Six rungs, bottom to top, and the finish work beside them.
A visitor asked me last week which Claude feature they should learn first. That is the wrong question, and it is the question the whole industry teaches people to ask.
Claude gets explained as a menu — projects, skills, Cowork, connectors, Claude in Chrome, here you go, pick one. So you pick none, and you stay exactly where you started.
It’s not a menu. It’s a ladder. You already know this ladder, because you have hired someone before. 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. Every rung is you handing over a little more of the work.
What the ladder actually is
Six short videos, in order, each one about a single thing you stop doing yourself. Rung one, you do all the work and Claude answers. By rung six it is going and getting its own information, running your procedures, and working while you are out on an appointment.
None of them is a setup guide. There is no jargon and nothing to install to follow along — this is the map, so you stop guessing which part of Claude to use when. When you want to build something real, the Build Library at the bottom of this page is where the rungs turn into working systems.
Each rung assumes the one below it, so the order matters more than the length. And there is a seventh video that is deliberately not a rung: Claude Design, the finish work, which you can reach from wherever you are standing right now.
The seven videos
Start at the top of this list. All seven videos are live, and every page is finished and ready to read.
Rung 1 Chat You do everything. It answers. Watch · 6:48 → Rung 2 Projects It starts to remember you. Watch · 5:11 → Rung 3 Connectors It gets its own information. Watch the video → Rung 4 Skills It knows the procedure. Watch the video → Rung 5 Cowork It works while you’re out on an appointment. Watch the video → Rung 6 Claude in Chrome It runs the tools that you run. Watch the video → Not a rung Claude Design The finish work — reachable from any rung. Watch the video →
Do I have to go 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, which is why you can’t skip to rung five and have it work.
The exception is Claude Design. It never asks you to hand over more work, so you can reach it from any rung — including the one you’re standing on right now.
Where Claude Design sits
The six rungs are the construction: the framing, the math, the numbers. Claude Design is the finish work — the paint, the siding, the trim. Nobody buys a house with no siding on it, and no seller reads a market update that looks like a wall of text.
Not a rung · Claude Design is the map for it. Teach Claude Your Brand is the build — set it up once with your colors, your fonts and your voice, and everything it makes after that comes out looking like you.
The ladder is the map. The builds are the trips.
The rungs teach you what Claude actually is. The Build Library is where they turn into systems that run — every build in it uses two or three rungs at once, which is what they look like in practice.
Three builds where the rungs stack.
Before you start climbing.
Where do I start if Claude is brand new to me?
Rung one, today. Watch it, then do the one thing at the end of that page: open a blank chat and write down everything you had to explain before you could ask your question. That list is your rung two, and rung two takes about four minutes to set up.
What if I already use Claude every day?
Then you have probably built more of this than you think, and the map is still worth ten minutes. Most agents who use Claude daily are using one or two rungs well and have never touched the others. Read down the list, find the first rung you cannot honestly say you are doing, and start there.
How long does the whole series take?
They are short — most run five to ten minutes — and that is on purpose: no setup guides, no jargon, just the map. All seven are live, so you can watch the series in an afternoon or climb one rung a week.
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