Transform Your Claude with Skills & MCP

Full video transcript

I’m going to show you how to connect Claude to anything when you are inside of Claude. You go ahead and click “add files, connectors, or more” and then you can type a slash and see a bunch of different commands. What you want to do is go to connectors and see all the connectors. I have Drive search, Canva, Firecrawl, Gamma, Gmail, Google Calendar, Notion, and then Zapier, and you can add many more.

So from this screen, you’ll be taken to connectors in your account where you can browse the different connectors and look at all the different platforms Claude now has connections with. For example, if you use Granola, you can connect Claude with Granola, sync it up, and do your meeting notes, then have Claude reference those right away. If you use HubSpot, you can have Claude interact with your CRM. If you use ClickUp, Stripe, Supabase, you can see all the different options here for many, many popular tools.

So, all of that said, if you have a tool that is not inside of Claude’s native connectors, it may be soon, but you can also go to “add custom connector.” You can name it, and then you would connect the remote MCP server URL. To build an MCP server or do anything related to that, you can search and follow Claude’s instructions. You can quite literally ask Claude how to do it and then use Claude to help you with research and getting this set up. Claude is a great tool to help you with also learning how to interact with Claude.

Back to our home screen, you can say, “Hey Claude, I want to research playsidehustle.com and their events series coming up. Go ahead and use the Firecrawl MCP to do a research report, and then run the market sauce prime blueprint skill to generate a report for me.” So now what I’m doing is giving Claude a command to use my Firecrawl MCP server, which is giving Claude a superpower in scraping and web research. It can go directly to websites — you can see it’s doing that right here. That is using my Firecrawl MCP connector. It takes 5 minutes or less to get set up. We have a video on it on our YouTube channel at GenAI University for free.

You can see it’s going down and doing all of this work using the Opus 4.6 model with extended thinking. Now, I am on the Max plan currently, and you may or may not want to use extended thinking every time you’re using Claude. You may want to use different models other than 4.6, which you can toggle between. Certain models get sunset after a length of time; new models are constantly being reintroduced. Right now, Opus 4.6 with extended thinking is giving me the best results, Claude plus my Firecrawl MCP.

What this gives me the capability of doing is running a skill which I’ve asked it to do — the market sauce prime blueprint — which is a series of result-oriented prompts, commands, and instructions that Claude is referencing to execute without me needing to go copy and paste or type them out again and again. We’ve already set up those instructions as skills within Claude. What that looks like in action is when you go to connectors and manage connectors, you’ll see somewhere around there — you can also go to your settings, which may or may not look the way my screen does right now. If you go to Capabilities in your settings and then Skills, it might point you in a slightly different direction. It’s changed on me a few times this week, so you’ll just have to figure out exactly where this is at whatever point in time you’re using Claude.

We’ve kicked off the Firecrawl research again because we ran into an instance where it capped out. I reran it, and sometimes this does happen — I tend to find it happens more often when I’m using extended thinking. Maybe it thinks for too long and just times itself out. It’s better than it was previously and will continue to get better; this is the worst it’s ever going to be.

As that’s executing, you can see the level of research it’s doing. It’s even creating a document for us that will be an artifact displayed here, which we can export and upload and continue working on inside Docs or Google Drive. Something to note whenever you’re setting up these connectors: you can go into manage connectors, and besides the connectors, you have skills. Skills are where Claude can take the tools you’ve given it through connectors and then execute things on repeat that lead toward a specific result or outcome — such as doing research, doing outreach, doing responses, and creating operational documents.

You can see in my skill stack I’ve got a lot of different skills, and each one has a different purpose. Claude can execute multiple skills in a sequence if you have a skill that orchestrates multiple skills. Some of these skills are additional things I’ve created that Claude will do for me rather than me having to reprompt it every time.

So, all of that said, I’ve jumped back into my chat thread. We’ve given Claude the instructions; we’re having it build a consolidated report. It’s set to Opus 4.6 with extended thinking. Sometimes that extended thinking times itself out and you need to retry a skill. If that’s happening often, I would just turn off extended thinking. You can also explore Sonnet and Haiku and other models. Opus 4.6 with extended thinking definitely uses more of your usage with Claude, so keep that in mind. If you’re on the Pro account, you may hit your limit faster than you’d like. I’m currently on the Max account and hit it every now and then, but it gives me much more usage of the platform without interruptions right now.

Here, after a few minutes of research, we have our site research report for this site — which could be whatever site you want to research. See the overview, how it works, and Claude put this together for me. I can go through and look at all the information about the current event, or the research, or the person I’m wanting to research. Claude is very effective at doing that research.

Then, if you like the outputs, you could ask Claude to do this again and again — “Can you turn this into a skill for me?” Something along those lines will trigger Claude’s ability to create skills. So if you like creating these types of reports for yourself, or if you’re doing this for a client, you can use a skill to create that type of output for whatever purpose you’re doing the research, by asking Claude to create a skill, and Claude will walk you through its skill-creation format. Sometimes it’ll ask you some questions, and you can personalize it — tell it something else. What should the skill name be? “Web recon” — that’s actually kind of a cool name. Let’s do that.

Now Claude has its questions for additional context that it will use to execute the creation of this skill. Again, keeping in mind the speed at which it’s doing this is taking longer because I have extended thinking on. If I turn that off, it will speed things up significantly. And if you use models like Sonnet 4.6 or Haiku 4.6, these will tend to be faster and quicker and can even be used for different purposes. Some people prefer Sonnet for when they’re in writing mode; some people prefer Opus 4.6 when they’re in research mode, or vice versa. You need to play around with these tools and figure out which one fits and works within your workflow best. Some of that comes down to your intuition with how you’re prompting and engineering these, experimenting, and then iterating on your process as these tools improve. Using your own skill to adapt is important in how you think and work alongside tools like Claude.

When you combine the power of Claude with connectors — meaning basically any tool that you use, which is why you might want to use Zapier, for example, since you can connect to almost any tool out there — and there are also ways you can create your own MCP servers, that means you’re giving Claude access to work with these tools from one consolidated interface. Then you can give it skills that it can use and execute.

So now we see Claude finishes and has a web recon skill that I can copy to my skills — it has a skills document and a report template. So now I’ve got this report template that Claude built for that specific skill. It’s got the skill documentation and the skill, which I can simply copy to my skills. I can download it and save the file to my computer; it’s a skill file. Now we can go to settings and capabilities — you may see your skills down here, or it may tell you to go customize them. Now we can see my skill, web recon, is right here.

Next time I want to use this skill, I go back to starting a new Claude conversation and say, “use the web recon skill to research playsidehustle.com.” Now it’s going to execute that skill and produce another report for me using the Firecrawl MCP tool alongside its research process.

I’m going to do one more example, actually with the same ask, but I’m going to use Sonnet 4.6, no extended thinking, so you can see the speed and difference in working between these tools. It’s still accessing the same skill, which is important, and it’s still accessing the same connections — the same MCPs — that you’ve integrated with Claude. The longer and more complex the skill, the more time it typically takes to execute. So keep that in mind. As you’re building skills, remember to make sure they’re toggled on when you need them. In some cases, you may want to toggle skills off because you don’t want to accidentally trigger, for example, Firecrawl while you’re working and just want it turned off — there are a multitude of reasons that could be the case.

And if you’re coding, you can add from GitHub — you can connect directly to GitHub and pull information from there. And here we go — we generated the report. I can download it, I can upload it into my Google Drive if I’ve connected that. It’s interesting that it’s actually pulling this stuff up from different pages that we have on the website, and to see it again, me actually knowing this brand — I could run this for any number of reasons, for any number of people. Say I get their information from an RB2B pixel for tracking website visitors — you could take someone’s website, drop it right here in Claude, run that research, and generate those reports.

So hope you found that useful. If you did, like, subscribe, and share. See you on the next video.