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There are three Claudes
Same brain underneath. Three completely different ways to put it to work.
Claude Chat is the app you already know. You ask, it answers, you stay in the driver's seat. Claude Cowork is Claude working on its own inside a folder: it runs on a schedule, writes in your voice, and handles multi-step jobs while you do something else. Claude Code gives Claude access to your actual computer to build websites, apps, and automations you'll use again and again.
Use the wrong one and a great tool feels disappointing. Use the right one and it feels like cheating.
The 30-second decision rule
Surface 1
Claude Chat · Fast, hands-on, no setup
Reach for Chat when the job is a one-off, you want to judge the answer as it comes, and Claude needs access to your stuff but not a full briefing on your business.
Research before a decision or a meeting
Quick market, competitor, or topic research where you judge the answers in real time. The trick is incremental refinement: start broad, then narrow.
Try this
What are the current best practices for reducing churn for a business my size? Then tell me which one has the best ROI under 50 employees and what usually breaks first.
Turn a transcript or long doc into decisions and action items
Paste a meeting transcript or a 30-page PDF and pull out what actually matters. Not a play-by-play, an outcome.
Try this
Summarize this call into decisions made, action items with an owner and a deadline, and open questions. Skip the chronology.
First-pass contract and legal review
A plain-English read of an agreement before you pay a lawyer. Think of it as a pre-attorney briefing so your billable time goes to real questions.
Try this
Review this agreement. Flag everything about data ownership, termination, and liability, and call out anything that differs from standard. Explain each in plain English.
Draft an email or a quick piece with real context
Follow-ups, replies, a quick post. Give it the situation and it matches the tone.
Try this
Draft a follow-up to Sarah after our call. Emphasize their 48-hour support response problem, reference the pilot we discussed, propose next steps. Under 150 words, friendly but professional.
Pressure-test an idea
Use Claude as a sparring partner, not a yes-man. Make it argue the other side before you commit.
Try this
Here's my plan. Give me the three strongest reasons it fails and what I'd need to believe for it to work anyway.
Make sense of anything visual
Drop in a screenshot of a confusing dashboard, a chart, an error message, or a photo of a whiteboard and ask what it means or what to do next.
Try this
Here's a screenshot of my analytics. What are the two trends worth caring about and what would you check next?
Surface 2
Claude Cowork · Claude working on its own
Reach for Cowork when you want Claude doing instead of answering. It runs on a schedule, writes in your voice using context docs you point it at, and works through multi-step jobs that end in a real file. This is the surface most people underuse, and the one that quietly runs a business in the background.
A daily news agent that runs while you sleep
The flagship example. A scheduled task reads everything talked about in your niche over the last 24 hours and emails you a report every morning. You wake up briefed.
Try this
Every morning at 6am, find what's trending in [my niche] on X and in the news over the last 24 hours, summarize the 5 things that matter, and email me the report.
Write in your brand voice with full business context
Proposals, reports, client emails that sound like you and know your offer. Point Cowork at markdown context docs (your brand voice, your offer, your call transcripts) and it writes the same way every time.
Try this
Write a proposal for this client using the voice in brand-voice.md and the packages in offer.md.
Turn one long-form piece into 30+ platform posts
Drop in a video transcript or a blog post and get tweets, a LinkedIn version, an Instagram carousel concept, and short-form scripts, all on-brand, in one pass.
Try this
Repurpose this transcript into platform-native posts for X, LinkedIn, and Instagram, following brand-voice.md. Keep each one native to the platform, not copy-pasted.
Triage your inbox and draft replies on a schedule
Connect Gmail, then have Cowork sort, flag, and draft responses every morning so you open your inbox to decisions, not chaos.
Try this
Every weekday at 8am, review my inbox, surface only the emails that need a reply today, and draft a response for each in my voice.
Find leads and scrape the web without writing code
With the Apify connector, Cowork can pull data from Google Maps, Instagram, Reddit, and thousands of other sources in plain English.
Try this
Find 20 [type of business] in [city] with fewer than 50 employees and a Google rating above 4.0. Return name, phone, email, website, and review count in a spreadsheet.
Multi-step research into a finished deliverable
The job that's too big for one answer: research a topic, summarize the findings, then turn it into a presentation. Cowork chains the steps and thinks sequentially, so you get the finished asset, not three separate chats.
Try this
Research [topic], pull the best 5 sources, summarize the key findings, then turn that into a 10-slide presentation.
Turn messy notes into polished, branded documents
Voice memo, meeting notes, or a bullet dump goes in. Formatted minutes, a status report, or a client-ready doc comes out, in your template every time.
Try this
Turn these raw meeting notes into formatted minutes using our template: decisions, action items, owners, deadlines.
Run recurring competitor and market monitoring
A weekly task that crawls a competitor's site and ad library, then reports what changed since last week. Competitive intelligence on autopilot.
Try this
Every Monday, check [competitor]'s site and the Facebook Ad Library for their active ads, then summarize what's new or changed since last week.
Surface 3
Claude Code · Build the thing
Reach for Code when you want to build something you'll use more than once: a website, an app, an automation. Real talk though: Claude Code is basically Cowork with the ceiling ripped off. Same core idea, Claude working on its own, just far more powerful. Cowork gets 90% of people 90% of the way there, and that's genuinely all most people ever need. But if you want to be a real go-getter, this is where it gets nuts. It leans to the dev side with a steeper learning curve, which is exactly why it's the power-user surface. Give it a day or two and the ceiling just disappears.
Build a website or landing page
Describe what you want, hand it your brand colors and logo, and it builds the whole thing, then deploys it live.
Try this
Build a one-page site for my offer using these brand colors and this logo. Make it mobile-responsive, then push it to GitHub and deploy to Vercel.
Analyze messy business data
Drop in the ugly CSVs your tools export and get them cleaned, analyzed, and charted, without touching a formula. Bonus: it builds a reusable pipeline you can rerun on next month’s data.
Try this
Clean this sales export, then show me monthly revenue trends, customer acquisition cost by channel, and my top three growth opportunities, with charts.
Build a custom CRM or sales system that fits your pipeline
Instead of bending your process to fit someone's software, build the exact stages and fields you actually use.
Try this
Build a simple CRM that tracks leads through my four stages (prospect, qualify, demo, close), capturing contact info, pain points, and next steps for each.
Batch-edit video and build a content pipeline
Point it at a folder of raw clips and get platform-ready versions out: subtitles burned in, three aspect ratios, named and sorted, in one run.
Try this
Process every clip in /raw: transcribe, burn in subtitles in my brand style, export 16:9, 9:16, and 1:1 versions, and save them named by platform.
Build a reusable automation or agent
The task you do every single week, turned into a one-command workflow you never have to think through again.
Try this
Build me a workflow that pulls my weekly numbers from these sources, formats them into my report template, and saves it to this folder. I want to run it with one command.
Build internal tools and dashboards
Small apps for you or your team: a tracker, a calculator, a live dashboard. The stuff you'd normally pay a developer for or just live without.
Try this
Build a simple dashboard that reads this spreadsheet and shows me live totals and a chart I can open in my browser.
The Real Unlock
It's not 20 prompts. It's one habit.
Notice the pattern. The skill isn't memorizing 20 prompts. It's the half-second of judgment before you start: is this a one-off, a recurring job, or something I'm building? Answer that and you've already picked the right Claude.
Two things carry across all three surfaces and compound the longer you use them:
- 1.Context docs. The markdown files that teach Claude your voice, your offer, your situation. Write them once, point every surface at them, and the output stops sounding generic.
- 2.Skills. Any process you run more than once, save it. Then it's one command forever, identical every time, on Chat, Cowork, or Code.
Get those two habits going and these 20 use cases turn into 200. Same brain, pointed at the right job, by someone who knows which door to walk through.
Work with Me
Need AI to actually work for your business?
I help businesses cut through the AI hype and build the workflows, automations, and systems that actually move the needle. Direct, hands-on, no fluff.
Work with me