team member. And then once I'm like, okay, this is actually pretty good, I will say, write this as a skill. And essentially what it does, it takes all of that, puts it in a document, and then it'll tell you save the skill because it's a literal document, right? And so you Save it in the folder where you have your Claude pointed to or where you would wanna call this from. So in my case, it was in an Instagram folder that I saved the skill to. And the great thing about skills is that you don't need to tell, you don't need to activate it. If it realizes that I'm writing a hook, I want it to give me a hook, it'll automatically call the skill in the same way that your brain works. Right. If you—

Like you've built that as a knowledge base.

Exactly.

Uh, but you can also, one of the things that you were talking about is like, one of the skills that I built was like, I'll do a review of the books that we have, but I also have a skill that like goes in and then reviews the books, like to see if there's anything I've missed. And I kind of essentially give it all the information that I've considered to be important. And so it's like, I'll do it still, but also it's like a little bit of a double check. And so there's like a slash command for me. It's like slash QuickBooks that triggers it. So can you talk about a slash command within the context of Claude and skills and how that works if you want to like trigger or pull up a skill that you've created?

Yeah. And I think it's the, it's basically once you've created the skill you use, in my case it was slash hook. And so anytime I want to generate a hook, if I, if it doesn't pick up for whatever reason, I can just say, Use /hook in your thinking to generate these hooks. Um, and it just, it kind of goes in, reads that file, and then comes back and, and spits out, um, the applied version of that skill for that particular concept.

Yeah, that's great. So, um, a couple important pieces to point out to people. So what you're doing is essentially creating a skill. Sounds complicated, but really what it is is text. That is telling AI what to do. And similar to what we've talked about for a decade, which is like processes and SOPs. And exactly a huge burden lifted from any entrepreneur is like an SOP. Also great if you can continually update those. The great thing with AI is not only does it take the burden of creating an SOP off your shoulders, because it's a drag to like open a Word doc. And to type steps out. Like nobody wants to do that. It's not fun. There probably is, there probably are people realistically who like doing that. Most people don't like doing that. And so what you're doing is you're essentially talking or taking a transcript from a podcast or an article that you read and saying, use this as a reference. Also, here's my personal take on how I want it to look. Okay, let's do back to your point before V1 or V0. Okay, we got a version of this. Let's workshop it a little bit. Let's change it. Okay, now what does it look like? You're doing this iteratively, and then you get to a point where you're like, okay, 90%, 95%, let's wrap this up and put it into a skill. That doesn't mean it's frozen in time, but it just means it's good enough for now. And then you can reference that moving forward. This gets superpowered once you have these portals that are connected to all the different places of your business. Whether that be, um, you know, QuickBooks, whether that be your email, um, Dropbox folder, suddenly from within Cowork, you're able to reference these places and you're able to build these skills. Where it also gets interesting then is you can start to, uh, schedule these. So you aren't the one prompting it, like it's doing it on its own. So can you talk about— within Claude, what that looks like. If you've created a skill and maybe you want that skill to run on a schedule, once a day at 8 AM, do this thing. How do you do that and what does that look like?

Yeah, so there are basically scheduled tasks. I have an email triage skill, which is probably a great example for this. So I have at this point, like I think 4 emails that are all work emails that I created at various points for various things. And so the first thing I did was I pointed all of them into one Gmail when I connected, because you don't, there are connector capacity constraints. Like it won't be able to connect to multiple Gmails.

So it's one of the biggest bummers, like with ChatGPT, I just did this. And it's one of the things I love most about OpenCLAW is like, it has access to all 3 of my email addresses. And so it can look through all of those. And I just was trying to set it up within Codex. I'm like, oh, like I, I'm sure it'll get fixed eventually, but like, yeah. You can only have one. So you've solved that by having all the emails go into one central inbox. Yeah.

And honestly, I should have just created the one email and used it for everything, but it was just like, you know how you start out, you're like, urbanfarmy@gmail.com, and you're like, okay, now I need a workspace.

Yeah, exactly.

And so anyway, I pointed everything into one email and that email is now connected to Claude and I have a daily brief task. That basically runs at 6 o'clock every morning. And what it does is, I mean, it has a bunch of different parts, but I will talk specifically about the email part. It will go into my Gmail every morning and it will scan all new emails and it will tell me, like, I have buckets created. So for instance, there's one bucket that is basically, here's like real action things, you know, like, oh, like somebody sent you an invoice or Google Search Console is sending you an error report. You're like, oh God, I gotta go fix that.

Yeah.

So there's probably some stuff in there that's like, you know, the TLDR highest priorities. There's a bucket that is like paid products. So like for instance, if I have WPRM is my recipe card. So like if Brecht has sent an email with like some kind of an update, new features. So these are things that I actually subscribe to that I should probably know more about what features are releasing so that I can make better use of it. So I have that separate. From newsletters. So things that I subscribe to, you know, like, oh, Casey Marquis wrote an article on Search Engine Land, or, you know, whatever, Simple Pin Media sent out a new podcast, Food Blogger Pro sent out a new podcast.

Thanks.

So then there's kind of like, yeah, no, it's just like, you know, okay, cool. Like, you know, and if it's information, if it's, yeah, it's information and I don't need to, like, I, I, you know, in the same way that like there's only so many hours in the day, there's only so much processing capacity for consumption. And I'm like, honestly, I'm trying to. Part of why all of this AI workflow became even important is that I'm trying to reduce consumption and do more production or just be more present in other areas of my life. And so it'll process all of that and then it'll give me a quick digest in the morning of like, you got like 70 emails, but I think these are the 5 that you will like. And at the beginning it took a little bit of, and that uses the skill of Here are the things that I, here's, first of all, even developing the buckets that I just outlined was part of the skill development process where it was like, okay, here's my inbox. Like, how would you sort this?

Yeah.

And then it came up with some stuff and I was like, well, you know, the newsletters are not the same as the products. Like when, you know, Brex sends me something, I wanna actually know what, what's happening. Or if Nordpress sent me something, I wanna know what's happening versus, you know, this is not the same as that. Uh, and then even within newsletters, there's like a couple of different buckets, you know, there's like, Newsletters about blah that I don't really care about. Yes, I subscribed. I should probably go unsubscribe, but it requires me to go like click on 70 things. Okay. And then, you know, over time, and then I built that skill. And so what it does is every day at 6 o'clock in the morning, it calls on the skill, goes into my email, grabs all the things, runs the skill, and gives me a briefing. The briefing also does other things. So this is where your, you know, AI compounds. point becomes even more salient is because the briefing is not just email. It also connects to my Airtable and it has an Airtable triage skill that essentially tells me, hey Shruti, this post is due on Monday and you're supposed to be reviewing and scheduling it today.

Uh-huh. Yeah. It's like your editor.

It's my assistant actually, right? I had an executive assistant when I was at work. Can't do that right now. So I've just made AI my assistant in some ways.

Yeah, that's great. So I think people will start to understand the power of this when you start to see, okay, it can do its knowledge work. And it's, that's been one of the biggest shifts for me thinking lately where, uh, I was listening to some podcasts and it's specifically around like, what is the value of a company like OpenAI or Anthropic? And it comes back to like, what is the value of knowledge? And it's like, actually for us as knowledge workers, that's really what we're doing is we're using our knowledge. And so what is the value of knowledge? We're going to find out like as these companies become knowledge resources and then they lease that knowledge out to people at a cost. And that's what we're doing is we're paying a ridiculously low amount of money, $20 a month, $100 a month, $200 a month. to have essentially knowledge. Uh, it's not all knowledge known to mankind, and it's definitely not your personal taste and opinion, but it is a lot of knowledge that we need in order to get done what we need to get done. And a lot of the things that we are doing, uh, require knowledge of ours that isn't valuable. Processing of our brain, you know, energy that isn't valuable, like reviewing the books, right? Like that's valuable. It has to happen. Or like me reconciling and trying to understand why the Amazon payment is $10 off. Yeah. Um, and if we can get in the habit of like getting rid of those things, getting those things off of our plate, Usually previously you had to like hire somebody to do that who was like capable enough to do it, but also that you wouldn't be hiring somebody who's, you know, um, this like senior level CEO salary, but to do like a, so you're, you're having to like pattern match knowledge level. And, but now you're able to say like, okay, there's some of these things that need to get done. And it's such a great multiplier for those really capable people, whether you're a solopreneur, Or you're working as, you know, we have team members who are using this and it's like, oh, it's such a great multiplier for sharp people to get rid of some of the things that are a burden to allow them to do the things that are more important. And I think that's a big piece of it is this isn't necessarily like you set it and then you can go like have, you know, tea and cookies, which you could do, but it actually, what it does allow you to do is the things that are actually more impactful And, uh, you know, are more human, are the differentiator with what you're doing. So part of it is managing these processes, setting these up, setting up these systems, these SOPs, so that stuff can get taken care of. Then my question for you is like, what have you found to be the valuable things that you can slot in as time becomes available?

Before we get there, actually, there's like 2 other things that I wanted to point out.

Yeah, please.

One is that it accumulates cruft. in the same way that your brain accumulates cobwebs, okay? Like you probably don't remember everything you studied in college, but it's like rattling around somewhere at the back of your brain. So I think it's really important when you build skills, when you have projects, to have like a monthly auditing system where you actually go in and take, it takes 15 minutes, but what ends up happening is that AI averages things. It doesn't ever overwrite. And so if I told it to write in first person for something, and then here now I'm writing something else you know, I'm writing an article for the Seattle Times and I cannot write in first person, but then now it's like mushed both of that up and it's a really garbage output. It's like a very simple example, but that tends to be, I think, the main reason why people get frustrated.

Yeah.

'Cause it's like, oh, because when you go to a new AI, it doesn't have any of that baggage. It doesn't have all the context that's like conflicting context and now is able to give you a cleaner output that's not as Personalized, but it's cleaner. And so the goal of—

It's like a reset button.

Exactly. It's like cleaning your phone. You'll probably have like 60,000 screenshots. Imagine if your phone actually like actioned on all of that, you'd be in trouble. So clean it up. I think the other thing I would tell them—

So can you talk a little bit about that? Maybe another good example is like, you talked before about within your project, how you advise it to be adversarial. If you accidentally said that as like a general feedback, like, hey, always be adversarial. And then you're like, gosh, this is like, Whenever I'm using AI, it's like beating me down. That probably exists somewhere. How do you know? How do you actually audit it? Like, where do you go? What do you do? How do you see what exists?

So every month I go, I have like an hour or 2. I think now it's like expanded to 2 hours, but think of it as like performance reviews for your team, right? Except your team is your AI now. And so I think the first Friday of every month, I kind of open all my projects. So I go one by one. and I actually open the project instructions. So in the case of Cowork, it actually is like a file, it's called Claude.md within that project. I go open that and sometimes it would've started with like 250 lines and now it's like 1,000 and you're like, oh my God, do I need all of this? I'll usually skim through it and sometimes I'll put it back into that same window and say, hey, there's a lot of conflicting stuff here. Can you identify the conflicts? And then it would flag something and I'd be like, no, no, no, this is not important. This is not important. And the great thing is I don't even need to type any of this. I just use Whisper Flow. So sometimes I'll just be like on the treadmill and I'll be like, okay, like, nope, this doesn't make sense. That doesn't make sense. Let's just delete this. Let's clean this up. And so now you get back and, you know, it does, one of the benefits is that it does accumulate over time. So it's not gonna go back to 250 lines, but maybe it's 350 lines versus 1,000 because it's just absorbed random bits and bobs of memory and context.

Mm-hmm.

So I tend to do that. For every single project.

Clean it up. Maybe something got in there and you're like, actually, this isn't super helpful.

It's not.

Yeah.

I don't want you factoring this into future conversations. Yeah, that makes sense. Great. So that was one of the things, kind of this audit, make sure that you're kind of weeding the garden to make sure that it's exactly what you want it to present as.

Exactly.

What would the other thing be?

There was one more thing. I think we are often talking about AI as replacing tasks that we were already performing. Maybe by ourselves poorly because we don't have the time for it. We hired somebody, whatever. But I think AI is, because the fact that it is not human actually allows it to do things that you would've probably not even been able to do with a human.

Hmm.

An example here is that, you know, I have been for, I have another skill, which is a voice of reader skill. So it's just, you know, /voice-reader. And what I did was, this was really important because I went through a bunch of like brand positioning exercises in the last like 3 to 6 months as I realized I wanted to take this full time and I wanted the, who I was writing to, to be clear and consistent across all of the different platforms. Even though my voice might be different when I'm on Instagram stories, I'm talking in a slightly different way than when I'm writing a blog post. than when I'm writing Substack, but I wanted it to still feel like it was the same person talking to the same people. And so I said, okay, like help me kind of like think through the voice of reader analysis. And so what I did was I took every survey I ever ran on the website. I took every comment that has ever been published on any one of my posts, which daunting even for somebody that's only been blogging for 5 years. So I can't even imagine what that's gonna be like.

Yeah.

But big journey up. Yeah.

And then I took all of that. Threw it into Claude and I said, hey, analyze this. And then I brought in my board of advisors and I said, think of this and tell me who my reader is. And I didn't give it any indication. I started a new project, so in some ways it was truly blind context. And I said, okay, who is it? And it was really enlightening because I think it came back and I said, protein is such a big, important conversation these days. Everybody's talking about high protein. And I thought, okay, like the numbers are important because, you know, as a vegetarian, that's the first question anybody asks you. Like, where do you get your protein from?

Where do you get your protein?

Yeah. But what I realized was that people weren't really concerned about the numbers as long as it, like, what they didn't want was feeling hungry a little bit later.

Right. That was the problem. Not actually—

That was the problem.

Yeah.

Number is like kind of an artifact or a symptom of the problem, but it wasn't like the pro— it wasn't the root cause of the problem.

Yeah.

Or another example, which I think I mentioned a while ago, is that My website is vegetarian recipes, which is non-judgment. You know, I'm not asking you to completely give up on all animal products. I wanna be friendly and a resource for you regardless of where you are in that journey. And a lot of the recipes on my site, I tend to describe as happens to be vegetarian. You know, you don't even realize it's vegetarian. Like mashed potatoes are vegetarian, but have you ever thought about it that way?

Sure.

Probably not, right? Like baked potatoes are too. Like, okay, maybe you add bacon, but if not, Yeah. Sour cream and like whatever it's, so I was like, okay, you know, I think I had an impression that most of my readers were somewhere on that journey to becoming vegetarian, but not there. What I realized from running this analysis is that that's not actually true. My readers were vegetarian. They were cooking in families that were not consistently vegetarian.

Sure.

And what they were struggling with more was that they were cooking 2 meals essentially.

Yeah.

And so what did that lead to was that I said, oh wow, this is really interesting. And as I was going through this, I said, okay, like, but I don't want this to be a static snapshot because readership changes, you know, like if I suddenly blow up on Instagram, the people that are coming in from there might not be the same as the loyal, like newsletter readers that have been with me since 2020 when I started the blog. And so then I built in some like guardrails and I said, okay, we're gonna like split this into like buckets. And because Claude has access to my Gmail, which is where all my comment moderation comes in for the queues, I run all my surveys through Google Forms. You know, I, you know, Instagram is the one that is like not super great right now, but I'm trying to figure it out. But there's also Kit and it has access to my actual emails. And I do actually have good discipline in terms of categorizing. Anytime somebody sends me an email, a reader sends me an email, it goes into, it actually now it's like auto-labeled. So if somebody, you know, that is sending me an email, then it just goes into a review queue. So then now this is a skill that runs once every month. It builds up on the first baseline so that way it's not going back like 5 years of data at any given time. It's only processing a month of data and it tells me if anything has shifted. And honestly, I have actually used that to really tweak the language. on how I am positioning different things. And the biggest example of this was that I like posted a story on Instagram. I think it was like 2 weeks ago or a week ago where I also like gave it a bunch of like prior stories I'd posted. It was like, hey, like this is the, you know, analyze this, like what seems to do better? Like tell me what happened. And it like gave me like, visually it's able to process screenshots. So it like did that and then it said, here's like 3 things you can try.

Mm-hmm.

And then I tried, I used that plus the voice of the reader data that I had. I posted a story and that story, I mean, it got like 60% viewership of my audience. And I added 125 subscribers to my email list from one story. I was like, wow, this is, this is really good because people probably feel more seen when you talk to them using the words that they are describing their pain points in.

It's such a great example of like audience development, customer development, you know, and so often we think—

And engagement, right?

It's community. Yeah. We think we know. We know what people need, but like people actually know what they need and they'll just tell us in their words. And if we are able to create a solution that helps them with the thing that they have said their problem is and use that same language to frame up the conversation to say like, I've heard you say this, here's the solution to that. The ability for AI to process a large amount of data. Is, you know, it's one of the best skills that they can have. Yeah. So valuable. So we could talk for hours here. Um, this I think will be great kind of kindling for people who are still in the, like, use Claude and ChatGPT as like a chatbot, um, to say like, hey, let's light a fire around what can you actually really do if you lean into some of these tools? Uh, my last question for you would be.

Yeah.

When you are using it, um, does it always have to be on? So like you were referenced like being on the treadmill and like, uh, you know, interacting with it. So do you have it on a computer that's always on that you can make sure that when it is doing a task that, that it's, that it's open and running? Okay.

It is.

That's the other piece that I think exists for people. Um, that's different than how we operate right now is like. Having an always-on computer so it can continue to work, um, when you're referencing and interacting with it.

It is the primary downside, I would say, of Claude is that you, Claude CoWork only works on desktop and it has to be on. So you can access it from your mobile phone through what they call a dispatch feature. So it's basically like a text message service that will like ping your computer to start a task or something like that. But it is pretty rudimentary. It's not great. When I said I was on the treadmill, I literally have my laptop with me.

Have your computer, yeah, sure.

It's a walking treadmill.

Yeah, yeah, I see.

But that, and the second thing is if you use multiple devices, so let's say you have a work laptop that just sits in your office and then you have another work laptop or an iMac and then whatever, you cannot, it doesn't work. So you have to have a primary single device.

Yep. One of the solutions, I do this and I know a lot of people do this as well.

Open Cloud would work with that.

Yeah. Like having a Mac mini that just sits headless, meaning it doesn't have a, uh, you know, it's so creepy though. No, like it's just like, it's like, hi, I just came online. Who am I? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. Uh, but could you, could also do that with Claude where it's just like always on and then you use like a screen, you know, uh, it automatically does that when you're on dispatch. Sure. Keeps it on. Yeah. Um, Shruti, this was such a fun conversation. I think super important as creators to think about like, how do we really lean into these tools? To allow us to do, we didn't get a chance to talk about this. We can have you back on. Uh, but, but really the spoiler with it is like, this allows us to do less of the things that computers are good at, which is transactional. It's like, some of it's brainstorming and creative, but like the worst things that computers are, uh, capable of are the best things for us to be doing, which is like the human forward.

Mm-hmm.

It's videos, it's interaction, it's, you know, going live on a platform, whatever that might be. Like those are going to be the differentiators for creators. And if we're, you know, toiling away at like moving files back and forth or like analyzing data in a way that we don't need to, you know, that's going to be time that's not going to differentiate ourselves as creators. So for those who want to follow along with what you're up to, what you're doing, you've got this great Substack, which I think would be the highest match for creators who are here. Talk a little bit about that, how people can sign up for it.

Yeah, it's called Maison Claude, like Maison Plus, but Maison Claude. I just thought it was a funny name. And it kind of started because people would send me DMs all the time and just be like, hey, like I was doing this thing, like, have you figured this out with Claude? And I was like, yeah, sure. Like, here's how you do it. And then at some point I was like, I should just write about this somewhere.

Yeah. Instead of sending an email, it's now a newsletter.

Yeah, exactly. So now I'm just like, okay, like let me, throw up some stuff that I'm like experimenting with. 'Cause I think there's, there is a gap in some ways of like, there's a lot of like really advanced Claude thinking.

Yeah.

There's a lot of really advanced food blogging thinking. There's not a lot of like mixing of the two of like, and not even, I think there's even like Claude for bloggers, but it doesn't always apply to what we're doing. 'Cause like, for instance, like there are hard bright lines, right? Like I don't use Claude for recipe development. That's what I am good at and that's what I enjoy. So why would I do that? Or I don't use it for creating photos or, you know what I mean? Like, I think there are some parts that, again, to your point, you allow, you keep to yourself, and then let's outsource the things that are not as value-driven, you know, it's transactional, manual, et cetera. And so I think there's, but there's also a whole unsexy piece underneath it, which is like any other system, like your car would break down if you never got the brakes checked. So how do you do those things so that you can get the most value out of AI? I think that was the kind of—

Yeah.

perspective that I started the Substack with. So you can find it at masonclaud.substack.com or reach out to me anywhere on Urban Farmy. That's my handle across all of the other platforms where I do content.

Awesome. Yeah, totally. This is great, Shruti. Thanks so much for coming on.

Thank you.

Hey there, this is Emily again. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a minute to rate or review the episode wherever you listen to podcasts or share it with your community. It makes a huge difference for the success of our podcast. I also wanted to mention that Shruti is starting a 4-week challenge that helps solo business owners and small teams build an AI system to organize their work, reduce repetitive administrative tasks, and make it clear what to prioritize first. The goal of her program is simple, to spend less time managing the work and more time doing the parts you actually love. The program is called The AI Operating Engine for Bloggers, and she's running her second cohort from September 14th to October 5th. The link to the program is in the show notes for this episode, and you can use the code FBP for $45 off your registration. Next week on the podcast, we'll be chatting with Jeremy Carrasco, one of the co-founders of Riddance AI. Björk and Jeremy will be talking about AI media literacy and how to spot AI-generated food content and how to make sure that your work stands out in a world that is increasingly flooded with AI content. It'll be a great episode. We hope you'll tune in and we'll see you back here next week.