Eight months of paying for Claude. One blank chat.
I coach an agent — I’ll call him Dave. He had been paying for Claude for eight months, and last month he told me it wasn’t working for him. He was still writing his own listing descriptions, still building his own comps, still spending Sunday night pulling seller updates together by hand. So I asked him to share his screen and show me how he was actually using it.
He opened a blank chat, typed a question, copied the answer, and closed the tab. That was the whole thing. For eight months.
And we told him wrong. Merrill and I handed Dave a list — projects, skills, Cowork, connectors, Claude in Chrome. Here you go, pick one. That’s how everybody explains this, and it shows up like a menu. So you pick nothing, and you stay exactly where you started.
It’s not a menu. It’s a ladder.
And you already know this ladder, because you have hired someone before. Day one, your new assistant asks you a question and you answer it. You don’t hand over your logins on day one. You hand over one small thing, and each week, as they earn it, you hand over a little more.
That’s all this is. Every rung is you handing over a little more of the work.
The six rungs, bottom to top
Six rungs, bottom to top. That’s the whole map.
Claude Design leans against the ladder
Think about what a ladder is actually for. You climb it to build the house. Everything in that table is the construction — the framing, the math, the numbers. Claude Design is the finish work: the paint, the siding, the trim.
I want to be careful how I say that, because “finish work” can sound like the optional part — the nice-to-have you get to if there’s time. It isn’t. Nobody buys a house with no siding on it, and no seller reads a market update that looks like a wall of text. The construction is what makes it true. The finish work is what makes somebody actually want it.
Design never asks you to hand over more work, which is why it isn’t a rung — and why you can reach it from anywhere on this ladder, including the rung you’re standing on right now. You don’t have to climb first to get there.
You can’t skip to rung five
Here’s the thing about a ladder: you don’t get to the top by picking one rung. Almost every genuinely useful thing Merrill and I build uses several rungs at once — a skill sitting inside a project, pulling from a connector, running in Cowork. That’s not advanced. That’s just what it looks like when it’s all working together.
Which means the order matters. If you’ve watched some of our build videos, you’ve already seen these pieces stack. If Claude is mostly new to you, this is the series to start with.
Rung one is not bad
Last Tuesday I had a seller who was upset about a lowball offer. I opened a chat, told Claude exactly what happened, and a few seconds later I had a plan for how to walk into that conversation. We went from offended to constructive, and we put together a counter.
That’s rung one, and it is genuinely useful.
Here’s the ceiling
Claude doesn’t remember that conversation. Next time that same seller has a problem, I start all over — who I am, what market I work in, what we already talked about, what brokerage I’m in, my voice, my brand. Every single time.
Ask a question, copy the answer, close the tab. Now I’m just like Dave. That’s chatbot thinking. Rung one works — it’s just the bottom rung, and what we see is that most agents never find out there’s a second one.
Your take it and run challenge
Do this before the next video. Open a blank chat the way you normally would — but before you type your question, write down every single thing you had to explain to Claude first.
That list you just wrote? You’re going to type it again tomorrow, and the day after that. That list is your project. That’s rung two, and it takes about four minutes to set up.
Next: rung two
Three builds where the rungs stack.
Before you start climbing.
Do I have to climb the rungs in order?
Mostly, yes. Almost every genuinely useful thing we build uses several rungs at once — a skill sitting inside a project, pulling from a connector, running in Cowork. Each rung assumes the one below it, so you can’t skip to rung five and have it work.
Is there a rung seven?
The ladder keeps going past six — there’s a whole world of Claude built for people who write software. That’s a different ladder in a different building. Get to rung six and you’re ahead of almost every agent in this country. You don’t need rung seven.
Where does Claude Design fit?
Beside the ladder, not on it. The rungs are the construction — the framing, the math, the numbers. Claude Design is the finish work: the paint, the siding, the trim. Because it never asks you to hand over more work, you can reach it from any rung, including the one you’re standing on right now.
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