By Dan Donovan, @askdandonovan
One hour a day. Seven days. By the end, you'll have a working onboarding assistant running on your laptop, and a pattern you can reuse for any other process in your business.
Claude Code is a tool from Anthropic that lets you describe what you want in plain English and it builds it on your computer. It reads your files, creates documents, writes emails, and automates repetitive work. You don't write code. You give instructions like you would to a new hire.
This guide is for entrepreneurs, freelancers, coaches, and business owners. If you serve clients, you'll build a client onboarding system. If you sell products or courses, swap "client" for "customer" or "student". The pattern works the same.
Hi Sarah,
Welcome to Alpine Advisory. I'm excited to get started on your website redesign. Here's what happens next.
Over the next 48 hours, I'll send you a short intake questionnaire (10 minutes, max). Once I have your answers, I'll put together a project brief and we'll schedule our kickoff call for the week of March 10.
If you have any questions before then, reply to this email. I check it daily.
Looking forward to working together,
Daniel
This plan involves installing a tool on your computer and typing instructions into it. If you've never done that before, that's fine. The first 20 minutes feel weird. By day 3 it feels normal. By day 7 you'll wonder why you didn't do this sooner. You don't need to know how to code. You just need to describe your business in plain English, which you already do every day.
Here's the free course from the video
Anthropic's official Claude Code 101, free to sign up, self-paced.
Open Claude Code 101Step 1: Sign up for the free Claude Code 101 course on Anthropic Academy. This is the course from the video, and you'll work through it throughout the week.
Step 2: Install Claude Code using this setup guide. It walks you through every click in under 5 minutes. You'll install the free VS Code app and add Claude to it. No terminal required.
Three landmarks in VS Code and you'll never feel lost:
/plan in the Claude panel) and Claude tells you exactly what it's about to do before touching anything. And every prompt auto-saves a checkpoint: hover any message and click Rewind code to here (or press Esc twice) to undo Claude's changes and go back. You can't break anything permanently.
Watch first: Claude Code 101: complete Modules 1 and 2 (~20 minutes). These cover what Claude Code is and how it reads your files.
Practice: In VS Code, go to File → Open Folder and pick your Documents folder (or any folder with some files in it). Open the Claude panel, then try these prompts one at a time.
Summarize what's in this folder. What kinds of files are here, how is it organized, and what's taking up the most space?Create a professional-looking HTML page called "meeting-agenda.html" for a team meeting. Include a header with today's date, three agenda items about Q2 planning, and a section for action items. Make it look clean and modern. Open it when you're done.Find every file in this folder that hasn't been opened in 6 months. List them with their last modified date and total size. Then suggest which ones I can safely archive.Watch first: Claude Code 101: complete the "Customizing Claude Code" module (~15 minutes), specifically the section on CLAUDE.md files.
What's a CLAUDE.md file? It's just a plain text file with a fancy name. The .md part means markdown, which is a simple way of writing text with basic formatting. You don't need to learn markdown. You just write normal sentences.
Practice: Create a folder on your computer called client-onboarding. In VS Code, use File → Open Folder to open it, open the Claude panel, and run this prompt:
Create a file called CLAUDE.md in this folder and open it for me to edit. Inside, leave three empty sections: "What I sell", "Who I sell to", and "How I currently onboard a new client".Claude will create the file. Fill in the three sections in plain English. Write it like you're explaining your business to a new hire on their first day. Three paragraphs is plenty.
client-onboarding folder with your business info filled in. From this point forward, every prompt in this folder will be personalised to your business.
Today you'll build your first client-ready asset. Inside your client-onboarding folder, run these prompts in order.
Read my CLAUDE.md and draft a welcome email I can send to a new client on day one. Keep it warm but professional.Now give me three variations of that email: one formal, one friendly, one short.Take my favorite version and turn it into a reusable template. Save it as welcome-email-template.md. Use placeholders like {{client_name}}, {{project_type}}, and {{start_date}}.welcome-email-template.md in your folder with {{placeholders}} where the client details go. This is something you'd normally pay someone to write. You just made it in 15 minutes.
Watch first: Introduction to Agent Skills (~20 minutes). This is a separate short course on the same platform.
What a skill actually is: A skill is just a small text file that tells Claude how to do a specific task. You don't write code. You describe what you want, and Claude writes the skill for you. Once it's made, you can run it again and again with one command, like saving a recipe instead of figuring out dinner from scratch every night.
Create a skill called onboarding-email. Its job: when I give it a client name, project type, and start date, it fills out my welcome-email-template.md and returns the completed email. Build it and test it with the fake client "Acme Corp, website redesign, starting November 10."Now you'll add a second deliverable to your onboarding system.
Read my CLAUDE.md and create a client intake questionnaire I can send to new clients before we start work together. Include everything I'd need to know to deliver great work. Save it as intake-questionnaire.md.Review the questionnaire and remove any duplicate or unnecessary questions. Make sure it's under 15 questions total and takes less than 10 minutes to fill out.At the end of the hour, copy the contents into a Google Doc or Notion page so you have a clean version to send to real clients.
intake-questionnaire.md file with clear, relevant questions specific to your business. Your onboarding system now has two real deliverables.
Watch first: Introduction to Subagents (~10 minutes). Don't worry about the name. Just understand that Claude can chain actions in sequence.
Today you'll build a second skill. It's the same pattern as Day 4, just with more instructions in the skill file.
Create a new skill called new-client-kickoff. When I run it with a client name, it should do three things in order: (1) generate a personalized welcome email using my onboarding-email skill, (2) copy intake-questionnaire.md into a new folder for that client, (3) create a project folder named after the client with both files inside. Build it and test it with the fake client "Riverside Dental."The real test (30 minutes): Run your new-client-kickoff skill with a real upcoming client, or a realistic fake one. Time it. Compare it to how long your old onboarding process takes. Write the difference down. You'll want this number later.
What you now have:
Your next three builds (30 minutes, pick one and start):
One entrepreneur used this exact pattern to automate her proposal process. What used to take 2 hours of copying, customising, and formatting now takes one command and 4 minutes. Another built a meeting-prep skill that pulls his notes and drafts the agenda, talking points, and follow-up email before every client call.
You don't need another course for the next step. You need reps. Pick one more process that eats your time and build a skill for it. The more you do it, the faster it gets.
If you finish this plan and want to go deeper into specific business use cases, that's where paid communities and specialised courses earn their price. But not before. The people who skip the fundamentals and go straight to the paid stuff are the ones who end up buying three courses and still feeling lost.