Claude Code for B2B Marketers (with Corey Haines)

Hey, it's Dave.

I want to give a quick shout out to Knack for sponsoring today's episode. Knack is a purpose-built email and landing page platform, and they're also one of our longest running sponsors. When I create our newsletter each week, I spend a bunch of time, more recently, with Claude, my friend Claude, as my editor. But once I'm done editing the newsletter, it's not as simple as just getting my copy from a Google Doc and hitting send. If you're a B2B marketer, you know that.

So what happens?

Someone has to take that output and turn it into an actual email that renders in Outlook follows brand guidelines and ships. You know this story. The last mile still feels slow and manual. Knack has made this a lot shorter. They just launched an MCP server that connects your AI assistant directly to their platform. So now you can describe the email you need in Claude or ChatGPT and draft it like normal, but it automatically starts building in Knack for you. You get an email that comes out following your brand rules automatically. No manual cleanup, no broken HTML, and even better quality than anything your team built by hand. The marketing ops team at OpenAI is actually running this workflow right now. They intake internal campaign requests from Slack, an AI agent structures it into a ticket, Knack MCP generates the email, and a marketer refines and ships. This is the future of marketing. You should go check it out at knack.com. That's K-N-A-K dot com.

Hey, it's Dave. I want to give a quick shout out to Vectr for sponsoring today's episode.

Vectr is a contact-level ads platform. You probably have anonymous buyers lurking in your funnel, people you can't identify or follow up with, people you can't target with any real precision. So you end up throwing ads at job titles and hoping the right person sees them.

Vector fixes that.

Instead of targeting job titles and crossing your fingers, Vector lets you build audiences from actual people, the ones on your site that are clicking your ads and checking out your competitors. They're launching an MCP server that lets you connect AI like Claude or ChatGPT directly to their platform. It connects to your LinkedIn ads and site visitor data. So instead of clicking through dashboards, you just ask your AI a question and get an answer. Hey, which ad creatives are fatiguing? Which companies are engaging but not converting? What's actually driving pipeline right now? It turns your data into something you can use in the moment.

Go and check them out.

It's vector.co. That's V-E-C-T-O-R.co. Vector.

You're listening to the Dave Gerhardt Show. Exit.

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If Don Draper had access to AI today, there's no way he would ever go back. Think about it. Don sits in his office, he dreams up a concept, and then he waits. Peggy comes in and writes the copy. Then they send it down to Bob in the art department. They build the mockup. Weeks go by, meetings happen. They got to get it approved. Eventually they have posters they carry around. That, that was the job then. My guest today thinks that we're about to look back at how we're doing marketing today the same way that we look back now at Don and Peggy working on pen and paper to produce ads in the Mad Men days. His name is Corey Haines. He is the founder of Conversion Factory, Swipe Files, and Marketingskills.com, which now has over 20,000 stars on GitHub. He's gone all in on AI. He's one of the sharpest B2B marketers in SaaS, and he's been fully AI-pilled since 2023 when He got laid off, flew to a stranger's house in Atlanta he met on Twitter and spent 2 weeks learning how to code. In this episode, he shows me how he works now. Live keyword research pulled straight from an API. 10 programmatic SEO pages generated in about 30 seconds. He's cross-referencing Google Search Console, Fathom, and keyword data to produce the kind of deliverable an SEO consultant charges you 5 figures for. He also showed me a rev-op skill that audits your HubSpot and builds out your lead scoring model. He even showed me a video editor running in his browser that allows him to use Claude to edit videos live on the spot that Claude made for him. But the real unlock in talking to Corey is the mindset shift. You stop being the typist as the marketer, or in the case of Don and Peggy in the creative department, and you actually become the creative director. And Claude is the full-stack team for you. This episode made me feel a little bit more like an AI optimist. Here's my conversation all about AI and marketing skills with Corey Haines. All right, Corey Haines is on my podcast today. I'm excited to have you, man. No better time to have you now because I think if I were to look up the term AI-pilled marketer, I would find your face right now, probably.

Oh man, I got to make that my new metal title on my personal site. AI-pilled marketer. I like that.

Yeah, you should. You should. I see you every— if one more person sends me a freaking Corey Haines Claude Code skill, I'm going to, I'm going to, you know, I don't even know what I'm going to do, but it's great. You, you're doing some cool stuff. Can you— we're going to get into a bunch of stuff today, but before we do that, can you just kind of like level set? Who are you? Maybe some people listen to the show will know you built this Swipe Files thing a couple of years ago, but I've seen you now. I associate you with AI and marketing, but I'm not a good explainer. So tell me the Corey Haines, like 1 to 2 minute backstory, and then I got some questions I want to get us into.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, gosh, 1 to 2 minute version. Spent my whole career in B2B SaaS marketing. I bounced around a couple different startups, got laid off in COVID, started doing a bunch of like consulting. That's when I started Swipe Files. It's a newsletter, has like 27,000-ish subscribers and just sharing everything, case studies, interesting tactics. And then in 2023, I started a SaaS marketing agency, Conversion Factory. And actually a month after I started the agency, which funny story, it was like June 2023, I got laid off and I had booked a coding bootcamp the week before. And so like July, I started Conversion Factory. August, flew to some random house from some guy on Twitter outside of Atlanta for 2 weeks, learned to code. And then ever since then, I've been, I guess, like AI-pilled.

I don't know.

I feel like it's getting a little bit cliché and icky to say things like that.

I like it. I love it. I love, I love the phrase. I'm saying it over and over and over. Are you? Okay. I'm telling everyone I'm AI-pilled. This is just how I am. My wife, I always complain to my wife. I'm like, nobody ever asks how I'm doing. How am I doing? But then she's like, it's because you don't shut up. You ask so many damn questions. But I don't let people gloss over.

How are you doing, Dave?

Huh? I'm doing great. I'm doing great. I'm good. I got— I'm good, man.

Okay. Now, thank you for asking.

I'll put that in the bank.

Yeah.

So 2 weeks at some guy's house in Atlanta off of Twitter.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. This guy, Ryan Culp, he's like a serial SaaS entrepreneur, founder. He's like acquired some businesses, sold some businesses. He made some, some courses for learning, we're learning Ruby on Rails. And I'm a marketer, but in spirit, I'm a founder and an entrepreneur. And I'd always wanted to build things. I was just really tired and frustrated of trying to lean on someone else to do that part for me. So I was like, screw it. I'm just going to lock myself in his house with 9 other strangers for 2 weeks. But that was his whole offer. He was like, hey, I've made these online courses, but if you haven't done them yet because you just haven't taken the time, fly to my house, stay here for 2 weeks, and you will learn how to code by the end.

I love it. I think it's an amazing forcing function. It's like having a personal trainer. It's like my to-do list. I have 1,000 videos I'm never going to watch. But if the forcing function of like, I'm going to pay for this thing, I'm going to fly there, I'm going to be there, I got nothing else to do. My question was going to be, what made you want to go from marketer to learning how to code? And I think that perfectly describes that. I've always described myself personally as like, I'm a marketer, but I'm like entrepreneurial kind of marketer. I'm a cool kind of marketer. Like I'm not just a marketer, right?

I'm not just a shill.

Yeah. So the timing of this then, like 2023, obviously this is who knows whatever GPT model that was, but that was the thing. And so it's probably like that thing ran a parallel track to like you going deep, learning how to code, getting into the more engineering side and building side. Perfect storm, perfect timing comes along. Anthropic, OpenAI, all these tools come out. Was there a moment for you that was like, damn, I can see how this is gonna change how I would do marketing if I was doing something today? Like, what was that moment?

Yeah, it's funny 'cause I think a lot of people describe it as, oh, the first time I used ChatGPT or the first time it made copy that wasn't blah blah. For me, it was at that coding bootcamp. I was already using ChatGPT and using it for marketing and copywriting things and trying to, you know, use it as my, my copilot and my brainstorming assistant and whatever. But when I was at that bootcamp, so there's this thing called an IDE, it's a code editor. That's where you write code when you publish to an app or a website. And so there's a bunch of big ones, you know, VS Code and Atom and all these ones. And while I was at the bootcamp, it's like 10 random dudes in this guy's garage, right? And so we're all just like, struggling and fighting every day to figure out how to make this stuff work. And some guy was like, hey, I just found a VS Code fork that has ChatGPT in the code editor. And we were like, what? No way. Because we were already also getting used to having ChatGPT kind of squash bugs for us and problem solve and like, why isn't this working? Okay, it's giving us some code back. It's not very good, but we're going to keep copy and pasting. And that was Cursor. So I started using Cursor, and Cursor was like, okay, this is an IDE that has AI in it. And the unlock there is that you're not just like copy and pasting things back and forth. It is in your workspace. It has full context of everything that you're doing, that you're working on. And immediately for me, that was like, oh, this is how AI should work. AI should be in all the things that I'm doing and implementing and building for me. I shouldn't have to be like copy and pasting back and forth between everything. And I feel like only now, 2 years later, are marketers and everybody else catching up to that same kind of moment of AI being in your workspace because it was first in the IDE for developers. And now 2 years later, marketers are like, Oh my gosh, what if I can have AI in my email marketing platform? What if I can, like, yeah, it's awesome, right? Like, this is what I kind of saw and realized 2 years ago that is only really now recently possible, honestly, because of things like marketing skills, because of Claude Coe, because of having just a little bit of technical acumen to be able to upload, uh, or, um, copy and paste API keys in the right places, but But Cursor was the big unlock.

So tell me about shifting now into— so you've built this thing called Marketing Skills. Let's use that as a— before we maybe show some stuff, talk about Marketing Skills.

Yeah. Do you like my SEO-optimized name for it?

I do. I love it. My— I'm the worst namer ever. I always go for the most literal, the literal name. If it's not cute, I don't want it. So, you know, well, I guess all my names are not cute, so I got it all. Marketing Skills. So how did you create this? And what is it for people that don't know?

Yeah, Marketing Skills is a collection of skills for AI agents. Anthropic originally created the paradigm of a skill, which is essentially like a hardcoded prompt in an AI agent like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, you know, whatever, pick your poison. So the skill allows the AI agent to do things better than it would before. Because it's all gone going off of training data and a lot of good examples, a lot of bad examples. And so the skill helps to make it better at that thing and also gives it really specific SOPs, processes, frameworks. It's sort of like, this is exactly how you should do it. Do not deviate from it. Gives it really tight guardrails. What I started doing was I'm coding now. I'm using Cursor. I'm liking that workflow and I'm trying to take that workflow and do everything marketing in it as well. But I'm struggling because I have to keep copy and pasting the same prompts into Cursor every single time. I have to figure out how do I give it the right context and load in the right information for what I'm working on? How do I connect all these tools together? So I started building a GitHub repo. Of like, this is my brain. These are all of my Swipe Files newsletters. These are my agency SOPs and playbooks. These are the templates. These are the, you know, so on and so forth.

Were these things you already had in your head, like a framework for this, a methodology for that, or did you have to make— Yeah, you had them already. Okay.

I'm a big frameworks guy. So like everything in Swipe Files, every course, ebook, whatever I've ever created is like, yeah, me just trying to make sense of how to do something. And so I just, I have to break it down.

Can I give you the opposite? I'm not like that at all. I'm much more of like a freestyler.

Oh, that terrifies me.

Oh yeah, of course. Everybody's got their own tastes, right? But what was cool for me was actually being able to use Claude explained my style and the things that I like for the first time. And so I was then able to create skills from that. And so I've had this Claude project forever where I edit my newsletter and I can't ever articulate what my editing style is and what I like and I don't like. But I was able to say like, hey, what are the patterns that I have? And so I basically created like the system prompt from that. And so now I have it and now I've been able to like give that to the whole team, which has been so helpful. Or like, I'm not a designer. I feel like I know what I want, but I can't say it in design language. You know how like We'll be driving down the road and, uh, you know, my wife would be like, look at that little, you know, 1960s style, whatever, colonial. I don't even know what the hell does that mean. I can't say those things, but I can go to AI and I can say, these are 3 websites that I really like. By the way, Corey's site is marketing-skills.com if you want to look it up and we'll show a bunch of stuff too. But like, how would I describe that style? Now I have someone that can do that. So that's essentially what skills are. Now it's like, damn, this was the big unlock for me. It's like, Oh my gosh, I go back and think about things in my marketing career. Like, dude, I used to be the bottleneck for everybody on edits, on landing page. Like it used to be like when I was working at Drift, it was like, did Dave, did DJ take a look at this page? Now it's like, if we had this skill, we'd be able to go and reference it, which is so cool. And this is why I want to have you on because you've built a bunch of cool stuff. People can go look it up, but I'd love to maybe think about 2 or 3 examples for people. I don't know if you want to show something or if you just want to talk through it. I've got several things that are particularly useful for B2B marketers. Having you on is not just like a generic guy to talk about AI. You actually like worked in this world and did the job. So I'd love to have you show some stuff.

Yeah. Do you want me to share my screen right now?

Share it.

Share it.

Okay. A couple of ideas for you. Number one. Okay, so I have this little environment. It's called my skills demo because I've done this like several times now and it's really scary to try to do this completely unprepared.

You really know how to make a guy feel special.

All right.

Thank you for that.

This is my usual date spot. Yeah, I come here every time. I know what to order. No, it's out of love to try to give the audience the best thing possible.

So good. Nobody listens to other people's shows. Just this one. So this is good.

All right. Just yours. The number one in the charts for B2B SaaS marketers. So, but this is a terminal. I was trying to explain like, okay, what are we even looking at here? This is a terminal. It's a specific terminal called Solo. That doesn't really matter. One thing we might want to talk about, we can jump around a whole bunch, is like, why use Cloud Code in the terminal versus Cloud Codex or Cloud in the browser? Essentially, the closer to the metal you're going to get, the more power and more options you're going to have. And so I just can never go back. Like, once you start using Cloud Code in the terminal, you don't want to do it anywhere else. I've made this little demo environment.

And you feel that way even since like recently they've— there is an interface now in their like desktop app that is Claude Code. You still feel this is, this is where you want to be at?

Yes, because God, I hate to be so annoying and talk about first principles, but—

Don't, dude, this is— people love this stuff. Are you kidding me? They're like, wait, you send the email on Tuesday? What time on Tuesday?

Okay. Yeah.

Is that, you know, so it's okay.

So this is my like superpower a little bit is because when I was at the bootcamp, I did everything the hard way and I learned to code. So I— and when you learn to code, it's more like you learn how the internet works. And so for like first principles, you just understand, oh, this is how a web app works. This is how coding works. This is how everything gets rendered in a browser and a bunch of other jargony gobbledygooky things. And so every time that I see a model update, which there was one today, actually, as of this recording, Opus 4.7, every time that I see an update in one of the coding agents, I sort of inherently know what's possible and what's not possible and what can be improved, what can't be improved. And so every time that I look at an update on the Claude desktop app, I love it. And I think eventually all these different versions of Claude are gonna converge into the same thing. But on the desktop, you're still gonna be hamstrung a little bit. You're just never gonna have 100% control unless you're building out of the terminal because the terminal is like the backdoor jailbroken version of accessing your computer and all the tools in your computer. The browser just being one of them. Your desktop app is like one layer higher. It's better than the browser, but it's still not like full jailbreak mode. And then the browser is like nerfed normie mode. So you're not going to have as many options. So I'm like, I'm always going to be a Terminal Stand a little bit because I'm like, it's not that hard. It's just open up the terminal and get Cloud Code going. It's not, um, I made this whole site for you to make it really easy.

Well, I also feel like what now is like, I can actually ask Claude to explain anything that I would need anyway. And so it's like, hey, I'm trying to do this. And it's like, oh, here's how you, you know, here's what this means. Here's how do you get it started. I was on a webinar recently with a bunch of people learning Cloud Code for the first time. And like 20 minutes in, all the comments in the chat were like, wait, what, what is, how do I install this? What is the terminal? And I'm like, cause I'm an A-pilled— I'm an AI-pilled guy now, Corey. Obviously I'm like, Claude, how do I do this? You know?

Yes, problem solve your way through it. It's not rocket science. AI is everywhere. Use it somewhere. Copy and paste things back and forth. Take screenshots. Figure it out.

All right, show me some stuff. I think my message to everybody is like, I think this is how I learn. I can't say what's good for you, but I think Corey actually saying this is a perfect example. I could watch a million videos. I could listen to a million podcasts. Things don't click for me until I have to like go and do something for real. And so it's like, give yourself a project, give yourself a task to try to go and do. And maybe now you'll give us some good examples to get inspiration from.

Yeah, I've got a couple of things maybe that we can layer on top of each other. So let's start with this. Let's show the Data for SEO capabilities by doing some basic keyword research for my form builder SaaS tool, which is just a demo site. But we'll do some keyword research on things related to what a form SaaS would want to rank for. And then give me a list back. Do it quickly. I should have said make no mistakes. Sometimes I gotta like, for these demos, I gotta tell it, don't go off on a journey for 10 minutes. Just do something that I can show the people, please. Couple things. One, I love watching the AI work because you kind of understand what it's doing. So what I've done is I've uploaded a bunch of my API keys and login info for a couple of tools that I use in the terminal so that it has access. So another reason why the terminal is goated is because you can just do stuff like this and, and then you just tell Claude, like, figure out a way to make this work. You're not dependent on the Codex little connectors and these fragile little integrations that everything has to work perfectly every time. Cloud will figure it out. Cloud Code specifically will make anything work, and you can just chat with it until it does. So what I'm trying to get it to do is to do some keyword research for this tool, Data for SEO. This is just an API for SEO data. It's really cheap, so it's a great way to just like screw around and see what's out there. But while this is going to, I'll go on a little tangent that the biggest limiter right now for what marketers can do with these agentic tools is just the capabilities that these marketing tools let you work with the AI tools. They need APIs, they need CLIs, they need MCPs, they need all the acronyms for developer things. You can only do as much as these tools will let you through a coding agent. So this is one that was like, hey, this is an API-first product. This was built to be used this way. Not every tool has those capabilities. Every one of these things that it's doing is it's pinging the API, which is just going and grabbing structured data somewhere, and then it's pulling it in and it's trying to organize it here together. So this is pretty magic because think about the process of keyword research. I have to sit down and think, what do my customers care about? What are they probably searching for? What are my competitors doing? Let me see if I can go reverse engineer. What they're trying to rank for. And then I have to go and screw around with something like Ahrefs for like a million years, build a list probably in Ahrefs or in a Google Sheet somewhere, and then try to organize it somehow. AI just did all of this in 30 seconds, which felt like an eternity waiting for this to populate here on, on the live screen share.

Look, I mean, I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on SEO projects, and what you get out is a spreadsheet back, you know.

Right? So people will look at this and like, this is kind of what you would expect. Okay. We have some alternative-based keywords. We have these PDF form builder, Excel form builder, Google survey form builder. But the point is that we have all the data in front of us. We have some long-tail use cases. We can keep prompting it. We can keep saying, give me more keywords. Help me think outside the box. Now I can start to feed it some additional points. Like maybe let's say, find me keywords on form templates. This will lead into the next thing that we're gonna do. And I can just have a chat with AI to find all the possible keywords that I might be interested in. One of the things I found specifically about SEO is that you don't know what you don't know. So like the hardest part about it is just trying to be exhaustive and comprehensive. And what is all the different things that I should be looking at? Every single competitor, every single like tangential website that could be playing in the same space as me? How do I cover all of my bases and make sure that we're, we're thinking about everything that we should before we build our keyword strategy and make sure that we're going after the right keywords? AI is the ultimate, like, brainstorming machine, right? It's going to go look through everything, build a super comprehensive list. It's going to dedupe, it's going to do all that work for you.

So what do you do with this? Okay, so I get all this, like, this is cool. I'm doing some keyword research. This is going to help me narrow down some keywords. We want to go try to rank for some particular topic. Okay. What? Okay. But so what?

Okay. So what? Let's do this now. So this is a programmatic SEO jackpot, 30,000 combined monthly volume across template keywords, mostly low competition. It's making some suggestions here. So I'm gonna use one of my own skills and I'm gonna say, let's use the programmatic SEO marketing skill to build out some pages that target some of these keywords. Just produce the first 10 and then show me the localhost version of the page once you create it. Because what I wanna do now is I want it to actually do something from this because you're hitting the nail on the head where you're like, all right, this is some cool data. This is definitely nice. But now if I actually want to implement this, what do I do with this? This could be a year-long project. How do I take all this structured data, all these keywords, How do I organize them? How do I build content around each of them? How do I build the pages, design the pages, make sure that the pages are like up to snuff SEO-wise, all the technical aspects, and actually frickin' launch this thing, right? I mean, this used to take me a couple of months, right? Like programmatic SEO was like, well, this would be the whole deliverable.

The first step would be like, here's the audit.

Mm-hmm. Here's the data. Here's the plan.

Here are the keywords. You're able to just reference your skill and it knows the skill.

Yeah. So what happens with a skill is that it's this hardcoded prompt. So this actually gets saved in this secret folder called.cloud or.agents in your computer. So when you download or install a skill that gets saved on your computer, it's not like some browser page that it's referencing or has to go look up like it's actually saved on your computer, and all the skills that you save are immediately referenceable at any time. Now, if I were to— you can kind of invoke them in a couple of different ways. They're made to be kind of smart so that if you say, hey, let's build some programmatic SEO stuff, then it should know to invoke this skill because of the keyword programmatic SEO. You can also just tell it, use a skill.

Got it. So once the skill has been installed, then that makes that the rest of that happen.

Yes, exactly. Now it's available for it to reference. And there's a whole skills marketplace. I don't know if you've seen this before, Dave, but I spoke at these guys' event like a month ago in New York. This is a directory of skills. There's 91,000 now out there. There's skills related to everything under the sun, right? These are a bunch of mine. For a while here, I was in the top 10, and then Microsoft came along and was like, we'll take that, thank you.

Wait, so did getting featured in this site though lead to why you have so much to discoverability on GitHub. You know, you— I saw you, you're flexing the H1 on your, you know, above the headline is your 21,569 stars on GitHub.

Let's go! That's the new flex. Definitely flex.

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Yeah, but there's skills for everything.

Yeah, this is cool. I think this week Ramp published this, like, how they made this basically operating system inside the company, and they have 300 skills from all the employees inside the company. It's like, man, that's so smart. Like, we're going to democratize the knowledge inside of the company. Anyone who does anything that's repeatable work, every company now can have their own internal library of skills for people. Hey, I'm just thinking about things we've done in the past. It's like, hey, we need to template for like sending out an email to our VIP customers to like offer them some swag. Oh, there's a skill. Just call that and then send it, right?

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, the skills are awesome because it gets saved on your computer locally. You can download my copywriting skill, for example, if you want to like write like Corey Haines. But then if you want to change it and make your own, all you have to do is edit it and now it's your skill. You don't have to like upload it anywhere. You could rebrand it, re-upload it, share it somewhere else. You don't have to necessarily, but they're completely forkable and editable. So these are a ton of amazing starting points, and then you can make any of them your own. Let's just go through really briefly what it went through. So I told it to do 10 because again, that helps us be able to see something faster. Each one of these programmatic pages is gonna be based off of a template, and we have this really nice URL structure. It's going to name the URL, the target keyword, the estimated volume for it. And then it made these 10 pages. It's going to talk a little bit about like the strategy. Now we could dive into like what is in my programmatic SEO skill. The funny part is like, I don't think anyone cares, to be honest. No one ever freaking looks. Sometimes people are like, so how does it work? I'm like, did you read it? It's just a markdown file. Yeah, it literally just made this right now. I didn't have this prebuilt before. That's why it's scary to do this live, but it made this. We're on a /templates/index page. And now I can go to each one of these pages. I have an actual order form template. We have a lot of text. We got an FAQ. We've got the call to action. You can see that we've got a clean URL. These are pages. I can create thousands of these pages based off of real keyword data by One, getting data for SEO, and then two, using the programmatic SEO skill, which is building these pages locally on my computer. This is all with Next.js. I have this, uh, again, this little form demo repo because it looks nice and you don't have to start all this stuff from scratch. But this all is just getting built live right in front of me.

It's amazing because there's a bunch of different use cases for just this one example that you showed, which is like, you know, forever. Marketers have had to make lead magnets or multiple pages, and it's like you just created 100— whatever, even if it was 10, 100 pages. I'm going to click on each one. So this is a made-up software company that their product is forms. I'm going to go download— yeah, actually, no, I need this. I need an order form template. So I'm going to go to Google or whatever, I'm going to search research survey template, I'm going to download this for free. In order to do that, I got to put my email address in, and this took 20 minutes of your work. What, what would the steps be from like, okay, this is all good, I bless this, it's working, I actually want to make this live on the site. How do we— I'm not a developer— how do you bridge that gap? Is it, can you just press a button?

Even better, you just tell Claude, make this live, push this to prod, put this on my site. Yeah, no, seriously. So GitHub is the central source of truth for anything that is code. It's actually for more than that. It can be text, it can be whatever. But at the end of the day, GitHub is usually the storage place, the central source of truth for anything. So I would tell Claude, I'm not gonna do it here, but I'm gonna tell Claude, push this to GitHub and then sync with Vercel. For example, Vercel is a hosting platform for Next.js. It's gonna look at my GitHub that I just uploaded this to, and then it's gonna create all the pages. That are synced with GitHub. Simple as that.

A lot of people are listening, like they're using Webflow or they're using HubSpot. Is there a way that this would connect there?

Yeah, that's interesting because for one, so we've seen that at my agency, we used to do everything in Webflow and in Framer, and now we're only doing things in Next.js because it's just way, way easier, way faster, way more scalable. It's totally possible. It's just, you're going to be fighting it a little bit. Something like Webflow, they have a CMS API, for example. You can upload all this data via the API and populate things in the CMS and then publish that to Webflow. But you still have to go in and like design the page in Webflow. You have to make sure everything's populating correctly. You're still going to be doing things fairly manually. Again, this is the totally jailbroken version where all you have to do is tell Claude.

It's interesting cuz like a bunch of people that listen are at an established company. They're not just gonna blow up the website and do this, but if I was starting a company now and you needed a website for it, this is absolutely where you would start. Is the future gonna be like you don't ever log into a web app again to like edit? Am I ever gonna log into like a landing page editor and like change the title of a landing page ever again? Am I just gonna do it here?

I don't know. It's a good question. Like a lot of these website builders, I think that they're trying to catch up and they're trying to build a lot of this agentic stuff. So maybe in Webflow in the future, you can talk to Webby or whoever their Claude agent is in Webflow, and it's building things in Webflow just like we are now. And then you can also edit it on the page in like a WYSIWYG kind of thing. But it's for sure not gonna be the way that it has been the last 15 years or so, however, like the modern website builder experience is like. And I think that's true for every marketing tool. I find myself being like, hey Claude, upload my email newsletter that we just wrote together to kit.com. I don't wanna copy and paste it and like build that out. Hey Claude, go grab all the form data for the survey that I just sent to my customer and then do some analysis on it. I'm not gonna put it in a spreadsheet and like look through it row by row. That's crazy. Take any marketing tool and the main way that you're, you're gonna interface through it is not through like clicking through the AI. It's gonna be connect to Claude and then ask Claude and Claude becomes the driver. You're the copilot, like instructing it where to go, what to do. Have you seen those rally races where the driver's going like a bazillion miles an hour and he's got like mud on his face and he's got this dude next to him with this map and he's telling him the turns, like, okay, 30 meters, 5 degrees left. Like, that is your job now. You are not the driver.

All right, so this, I think what's cool about this example, if you're watching this on YouTube, is this is, he showed an SEO example, but it's not just applicable to SEO. It's like, I need to make lead magnets. I need to make a bunch of pages for international markets, different languages. There's so many use cases here.

Free tools.

Free tools, right? And then eventually I want to have you show the RevOps. I saw you tweet out the RevOps like SLA lead scoring thing. I want you to show some of that, but I just want to put a bow on this one and just ask, like, you build this, you implement it. Would you actually be able to also measure the performance of all this? So, hey, we did this now. It's been live for 2 weeks. Like, because I think people want to like, I want to close the loop on this. Like, I'm not just doing this because it's cool and I want to like show people I can use cloud code. I want to like rank for some of these keywords.

Dude, you, you read my brain. That could have been the more perfect segue. Thank you for asking that because I wanted to show you this is an actually real use case on one of my SaaS products. It's called TruList. It's an email validation platform. I'm going to shamelessly plug myself here that if you need that, then go look up trulist.io because I was just doing this and I was like, oh, I should show Dave because this could be a cool segue into like Data, data analysis. One of the things I talk about this on, on my site here of like what agents are great at that chatbots are not. One of the things that agents are so freaking goated at is cross-referencing data, working with an insane amount of data, making sense of the data, cross-referencing different data sources. It's so incredibly good at that. As marketers, I think that we're used to using our brains and our limited brain power to like switch between Google Analytics and Google Search Console and then Google Ads and like try to make sense of everything just by intuition. That is crazy. You know, like your brain is not meant to do that much math. What I did with TruList is I connected our Google Search Console, our Fathom Analytics, and the keyword data for things that we want to rank for, right? So like, these are dumps from Ahrefs and For Data For SEO. And then I said, cross-analyze all this, please just make sense of it. I don't know what to do. I'm not a math whiz. I'm not a genius. And what it did was it took all these different points, it builds a little bit of a report for me, right? So it's looking at all the different sources, taking the raw data, and then now it's starting to make some some analysis. This means direct referrals, social traffic is up, but organic traffic might have softened slightly. Or da da da da. It's looking through each of the pages that are cross-referenced. So for this page, the homepage, these are your Google Search Console clicks. These are your Fathom clicks. This is the keyword volume for what you're trying to rank for. That's not a good example. There's no, there's no one there. I can look through page by page, all the different data sources, see what's happening. This is the awesome part at the bottom, right? Key takeaways. Again, we were talking about deliverables earlier. This is a deliverable from like an SEO god after 3 months. And it's like, hey, here's your 5 key takeaways. These ones are working really, really well. These ones are actually underperforming. We need to like fix these. There's a divergence here where now I'm starting to see differences in data. Okay, cool. Google Search Console says this one thing. Fathom says another thing. This is what it means. It means that direct referral traffic is growing while organic visibility is actually going down a little bit. Now I can explain, you know, there's the classic, dude, I remember you saying this where you hated when CEOs would be like, Dave, why are we seeing a dip in traffic this month? You're like, I don't freaking know. Why would you ask me that?

I'm like, cause it's July 6th.

I don't know. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Right. Right. You're 3 days into the month and we're like, leads are a little slow. Can you investigate? Yeah, dude, I can actually answer these questions, or at least it can attempt to, right? But copy and paste this to the programmatic SEO stuff that we were just doing where I can build out all those pages and then I can tell Claude, now do a weekly analysis. Claude made this thing called a routine. You can have it actually on a schedule, a daily, weekly, monthly basis. Run through a cross-reference like this or check up on something, run an analysis, pull new keywords, grab the latest data from Fathom Analytics or whatever your data tool of choice is.

Yeah, I mean, this is what is, I think, amazing about the use case of AI in general. A world is coming. I mean, you're already in this world. For us mortals, we will get there. But like, my dream has always been to be like, man, I don't ever want to log into Salesforce again. Please.

Yeah.

And now it's like if you have whatever you're using, let's just say Claude in this example, it's almost like step one. If you're like onboarding or something, it's like I'm going to run everything. And now you're same as I'm— everything for me now is voice. Like I'm using Whisperflow. I don't know whatever you're using, but it's just like it's so much faster. And actually feel— this is a side note— the voice stuff actually makes me feel like more of a human when I'm just sitting quietly in my office typing and I'm talking to AI. I feel like I'm like I'm allowed to be Dave a little bit and I can pop off with my, with my voice.

Freestyle.

Well, there's a world where like, I'm going to have— I should have all the marketing tools, everything that I'm using to run the marketing, the business, everything piped in here. And I can be like, are leads down right now? Is this thing doing— check this thing. How did the email go out today? Instead of all those things, ping in Slack, or I got to go log into HubSpot, and then I got a 2FA, and I get the text to my phone, and I go back in, then I got to click the emails tab and see the performance. I'm like, this is the stuff that's cool, that has me excited. It's like, I got this. Command center for everything that's going on in our business. Now you layer on all the customer contacts, customer calls, transcripts, sales data, customer data, product data. It's like, whoa.

Yeah. Whoa. The sky's the limit. Honestly, I feel like I'm still even scratching the surface. Some of it is because you can see I have literally a bazillion things that I'm working on at any given time. I'm just constantly multitasking. But yeah, the more tools that you connect, The more data you give it, the more access you give it to your information repository, your Notion, your GitHub, your whatever, the better.

Yeah. I want to put two more examples on tape and then I want to wrap up and ask you about like, what does this mean? What should I be thinking about as a marketer? And the two that I will, if you could, I don't know if you have, so no, you know, you have other examples if you want, but you posted one the other day that was this skill for creating social media content, specifically like LinkedIn and Instagram and TikTok.

You're in my head, man.

Well, I mean, it's crazy. I'm just— I know I'm— I follow you on Twitter. And then the other one is I bookmarked this one recently. I don't know when it was, but the one about like RevOps, SLA and all that stuff. And so— and then my main questions on each of them is could you show me the output on them? Because I understand the skill. So you're going to have a skill that writes social content based on certain things. But then it had me thinking like, yeah, but how do you do that for Instagram or TikTok? That's video content you have to go make or How do I actually go and implement this like SLA? If I just get this markdown file about what my lead scoring should be, how do I go implement that? And I feel like you can help me see how we'd close the loop on these things.

Yeah, yeah. The RevOps one, I don't know if I could show in a demo. I can talk about a little bit and explain.

I think this is one we're talking through. It works. It's—

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is just one example. So I have a skill called Social Content. It's got like platform-specific guidelines. Ideas and templates, frameworks for different types of social content. This is one I've been playing around with a ton, especially for Marketing Skills, is there's this open source library called ReMotion and it builds videos for you all out of code. So it's TypeScript code and it all renders and animates into something that gets stitched together into a video. So this is what I created for the last release of Marketing Skills just the other day for 1.7. and I can show you how it works a little bit under the hood. I'm sure people have seen this if they actually saw like the announcement tweet, but Claude made this. I just wanna show you like, yeah, it's cool. I did not make this. I'm not a video editor whatsoever. Like I'm literally handicapped when it comes to video things. And this was just like me telling Claude, hey, use ReMotion and make this video for me.

You know, you showed me this like Data for SEO, ReMotion. Is your brain just wired to like find tools that connectors for you to be able to do this in Cloud Code as an example, or is it about having API or MCP or?

Yeah, this is, I think, another one of the things that I have an advantage on because I've been coding too, where you realize that in this programming world, there's tons and tons and tons of free open source libraries and tools and resources. And so for one, Vercel made a skill for finding skills. It's very, very meta, right? But I could invoke the skill and be like, hey, I'm looking for a skill to help me make videos. Please do some research or whatever. It'll go find some skill. Then the skill is a wrapper, a set of instructions around a set of tools or some kind of process. So Remotion is the tool, and then Remotion also has a skill. So Remotion best practices. This is by the team that built Remotion. You can see that it's just a GitHub link. That's where everything lives. And this is going to be best practices for how to make a video using Remotion. So Claude might not know how to make a video with Remotion, but with the Remotion skill, it does. And anything else that you want to do, if there's a skill that exists for it, everything gets installed locally. It'll present the skills. And it's going to search this database here with 90,000, try to find things that are relevant to you. It's like we were talking about earlier, figure it out. Ask Claude, hey Claude, are there any free libraries or skills for making videos? That's as simple as it is. Just go do some research, go find something. And if there isn't something, you could make something, or maybe you could jerry-rig something together. But at the end of the day, let Claude do all the work for you and figuring that out.

I mean, even just something like just being able to use skills, right? Like from everywhere else. I have my own for like writing YouTube introductions, but now that I'm like, I'm on this skills.sh site, I could be like, I need a skill to write a YouTube intro for me. Can you plug that in? And it's just this thinking of being able to— and it's a hard shift for a lot of non-engineers, actually, myself included, which is like to let go and be like, well, I have to know how to create this video. And it's like, no, someone else does. They've already done it. And there's best practice. Here's this tool, Remotion, and there's like best practices around it. It's probably going to be better than whatever your V1 is going to be like.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. There's ones for emails too. It's funny, it popped up. It's a little bit serendipitous, but this is one of my, my latest tools in building Magister. It's basically cloud code for marketing in your browser for all the normies. So join the waitlist if you're interested. But these are emails that Claude created. I can view, I can edit them all here in the browser in this little localhost view, which is just a file previewer on my computer. And this is how I'm doing emails now. I'm like, hey Claude, I need to make a waitlist invite email, write it in React, and then show me so I can view it.

Cool.

Here's what the email look like. Great. Send. It's a totally different paradigm than me, like, clicking a thousand buttons to get this thing live. There's all sorts of cool— I mean, dude, look how cool this is. There's a whole video editor in my browser, and then anything I want to change, I can tell it. Like, hey, this happens pretty often where I'm like, it's going through the frames too fast, give it an extra second or two in the beginning and the end to let it breathe a little bit. Great. I don't have to drag this out manually. I don't have to figure out the transitions and know now the fade in, fade out, it's a little bit off. Claude will do that for me.

And you already said it, right? You weren't recording in that moment, but if you had your voice prompt on, it's like that took one, one second to edit that.

Yeah. Yeah, I did it earlier. I mean, it just—

Okay, quickly show me, shift over, show me the— I just want to see the, the, the RevOps scorecard because I thought it's just very useful for, for folks that are listening to this.

This is a great way to put a cap on it too, because I want to talk about How to use skills and how to make the most of skills in particular. So every skill is gonna be in a folder called skills. And then to go into each one of the skills, you have to find the skill.md. So here's my list of skills. I'm gonna go down here to RevOps. It's gonna open up this folder. And again, within a skill file, it can just be Markdown, but it's also a folder to hold other things. Like now I have these things called evals, which is how I make sure that it's actually good and up to standard and that it works. And I have references. References are templates, playbooks, definitions, rules, scoring models. Anytime you make an update to your scoring model right now, your skill is updating as well. And then this is the skill itself. This top part is called front matter. This is how Claude knows what to reference. Why to reference it, when to reference it. But then at the end of the day, it's just a Markdown file. Markdown became the de facto file type for storing these kinds of prompts in AI because it's a really small file size, but it's still like structured, organized data. You can see here that it has this really simple little hashtag for header 1, 2 hashtags for header 2, numbered bullet points, these things for bold, right? So that helps The AI scanned through all the text really quickly without burning a bazillion tokens. The way that I've designed the skills is, for one, every one of these more tactical skills like RevOps, for example, is told to first reference another skill.

Wait, sorry, is that a part of your QA? Are you— do you have to QA your skills to make sure that they're set up properly so they don't burn a bit? Like, is that something that someone would be like, man, I'm not going to use this because it burns too many tokens versus someone else made a more efficient one?

Maybe a little bit. It's more like the higher level stuff of like, if I save this as a.docx, it would burn 10 times more tokens compared if it was just a.md instead.

A markdown. Yeah, sure.

There are standards like this is 345 lines. Your skills are not supposed to be any more than 500 lines of code. And in general, the smaller the better because your AI is only going to have so big of a context window. I think for Claude, the standard is like 100,000 tokens for your context window. So the more that you fill your context window with things like skills or other things that you want it to like remember, the less brainpower it's gonna have for actually doing the thing that you're asking it to do. So you just wanna make sure it's not bloated. That's like the biggest thing. But each one of the skills is gonna reference another skill called product marketing context. And that is where you save all of the important contextual information about your ICP, your pricing, your product differentiators, your X, Y, and Z, all the important things that you would need to tell it in order to have the right info about you and your business. And then it goes into core principles. So these are like the high level, this is how we want to structure things for RevOps. And then I give it a pretty standard lead lifecycle framework, defining everything, talk about lead scoring, and I tell it about lead routing, pipeline stage management. This is all a bunch of text, but I'm giving it very specific instructions about how to do something because then I can say, use the RevOps skill and here's access to my HubSpot. And now when it goes into your HubSpot, it's looking at your HubSpot with these frameworks and instructions and prompts. In mind so it knows what to do. It's going to go and look. You can ask it, oh, do an audit of my HubSpot, and then it's going to go through and be like, okay, let's look at all your pipeline stages. Let's look at if you have any lead scoring today. No, you don't. Okay, cool. We can build that out for you in HubSpot. And then it can either tell you what to do in HubSpot, or if it has enough access, it can do it in HubSpot for you.

Does that work today? Has anybody tried that?

Yeah, yeah, quite a few people have. Again, it depends so much on how much access you have to your own tools or how much access those tools give to AI, but 100% it works. There's also these things here, maybe one more point just to clarify, is that there's a tools registry. So there's a lot of tools that even if you give Claude your API key, it still is going to have no idea how to use that API because every API is designed to work a little bit differently. So within the tools, I've also built out a ton of integrations and, and CLIs so that now anytime that you're telling it to work with HubSpot, it can reference this tool skill for HubSpot and it knows what HubSpot makes available between API, MCP, CLI, SDK, how it authenticates, the common operations for using the API, and now it knows how to do things in each one of these tools. This is an actual script for doing something in Instantly. It's not like just pinging the API. This is a little mini app interfacing with another tool instantly in order to do something with its API. So I'm trying to like build everything out to be as off the shelf as possible so you don't have to figure this out because what I was doing before is it was like Hmm, I don't know how to work with the HubSpot API. I'm gonna have to figure that out. And then it would try and fail, try and fail, try and fail, try and fail. So all the things that I found that it actually got to work, I turned into a skill saved here in the repo. And now when you use it, it hopefully works out of the box with limited errors.

So what, what do we do? What's the role? What, what, what role does marketing, what do marketers do in this? In this world where we, we have access to running. I mean, we've come so far in 2 years from like 2023, you had an advantage if you were using ChatGPT to like write landing page copy. Now the stuff you showed, and there's a thousand examples, I wanted to have Cory on to just give you a glimpse of like the point of this is not to be like, oh, I'm gonna go take that SEO example and do it. But I think to see these 2 or 3 examples, my goal for having you on was to open people's minds to being like, huh, Damn, I'm not even thinking about things on the same planet. This is such a different way of thinking. And it is really interesting because it is like applying the way an engineer thinks to marketing. Engineers are the laziest people I know, always. And that's why they're super smart because it's like, I'm gonna figure out the best way to do this. And so if you look at how I might do something, it's like, I'm gonna log in this tool and do this thing. And you're like, hold Hold on, wait, what is— what? And it's really interesting to see that the future of marketing is headed in this direction. Can you make the bull case for— I'm an optimist and I wanna leave people with this. Can you make the bull case for marketing, people who work in marketing and a career in marketing with access to all this? I think it's very easy to be like, software's dead, everything's gonna be replaced, it's all gonna be AI, we're not gonna have jobs. I don't want to take that case. I wanna make the bull case for it. And I'm hoping I— you have a good point of view here.

I'm totally an optimist. I'm not an AI doomer whatsoever. Okay, so here's how I think about it. This is really funny timing too. It's because I'm watching Mad Men right now. Have you seen it before?

Of course.

Okay. Of course. I'm just watching it for the first time. I'm like, I'm way behind in that aspect.

Good for you. Ah, I love— man, is there a better feeling than when you have like a good show and it's a classic and you're watching it right now?

Ah, and then you have the self-awareness to be like, ooh, I'm, I'm watching something that I love and that's gonna be burned in my brain forever now. Man, it's so, so interesting watching Mad Men because of course it's fictional. It's just like a depiction of what it was like.

What would Don do with Claude? Oh my God.

Exactly. Exactly. But it was so funny because I'm watching these guys work and you've got Don Draper. He's a creative director and he comes up with an idea in his head and then he's like, hey, Peggy, copywriter, make a tagline. And then he's like, hey, whoever, Bob, whatever. Art director now put it on a poster. And then they spent weeks, you know, manually writing ideas down. They put it on this poster mockup thing. They show it to the client and they kind of build this whole story and narrative around here's why this is gonna resonate with your customers and da da da. And like that was such a manual labor intensive process compared to today. And, and what I mean today, I don't mean even with AI. We're doing things on the computer, we're typing in a document, we're looking up and using templates, and we're filling in the blanks. It's so much easier now. We're using— with AI, I think with AI, we're going to look back on doing things in Google Docs the same way that we look back on Don Draper and Peggy doing things on pen and paper on a poster. Probably.

Good take, good take. Okay, I'm with you.

So here's my punchline. The good news is that We can be creative directors even more so than we were before. We don't have to be the typists who are writing everything down that Don Draper says. We don't have to wait for someone else to go do a job and get back to us so we can put in our part and okay, I got the tagline, now I give it to Bob and art, and now Bob gets back to me and then we go back and forth a bazillion times. Claude is the full tool stack. I can say Claude and it's really just any AI agent. It's the full team that you need across copy, across design, across any one of the mediums. Is it static? Is it a website? Is it an email? Is it a, a video? Is it a poster? Is it an ad? And we can spend all of our time just being creative and not doing any of the monkey work. I think that that's awesome. I think that's a really fun future. We're always talking about as marketers, like, What you should be doing is you should be experimenting and don't just create one ad, create 1,000 different variations of the ad. I don't know about you, I've never really been able to get to that spot because I was so bogged down in the day-to-day minutia of like, let me pull this report and let me put together this slide deck to show the board that, da da da da, and let me sync with the team and talk about how we're gonna triage. Yeah. All I get to do now is do creative marketing. I think that's awesome.

I think it's awesome too. The thing I've been saying a lot is like I got promoted to CMO because I was good at marketing and you're good at marketing and so you get the team and the budget and the responsibility. And then it turns out most of my day is like, I got to go, I got to jump off this, I got to, I got a one-on-one. So-and-so is fighting with this person or this person wants a raise and I'm like, dude, I just, I just like writing landing page copy. What am I— what are we doing?

You know?

So, all right, good take. I love that. My favorite scene in Mad Men that you didn't ask for— I mean, there's many. One clip that I reference often is there's a, there's a scene where Peggy— Don is yelling at Peggy and she's like, you never tell me I'm doing a good job, you never tell me you like my work. And Don goes, that's what the money's for.

And I—

God, I love that.

Yeah, I love that. It's never enough.

That is a good one.

Never enough. That's what the money's for. It's what pay you for.

Yeah.

And then I love the Don Draper example. The other thing it made me think of, do you know what those guys all used to do? It's voice dictation. They would dictate an idea or a memo. Now I'm on the pod with Corey Haines, marketing-skills.com, marketing-skills.com, and he's just talking to his computer the whole time, you know? I don't know if this is, this is one of those like LinkedIn badges or Spotify Wrapped where you're, everyone's in the top 1%, but I'm in the top 1% of all Whisperflow users, but I also haven't met someone who's not. So I don't know what to tell you. Interesting.

Yeah, it's a gimmick. They're, they're playing you just to get the social share for sure.

All right, Corey Haynes, good job. Go take a shower, take a nap, enjoy the rest of the day. You earned your job today. I know you've been traveling, doing a bunch of stuff, holding up get rich, do marketing signs at the airport and in the airport.

In that order. Do marketing, get rich.

All right, man. Good to see you.

Thanks, man.

Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what? I'm not even gonna ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at Exit5, and you can go and check that out instead of leaving a rating or review. Go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com. Our mission at Exit5 is to help help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at ExitFive. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers, building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group, or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get some off your chest. It's 100% free to join for 7 days, so you can go and check it out risk-free. And then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out, learn more, exitfive.com, and I will see you over there in the community.