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

Disclaimer: this transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: If you’ve ever opened Google Analytics or Google Search Console and then just looked at it for a little bit and closed the tab because it felt overwhelming, this is for you. And here’s the thing, it’s not just analytics or search console, it’s also WordPress. Maybe you’re trying to find a post quickly, understand how it’s performing. And after a while, you’re jumping from tab to tab trying to piece together information about how your content is doing. It really is one of the hardest parts about growing a contents business. It’s getting clarity. It’s not always necessarily effort, it’s just knowing what you should do next because your data is scattered, your priorities are getting fuzzy, and you’re staying busy, but you’re not confident that you’re working on the right things. That’s why we created Clariti. It’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I. Clariti is a content organization and optimization platform that pulls all that messy data into one clear place so you can audit your content, understand performance and see real opportunities instead of just guessing.

And it doesn’t stop at just insights. Clariti helps you turn what you’re learning into actual projects and tasks. So you can go from analysis to action and actually get stuff done. It’s not about quick wins or hacks. It’s about building a calmer, more sustainable system so you can grow with clarity and confidence. Go to C-L-A-R-I-T-I to learn more. And if you’re a Mediavine publisher, Clariti has a dedicated partnership just for you. Just go to clariti.com/mediavine to see what’s included.

Emily Walker: 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 Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju from Urban Farmie. Shruthi recently made the leap from a succesful career in management consulting to become a full-time content creator with Urban Farmy. In this episode, Sruthi 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. Bjork and Truthi 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 Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Shruthi, welcome to the podcast.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Thanks Bjork. Thanks for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: 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 in 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. 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.

Bjork Ostrom: 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 there’s a lot of people listening who want to do that, and so we’re going to dig into that a little bit.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Yeah, so I’m Shruthi. I run Urban Farmie, which is kind of foody, but farmy because my background 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 traveled extensively. And every time I would go to these countries, I’d think, oh wow, I should make a vegetarian version of this dish, or wow, this is a great dish.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: And it started out sharing stuff that way and then the pandemic happened and I realized, wow, this is actually this could be a business. This could be something I do in the far out future, but the far out future is here now. It’s

Bjork Ostrom: Here. The future’s here.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: 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

Bjork Ostrom: Very – Oh, wow. Yeah.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Right now, right now.

Bjork Ostrom: Talk about how you made that decision. How did you feel confident? Boston Consulting Group, obviously a really well-known company. It’s a great job.You’re a partner. What does it mean to be a partner at BCG?

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: I mean, I was one down from basically owning the company. As a managing director, you own the company and I was actually coming up on managing director election.

Bjork Ostrom: So you have equity ownership in the company?

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Yeah. It’s a complicated structure, but essentially

Bjork Ostrom: I have account

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Teams that sat under me.

Bjork Ostrom: 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 how did you feel confident in making the decision from a numbers perspective?

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Yeah. No, great question. I think I kind of harken every… It’s been in the works probably for two to three years. And honestly, everybody that’s ever been a consultant, a management consultant especially is constantly evaluating whether the job works because it’s a high reward, but also it demands a lot from you in a way. That I think it’s… 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. It was crazy.

Bjork Ostrom: A grind.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: And then I had a baby as it always goes with these things and you realize there’s a little human that’s not going to understand when it was just me and my husband, he’s also in a similarly crazy career. It’s like 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

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Very, very 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. I wasn’t quite as present as a mom as I wanted to be. I couldn’t fully go into the food systems work and be in Africa 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 the first thing that died because you’re like, well, between me having my day job and my child and then the second day job, where is the time? And it started conversations with me and my husband, because obviously it’s a big kind of financial decision as well.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: We were an equal dual ambition household. And it’s not that I took a step back from ambition, but I said, look, every job has portions that you 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.

Bjork Ostrom: And

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: 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 conversations on, okay, there are all of these projects, all these clients that you own. What’s the change management cascade? How do we tell them that you’re leaving and what are you going to do? Why are you leaving? Can we all align on how we deliver those messages? And then at my level, I essentially had a garden leave or a transition period where I was technically on company payroll but wasn’t expected to work.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: So think of it as a really long PTO in order to make sure that all the files are handed over and things like that. So occasionally there’d be questions, but then – Interesting. But then last week I handed everything in, then I was like done. And it’s

Bjork Ostrom: Like done, done. Yeah, so there’s this transitionary period where you’re not technically working, but you’re available in case questions come up.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: 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 ambition and it’s compounding ambition that grows and grows and grows. And then for us, you get to this point where it’s like, okay, suddenly there’s 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.

Bjork Ostrom: But I think what I’ve realized is, 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, okay, in your situation, CEO of your life, you had one client, BCG, two probably because you’re working on your side hustle. And then it’s like, okay, I need to shift 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 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.

Bjork Ostrom: 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 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 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’re doing at BCG.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: I mean, I’ve spent basically my entire adult professional life at BCG one way or another. I’ve quit, then 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 want to launch it in three months. And so I’m going to try to get to 30% in the month, first month, 60, 70% in the second month. I’ll finish everything and then I’ll do 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 will happen is a client will hire us to come and deliver a project that would have normally taken them year or two years, except we get to do it in three 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.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: The benefit of a large corporation is that you do have teams and expertise that you can pull upon. We would say, “Okay, end of month one, we actually have 100% answer, but it’s zero of the answer.” And then 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. Let’s rev on that. ” And then by the time you hand in a final deliverable, it’s maybe V15 and you always have a separate folder somewhere in your SharePoint that’s like V, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, 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 take a big sounding problem and break it up into parts that can then you iterate on individually, but also collectively is probably the single biggest skill mindset system, whatever you want to call it that I think I applied to everything in my life, not just the blog.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: 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 can take the girl out of that, but you can’t figure out the girl. Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: Right, right, right. So I remember Mark Zuckerberg having, he was in an interview and he talked about how a lot of his approach to any huge task is this realization that any significant project is just breaking down that project into little steps. And it’s like you can do really incredible things if you’re taking a few steps and moving it forward and breaking it down and saying, okay, it’s going to be massive undertaking to do a cookbook, but actually what it is 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. What we’re going to be talking about today is you’ll have some of those small tasks and projects that exist 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 aid us in getting it done really quick if it’s not completely doing it on its own.

Bjork Ostrom: So talk to me about how you have started to integrate Claude within your day-to-day. Maybe talk about what it looked like to start with and then what it looks like now. So what was the entry point? And then fast-forward a little bit and say, paint a picture of what it could look like for creators to really be leveraging these tools.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Yeah, I think if I had to summarize it in a sentence, I would say that AI handles the production overload that would previously require small creators like myself. I don’t have a team. It’s just me and a couple contractors here and there or whatever, but essentially it helps me operate. 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 this early adopter insanity. We have, I think I counted last 18 Google Home devices in a single house,

Bjork Ostrom: Which

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Nobody needs that much, but we do. My husband’s constantly tinkering. He was building these Raspberry Pi devices at one point. And so we would constantly talk about AI even before it became a household name in some ways.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: And I think that’s where it started. And I started just like probably everybody else did, which is the step one, which is essentially using it as a chatbot, telling it to, “Hey, write me a meta description for this post. Here’s the post.” Or, write a pin description for this thing. But that’s really step one. Step 1B might have been editing. So instead of just 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 want to say in an email, write a first draft.” So there’s the editing creation with inputs, which came very soon after. But I think right now I’m probably in a phase three or four, which is three, which is really allowing AI to do tasks on my behalf.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: A lot of times it’s really mundane task. This morning I just finished this massive category overhaul on my website. I was like, okay, I had all of these intermixed things and whatever. I cleaned up the taxonomy and now I’m like, okay, I have by course, by diet, by season. It’s very clean. Each post can only go in one of these places. It’s messy, as we would call it, mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive. So there shouldn’t ever be a post that dies on the site because it didn’t fit neatly anywhere. And in the past, yes, you can export your set of posts and you can put it in a Google sheet, but you would 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 discussed before and do a first pass.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: It’s not going to be amazing. It’s not going to be 100% perfect, but that task would’ve taken me five hours.

Bjork Ostrom: Right. And probably would’ve been similarly even though it’s a human. Yeah, right. 100%. It might’ve been the same quality output. For me, I would’ve started really sharp first two 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, my seater. And then I’m tired and then I’m checking a World Cup score. And I think that’s the thing that I’m reminding myself of, especially with work like that is I have the same potential to have 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. 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 1080 10, which is a Dan Martel phrase that I heard from him maybe exists in other places.

Bjork Ostrom: 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 a long form. For me, it’s like a long form rambly prompt, voice prompt that is dumped into, for me, it’s like ChatGPT Claude or using OpenCloud. We can talk about all those tools as well. And then it’s 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, hey, it takes something that would’ve been five hours of your time. It gives you 85, 90% of that. And then you’re able to shape the last five to 10%. It’s such a great example of giving a tool the ability to use its best work. It is knowledge. And I think we are leasing and renting this knowledge and it’s like, how do we put it to work?

Bjork Ostrom: And I feel that’s such a great example. So that was level three, you said? What does level four look like?

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Level four is actually co-oping AI as a thinking partner. It comes with guardrails. And 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 this was true for me, and it’s another example of something that I probably ported over from consulting, which is that 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 finished product would’ve had the hands and thoughts of call it a dozen people. And you could do it if you have a big team and I think you’ve had your general manager on the podcast and there’s Lindsay, there’s Emily, there’s all these people that could potentially provide inputs. Or if you’re a solo creator, I think you can actually tap into AI to create a board of advisors.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: That’s great.

Bjork Ostrom: And

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: I do it at a project level. I primarily use Claude for my workflows, but I actually call on ChatGPT or Gemini within Claude using API calls when I need a second opinion or Gemini is great at search compared to cloud. So 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. Tell me everything that is so wrong. If it’s a content problem, you could be, “Hey, 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 written right now?

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Or if you are cooking for a mixed diet household, which is something that a lot of my readers do because they’re vegetarian, but maybe their family is not. How are they thinking about that? “ Or if it’s a product funnel, it’s like, ”Hey, here’s a screenshot of… ” You don’t even need to give a screenshot, but pretend you are a marketing expert or a sales psychology expert. You can really bring in that expertise and force it to put that hat on and really 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 it’s never going to be truly all AI. What AI can do is provide you with a bunch of inputs. You are still the owner of your business.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Sometimes you’ll say something. I’m going to 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 going to do it. And that’s okay. But I think that’s in my head probably level three or four

Bjork Ostrom: Off.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like blind spot detection. Exactly. I love that idea of board of advisors. One of the things that I did 10 years ago was thinking about who’s my personal board of advisors, personal board of directors. And I just met with one of my mentors this morning. Who are the people that can 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 human to human level, like meeting with a mentor, but it is an expert level to say maybe it’s a nutrition perspective, maybe it’s an SEO perspective. When you’re doing that, are you creating that as a project within Claude and then pre-building instructions for how the response should happen within that project? Or are you doing it on a prompt basis where you have a prompt that’s built, it’s on the product basis?

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: 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. I don’t specify what the avatars are. I actually just gave it examples of what good looks 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 acros all of my projects because it lives at I basically have the same thing on whatever, replicated across the board. And you just use a hash slash whatever the name of the skill is. In my case, it just says advisor.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. And this is good 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 that you’ll have something that you want to do on a recurring basis. It’s something that is for me originally started with I would use Text Expander, which is this tool where you can save a block of text. And then I would have a prompt that I would often want to reference and early on I would just like text expander, do that prompt.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m 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?

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Oh, good question. So I’m going to use Claude as an example, but there are similar functionalities in other AIs as well. Claud itself has three components. So you have chat, which is where you’re just having a conversation. I tend to think of that as a scratch pad. 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 go to Best Buy and you go to Geek Squad and you’re like, “Help me fix this thing.” And you’re watching them 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 the level three, level four 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 code –

Bjork Ostrom: That would be the third area. Chat.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Cowork.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Cowork.

Bjork Ostrom: Code. And all of these are claude. It’s like literal tabs.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Thems

Bjork Ostrom: Essentially. Yeah,

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: They’re codes. The course that is probably worth mentioning as well, which isn’t within the desktop app is design, which I’ve used, and it’s 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.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Correct. That’s right.

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Bjork Ostrom: To learn more or apply, visit raptive.com/fbp. Thanks again to Raptive for sponsoring this episode.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: The thing with cowork is that in chat you have projects, but the projects live on the browser. You have to upload a bunch of things and it’s static. So 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 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, 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. Those things have different kind of fidelities.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: And so I basically have a project for every kind of type of content or what am I doing with the business type of thing. And let’s call it – Social

Bjork Ostrom: Media, website, email. Exactly. Well, all of the different – Social media is

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Broken up because –

Bjork Ostrom: Intagram, TikTok. Facebook.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Yeah, exactly. So I believe I have a content, which is really 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. It’s connected to QuickBooks

Bjork Ostrom: Or

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Financing and things like that. I have

Bjork Ostrom: A- And to pause real quick, I think this is another important piece. When you say connected to QuickBooks, this is another 301 type 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. 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. Exactly. And that’s really quickly as we’re talking through the skill piece, how would somebody do that?

Bjork Ostrom: If they want to connect QuickBooks to Claude, what does that look like?

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: So they’re called connectors and it’s essentially a plugin for your Claude in the same way that WordPress, I’m sure if you have whatever, a short pixel, 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. It’ll say 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 tabled on or off. But when you click on connectors, there’s a bunch that are just… It’s 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.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Airtable has one. Canva has one. Gmail, Google Drive. So it’s basically think of it as a literal connector that will help bridge the gap between your cloud where you’re talking to and whatever’s on the other site that you’re trying to access

Bjork Ostrom: The

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Data from.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like a portal. 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. Obviously that data doesn’t get out. Exactly. A super specific example of how I use a version of this, it has access to my email. And I was like, we’ve long had these shrubs that need to get trimmed in our house. But then I saw this lady and we have a very small HOA for the shared areas and she was doing landscaping. I was like, “I wonder who that is. ” And there’s one 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 and review it before I send it.

Bjork Ostrom: “ Before I would’ve had to make a note and then I would’ve had go look up his information, write the email out. Okay, not a big deal to do that, but you do it 200 times in a day and actually it’s a huge time saver. Or similarly, Jenna on her 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 two payments within Amazon Associates. It has the login to Amazon Associates so it can see that. Okay, can you go and figure out 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 this friction.

Bjork Ostrom: Friction,

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think most people are still using these tools as just a chat interface. And so all of that to say, let’s get back to this idea of the skill. We’re going through this process of creating a skill. And so we talked about there’s the chat interface, there’s co-work, 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?

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Yeah, so essentially you will just tell it to create a skill. And the way that this works is that all documents, text documents within Cloud, and I guess not so much ChatGPT, this might be a Cloud-specific thing, are saved as markdown files. Markdown is basically similar to how if you have a notepad on your laptop, it would always save as. Txt. It’s very similar. It’s just another format like how word is. Doc or whatever. Markdown is just 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 a one skill, one place where this particular skill lives. A specific example I can give you is that when I was still working in corporate, I couldn’t really do social media because there’s lots of

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Legal constraints, things like that. So you could never see my face anywhere, et cetera. And then once I quit BCG, I started taking over my own social media. And I finally was on May 1st, I was like, “I’m doing this. ” A great example is that for hooks for reels, I have a lot of video content that I was shooting because I love shooting videos, but then I was just not really thinking about it, just randomly posting things. And I said, “Okay, May is the month that I work in 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 want to come up with hooks. Here are hooks that are really good examples that I’ve seen that caught my attention.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Here’s some stuff that I learned by following X, Y, and Z people and what they’ve said.” I think at one point I gave it a Food Blogger Pro podcast transcript from when you might’ve had, I think it was Lexi from Crowded Kitchen. And then Micah was on recently. I was just like, it’s basically a hodgepodge of, here’s everything that’s probably rattling in my brain, except better because now I can actually give you the actual thing versus me paraphrasing something.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: And then I said, okay, take all of this and then I want you to write me a skill that’s going to give me 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 the full blog post for that thing. Here’s what the video actually has. It’s 10 seconds, it starts with blah, blah, blah. So a quick description. And I use WhisperFlow for this.

Bjork Ostrom: Which is a tool you can just talk.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Exactly. So it’s basically a dictaphone where I can, and it’s pretty good. It has AI, so it 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 really, is this suspenseful enough for somebody to want to stay on this recipe? Why would you? And you go back and forth until you get to a point where you’re like, okay, I got it. This is a good set of hooks. And then I will usually tell it, okay, now go back, look at our conversation. What did you learn and what would you change? Sometimes I will repeat this process three to five times with

Bjork Ostrom: Different – You’re revising the skill, you’re working together.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: 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. And so you save it in the folder where you have your clog pointed to or where you would want to 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

Bjork Ostrom: The

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Skill in the same way that your brain works. If

Bjork Ostrom: You- You’ve built that as a knowledge base.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: But you can also, one of the things that you’re talking about is one of the skills that I built was I’ll do a review of the books that we have, but I also have a skill that goes in and then reviews the books to see if there’s anything I’ve missed. And I 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 a little bit of a double check. And so there’s 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 trigger or pull up a skill that you’ve created?

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Yeah. And I think 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 it doesn’t pick up for whatever reason, I can just say use slash hook in your thinking to generate these hooks. And it kind of goes in, reads that file and then comes back and spits out the applied version of that skill for that particular concept.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. So 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 processes and SOPs. SOPs,

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: And 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 open a Word doc and to type steps out. Nobody wants to do that. It’s not fun. 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?

Bjork Ostrom: 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 QuickBooks, whether that be your email, 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 schedule these so you aren’t the one prompting it. 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.

Bjork Ostrom: How do you do that and what does that look like?

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Yeah, so there are basically scheduled tasks. I have a email triage skill, which is probably a great example for this. So I have at this point, I think four emails that are all work emails that I’ve 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 there are connector capacity constraints. It

Bjork Ostrom: Won’t be

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Able to connect to multiple Gmails.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s one of the biggest bummers with ChatGPT, I just did this. And it’s one of the things I love most about OpenClaw is it has access to all three 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, I’m sure it’ll get fixed eventually, but you can only have one. So you’ve solved that by having all these emails go into one central inbox.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: 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, [email protected]. And you’re like, “Okay, now I need a workspace.” Exactly. And so anyway, I pointed everything into one email and that email is now connected to cloud. And I have a daily brief task that basically runs at six 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 I have buckets created. So for instance, there’s one bucket that is basically, here’s real action things. Oh, somebody sent you an invoice or Google Search Console is sending you an error report. You’re like, oh God, I got to go fix that.

Bjork Ostrom: So

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: There’s probably some stuff in there that’s like the TLD are highest priorities. There’s a bucket that is paid products. So for instance, if I have WPRM is my recipe card, if Brakta sent an email with 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 newsletter. So things that I subscribe to like, oh, KC Marquis wrote an article on Search Engine Land or whatever Simple Pin Media sent out a new podcast. Food Blogger Pro sent out a new podcast. Thanks. I guess.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Yeah. No, it’s just like, okay, cool. And if it’s –

Bjork Ostrom: Information. Yeah.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Yeah, it’s information and I don’t need to… In the same way that there’s only so many hours in the day, there’s only so much processing capacity for consumption. Honestly, I’m trying to, part of why all of this AI workflow became even important is that I’m trying to reduce consumption

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: And do more production or just be more present in other areas of my life. And so it’ll proces all of that and then it’ll give me a quick digest in the morning of you got 70 emails, but I think these are the five 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… 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. How would you sort this?

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: And then it came up with some stuff and I was like, well, the newsletters are not the same as the products. When Brexit say something, I want to actually know what’s happening. Or if NordTrust sent me something, I want to know what’s happening versus this is not the same as that. And then even within newsletters, there’s a couple of different buckets. There’s newsletters about blah that I don’t really care about. Yes, I subscribe. I should probably go unsubscribe, but it requires me to go click on 70 things. Okay. And then over time, and then I built that skill. And so what it does is every day at six 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 AI compounds point becomes even more salient is because the briefing is not just email.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: It also connects to my Airtable and it has an Airtable triage skill that essentially tells me, “Hey, Shuti, this post is due on Monday and you’re supposed to be reviewing and scheduling it today.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s like your editor.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: It’s my assistant actually. I had an executive assistant when I was at work, can’t do that right now. So I have just made AI my assistant in some ways.

Bjork Ostrom: 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 that’s been one of the biggest shifts for me thinking lately where I was listening to some podcasts and it’s specifically around what is the value of a company like OpenAI or Anthropic? And it comes back to what is the value of knowledge? And it’s like actually

Bjork Ostrom: 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 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. 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 require knowledge of ours that isn’t valuable. Processing of our brain energy that isn’t valuable, like reviewing the books.That’s valuable, it has to happen. Or like me reconciling and trying to understand why the Amazon payment is $10 off.

Bjork Ostrom: Twice. Yeah. And if we can get in the habit of getting rid of those things, getting those things off of our plate, usually previously you had to hire somebody to do that who was capable enough to do it, but also that you wouldn’t be hiring somebody who’s this senior level CEO salary, but to do a… So you’re having to pattern match knowledge level. But now you’re able to say, 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 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 said it and then you can go have tea and cookies, which you could do.

Bjork Ostrom: But actually what it does allow you to do is the things that are actually more impactful and 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 what have you found to be the valuable things that you can slot in as time becomes available?

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Before we get there, actually there’s two other things that I wanted to point out.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, please.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: One is that it accumulates cruft in the same way that your brain accumulates cobwebs.You probably don’t remember everything you studied in college, but it’s 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 a monthly auditing system where you actually go in, 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. I’m writing an article for the Seattle Times and I cannot write in first person, but then now it’s mushed both of that up and it’s a really garbage output. It’s a very simple example, but that tends to be I think the main reason why people get frustrated. Because when you go to a new AI, it doesn’t have any of that baggage.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: It doesn’t have all the context that’s conflicting context and now is able to give you a cleaner output that’s not as personalized, but it’s cleaner. And so the

Bjork Ostrom: Rule of – It’s like a reset on… Yeah.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Exactly. It’s like cleaning your phone. You’ll probably have 60,000 screenshots. Imagine

Bjork Ostrom: If your

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Phone actually actioned on all of that, you’d be in trouble. So clean it

Bjork Ostrom: Up.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: I think the other thing I was looking

Bjork Ostrom: At – So can you talk a little bit about that? Maybe another good example is you talked before about within your project, how you advise it to be adversarial. If you accidentally said that as a general feedback, always be adversarial. And then you’re like, “Gosh, this is like whenever I’m using AI, it’s like – Beating me

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Down.

Bjork Ostrom: Beating me down. That probably exists somewhere. How do you actually audit it? Where do you go? What do you do? How do you see what exists?

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: So every month I go, I have an hour or two. I think now it’s expanded to two hours, but think of it as performance studios for your team, 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 coworker, it actually is a file. It’s called cloud.md within that project. I go open that and sometimes it would’ve started with 250 lines and now it’s a thousand 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.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: This is not important.” And the great thing is I don’t even need to type any of this. I just use WhisperFlow. So sometimes I’ll just be on the treadmill and I’ll be like, okay, nope, this doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t make sense. Let’s just delete this. Let’s clean this up. And then now you get back. And one of the benefits is that it does accumulate over time. So it’s not going to go back to 250 lines, but maybe it’s 350 lines versus a thousand because it’s just absorbed random bits and bobs of memory and context. So I tend to do that for every single project.

Bjork Ostrom: Clean it up. Maybe something got in there and you’re like, actually, this isn’t super helpful. It is not.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: I don’t want you factoring this into future conversations. Yeah. Exactly. Does that make sense? Great. So that was one of the things, this audit, make sure that you’re weeding the garden to make sure that it’s exactly what you want it to present as.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: What would the other thing be?

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: 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. And an example here is that I have another skill, which is a voice of reader skill. So it’s just slash voice-reader. And what I did was this was really important because I went through a bunch of brand positioning exercises in the last three to six months as I realized I wanted to take this full-time and I wanted who I was writing 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.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: But I wanted it to still feel like it was the same person talking to the same people. And so I said, okay, help me 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 five years, so I can’t even imagine what that’s going to be like on picture me up.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Then I took all of that, threw it into cloud 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 blank 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 though, okay, the numbers are important because as a vegetarian, that’s the first question anybody asks you. Where do you get your protein from? Where

Bjork Ostrom: Do you get protein?

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Yeah. But what I realized was that people weren’t really concerned about the numbers as long as what they didn’t want was feeling hungry a little bit later.

Bjork Ostrom: Right.That was the problem, not actually.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: That was the problem.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Number is kind of an artifact or a symptom of the problem, but it wasn’t the root cause of the problem. Or another example, which I think I mentioned a while ago is that my website is vegetarian recipes, which is non-judgment. I’m not asking you to completely give up on all animal products. I want to 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 don’t even realize it’s vegetarian. Mashed potatoes are vegetarian, but have you ever though about it that way? Sure. Probably not. And baked potatoes are too. Okay, maybe you add bacon, but if not, sour cream and whatever. So I was like, okay, I think I had an impression that most of my readers were somewhere on that journey to becoming vegetarian, but not there.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: What I realized from running this analysis is that’s not actually true. My readers were vegetarian. They were cooking in families that were not consistently vegetarian. And what they were struggling with more was that they were cooking two meals essentially.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: 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, but I don’t want this to be a static snapshot because readership changes. If I suddenly blow up on Instagram, the people that are coming in from there might not be the same as the loyal newsletter readers that have been with me since 2020 when I started the blog. And so then I built in some guardrails and I said, okay, we’re going to split this into buckets. And because Claude has access to my Gmail, which is where all my comment moderation comes in for the cues, I run all my surveys through Google Forms. Instagram is the one that is 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.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Anytime somebody sends me an email, a reader sends me an email, actually now it’s auto labeled. So if somebody 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 five 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 posted a story on Instagram, I think it was two weeks ago or a week ago, where I also gave it a bunch of prior stories I posted. I was like, “Hey, analyze this. What seems to do better?

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Tell me what happened.“ And visually it’s able to process screenshots so it did that and then it said, ”Here’s three things you can try.“ And then I used that plus the voice of the reader data that I had. I posted a story and that story, I mean it got 60% viewership of my audience and I added 125 subscribers to my email list from one story. I was like, ”Wow, this is really good because people probably feel more seen when you talk to them using the words that they are

Bjork Ostrom: Describing

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Their pain points in. “

Bjork Ostrom: It’s such a great example of audience development, customer development. And so often we think – And

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Engagement, right? It’s

Bjork Ostrom: Completely – Yeah, we think we know what people need, but 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, “I’ve heard you say this, here’s the solution to that. ” The ability for AI to process a large amount of data, it’s one of the best skills that they can have. Yeah, so valuable. So we could talk for hours here. This I think will be great kind of kindling for people who are still into use Claude and ChatGPT as a chatbot to say like, “Hey, let’s light a fire on. What can you actually really do if you lean into some of these tools?” My last question for you would be, when you are using it, does it always have to be on?

Bjork Ostrom: So you were referenced being on the treadmill and 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 it’s open and running? Okay.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: It is. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s the other key piece that I think exists for people that’s different than how we operate Right now is having an always on computer so it can continue to work when you’re referencing and interacting with it.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: It is the primary downside I would say of Cloud is that Claud 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 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 walk to

Bjork Ostrom: Me. Have your computer. Yeah, sure.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: It’s a walking treadmill.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah, I see.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: 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, it doesn’t work. So you

Bjork Ostrom: Have to

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Have a primary single device.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. One of the solution, I do this and – Open cloud would work

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: With that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Having a Mac mini that just sits headless, meaning it doesn’t have a – It’s

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: So creepy though, no?

Bjork Ostrom: It’s wild. It’s like,

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: “Hi, I just came online. Who

Bjork Ostrom: Am I? ” Whoa. Yeah, it is. But you could also do that with Claude where it’s just always on and then you use a screen access

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Screen. It

Bjork Ostrom: Automatically does that when

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: You’re on dispatch.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Keep it on. Yeah. Surethi, this was such a fun conversation. I think super important as creators to think about 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. But really the spoiler with it is this allows us to do less of the things that computers are good at, which is transactional. Some of it’s brainstorming and creative, but the worst things that computers are capable of are the best things for us to be doing, which is the human forward, it’s videos, it’s interaction, it’s going live on a platform, whatever that might be. Those are going to be the differentiators for creators. And if we’re toiling away at moving files back and forth or analyzing data in a way that we don’t need to, that’s going to be time that’s not going to differentiate ourselves as creators.

Bjork Ostrom: 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.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Yeah. It’s called Misome Claude, like Mason+, but Misome Cloud. 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, I was doing this thing. Have you figured this out with Claude?” And I was like, “Yeah, sure. Here’s how you do it. ” And then at some point I was like, “I should just write about this somewhere.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Instead of sending an email, it’s now a newsletter. Yeah,

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Exactly. So now I’m just like, okay, let me throw up some stuff that I’m experimenting with. Because I think there is a gap in some ways of there’s a lot of really advanced claud thinking. There’s a lot of really advanced food blogging thinking. There’s not a lot of mixing of the two of not even, I think there’s even Claude for bloggers, but it doesn’t always apply to what we’re doing.Because for instance, there are hard, bright lines. I don’t use cloud for recipe development. That’s what I’m 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? I think there are some parts that, again, to your point, you keep to yourself and then let’s outsource the things that are not as value-driven. It’s transactional manual, et cetera. But there’s also a whole unsexy piece underneath it, which is like any other system, your car would break down if you never got the brakes checked.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: 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 perspective that I started the

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Substack with. So you can find it at miseenclaude.substack.com or reach out to me anywhere on Urban Farmie. That’s my handle across all of the other platforms for my food content.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. This is great. Truthy, thanks so much for coming on.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju: Thank you.

Emily Walker: 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 our podcast. I wanted to share that Shruthi is running a four-week challenge to help solo business owners and small teams build an AI system to organize their work, reduce repetitive admin, and make it clearer what to prioritize first. Her goal with the program is simple: spend less time managing the work and more time doing the parts you actually love. You can find the link for her ‘AI Operating Engine for Bloggers’ program in the shownotes and use code “FBP” for $45 off your registration. Next week on the podcast, we will be chatting with Jeremy Carrasco, one of the co-founders of Riddance. Bjork 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.