# How To Build $250,000 AI Agents With Claude (Step-By-Step)

Channel: Charlie Chang
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4v6dDTzZ1bU
Duration: 23 min
Language: English
Words: 5196
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/4v6dDTzZ1bU

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[0:00] My name is Charlie and today we're building four AI agents that will replace a $250,000 team. These are not just chat bots, they are agents. These are things that can go and do the work and hand you the results. So, the first one that we're building will turn one video into a week of content. The second one goes through your inbox every morning and writes you replies. Third one goes out and finds you clients. And the fourth one actually answers your customers at 2 in the morning while you're asleep. We'll go in order from most simple to a little bit more advanced. I'll show you exactly how to

[0:29] build these agents. Let's get started. Okay, so you're watching this because you want to build an agent that can actually do stuff. And yeah, phase one of AI was just chat bots. You can ask it questions. It could answer you. Phase 2's AI agents that can actually go out and do things for you just like a team member would. The great news is that building these is actually extremely easy. You don't need to learn how to code. And after you build the agent once, it's going to work for you continuously for free. And the best way to learn is to actually build. So, I encourage you guys to build these

[0:57] alongside me because that's going to help you guys out the most. If you add up the agents that we are building today, you have a social media manager at $80,000 per year, an executive assistant at $85,000 per year, a sales rep at $128,000 per year, and a customer support rep at $70,000 per year. In total, that's over $360,000 per year. The great thing is that these types of agents will do all of the boring work that no one wants to do, and they'll do it before you actually even wake up. You can also set them on a schedule so they perform these things automatically without your input. And

[1:28] yeah, let's actually start building the first one now. So, agent number one is going to turn one video into a week of content. So, I have my Claude app pulled up on my computer. And the first thing we're going to do is come here to projects. We will click on new project right here. Let's name this content strategist. We'll write a quick little

[1:46] description on what it is going to do. You can also choose a folder if you want it to work directly on your computer. For this one, I'm not going to use a folder. And then you'll click on create project. So, I like to create projects because it just organizes your agents a little bit better. Yes, you can click on this button and just do a new chat, but

[2:02] I find this is a lot more organized. Plus, we're going to be able to schedule this to happen on a recurring time or date. So, over here are the instructions. And if I click on this plus button right here, I'll be able to type in a whole set of instructions for this agent. Now, yes, you can do this manually, but I'm actually going to

[2:20] prompt Claude to create this for me. Whatever instructions you have here, the agent is going to read every single time before it runs. Contacts here is also good if you have any specific documents you want. I'm going to leave this blank for now and we'll come to this later on. Now, there's two options to creating these agents. One is through co-work and one is through chat. For this video, I'll be showing you co-work since it allows us to actually give Claude tasks to run autonomously. So, I want you to help me turn videos and video transcripts into multiple content pieces for me to post. I'll drop in a video

[2:51] link or transcript, and you'll turn it into a ton of content across Instagram, Reels, X, LinkedIn, and my newsletter. I'll select the AI model that I want to use. We'll just keep it on Opus 5.5 for now, and we'll click on this button right here. Now, it may ask you some clarifying questions, so go ahead and answer those. We'll go with full batch, which is recommended. For the voice, I'm going to select match my video. But of course, if you have a whole voice profile or something, you can always enter that in right here. We'll go ahead and do a living doc for each. And for

[3:20] the newsletter, let's say short section just for this video. So, it's going to start building this agent. But the great thing is over time, we may want it to do different things or we may want it to do less of a certain thing. And we're probably going to be giving it feedback. Any feedback you give it within the chat right here is going to affect the instructions and it's just basically going to get smarter over time. So, it's created this content playbook MD. Let me take a look. This is essentially the instructions for this agent and as I give it feedback over time, this is going to update itself. So, I've gone

[3:50] ahead and selected a video that I filmed. I'm going to paste the URL right here and we'll click on enter. So, it's now going to pull the transcript and I'm going to select allow all for this website. If you actually click right here, we can actually set it to automatically approve, which makes it so you have to, you know, approve things less. So, I'll go ahead and do that. So, now it's watching the video and it's going to start building out all our content for us. Okay. So, awesome. That is done. It just took a few minutes. And as you can see, I have this whole

[4:18] document right here. It's built up the core ideas, some of the best quotes, clipw worthy moments. It gives us a bunch of different reels that we can both repurpose as well as film for an organic new reel. We have a bunch of different exposts that we can do. We can do a thread right here with eight different things. LinkedIn post. And from the newsletter, it wrote this uh 330word section. And now every time I come here to projects and go to content strategist, I can just drop in a link to a video that I've done. And it's going to do the same thing. Of course, I can

[4:47] give it feedback. I can say, "Hey, give me more reels or I only want to film real organic posts, not clip what I have in the video." You can also set this to run on a schedule. So you can have actually check out your YouTube channel if you have one, find any new content and anytime a new video is posted, it can go ahead and run this for you. It's all done here within messages. So yeah,

[5:07] you don't need any coding experience. Very easy to do and formatting like this in this project is in my opinion the best way to do it. Now let's work on agent number two, which is our inbox agent. This is part of what your AI executive assistant is going to do. So come back here to projects. Let's click on new project and let's call it inbox agent. We'll write a quick little description and we will click on create project. So you might be thinking okay cool let's build this agent but how is it going to have access to our actual emails. This is where connectors or MCP

[5:37] is going to come in. So there are two different ways that you guys can connect your accounts to Claude. One is directly through the connectors. So let me show you guys real quick. If I click on my name down here and click on settings. We'll come here to connectors. And here you're going to be able to connect all these different types of accounts to your cloud. So for example, since I use Gmail, what I'll want to do is come here, find Gmail. You can also use the search functionality here as well. And what we'll do is click on connect. It's going to pull up a browser. We'll click

[6:07] on continue connecting. And now we'll select the account we want to connect. I'll go ahead and select this one right here. We'll click on continue. And we will click select all. This is going to allow to read your emails, manage drafts, and also send emails. And yeah, it does take a bit of trust to do this, but I've been doing this for many, many months, and it's been great. We'll click on continue. And now that is successfully connected right here. I also recommend going ahead and connecting a bunch of other ones like Google Calendar. It can then schedule things inside of your calendar directly, access your drive right here. And yeah,

[6:40] anything else that you guys use, you can find it here. Another way to connect these types of accounts is with an MCP. So you can use something like Composio or Zapier. Essentially what this is is you have one account and on that let's say Composeio account. That's where you connect all of your different accounts. And within Claude, all you need to do is connect that one Composio or Zapier account and it'll have access to all the

[7:03] accounts within that single account. This is really good if you move between claud chat GPT other platforms cuz you just need to connect to one thing every single time that MCP and it'll give access to all of those accounts that are already connected. But for this video I'm just going to connect it using this direct connector right here. So let's go ahead and go to projects. Let's find inbox agent. And now that we know that our email is connected, we can start building this agent right here. If your AI is already trained on your writing style, I would go ahead and export some type of voice profile. Or you can even

[7:35] have Claude go into your email, look at some of your latest responses and replies, and build some type of voice profile from that. This is going to really help it sound more like you, which of course is extremely extremely important. Now, it's very similar. And what I'll do is I'll just start prompting it. One thing that I recommend doing is use this button right here because it's going to be able to transcribe your voice. Speaking is going to be probably three to four times faster than typing. Every morning go through my inbox and my email and basically get it ready for me. So sort everything into let's say one of four

[8:09] different categories. First is needs Charlie. So it needs a real person or a real decision from me. Second is draft it. So I know the answer. It's just typing. So you write it. Three is read later. So this is going to be for like newsletters and updates. And then four is going to be ignore. This is going to be like cold pitches, promos, stuff like that. Label them into Gmail with these exact names. And yeah, make sure the emails sound like me. So, go ahead and look at some of my latest replies or my voice profile so you can sound just like me. Never send anything, right? Only

[8:41] draft things. And let's go ahead and set this up to run at 8:00 a.m. PST every single day. Cool. So, as you can see, using your voice is a lot better. Let's go ahead and click enter. Okay, so it's going through these five different steps by itself. And again, the first draft of this is not going to be perfect. You're always going to need to tweak it. You're

[8:59] always going to need to give feedback. And over time, it's going to get really, really good. So, by giving it this detailed prompt, it knows exactly what to do. It's first building the voice profile, then it's creating the Gmail labels, then it's triaging my inbox, and then it's scheduling it, like I said, and then it's going to actually verify that everything is done correctly. Now, what I'd probably want to do also is add some functionality. I may want to scan my email multiple times per day, give me any really important ones and prompt me on them. And I can actually set it so that it can help me create drafts

[9:29] directly within Claude and I can approve them within Claude. After that, it'll send it out automatically, which is really, really cool. You never actually need to go into your emails. We'll go ahead and click allow for this task. And as you can see, it's also cool. It's using the Gmail connector that we just connected. Now, it's going to ask, do we want to schedule this task? So this morning inbox triage, we'll click schedule and again see how it does. Give it feedback directly within the chat and over time is just going to update this playbook and get a lot better. All right, so today's first pass, it has

[9:58] three emails that need me to actually look at. It's drafted one. There's 19 for read later and there's 10 that have been ignored. So I'm here in my inbox and this is really cool. As you can see, all these labels have been created. We have a bunch that are ignore, some read later, needs Charlie. We can look at my

[10:12] drafts. So it's drafted this one email. I can look at this, see how it is, and click send if it looks good. And all the labels are here. So I have everything sorted perfectly. I can also tell it, okay, that looks good. And like I said earlier, you can tell it to send emails directly within Claude. So I can approve of it and say send that email. So coming back here to see our agent, you can see

[10:32] we have this scheduled task right here. And what you guys can also do is instead of calling this inbox agent, you can call it executive assistant and just have a bunch of different scheduled tasks. So you can have your inbox triage right here. You can have another schedule task like check my calendar for today and brief me in the morning at 8:30 a.m. That's another way to basically organize this. But for this one, I just created this inbox agent just to show you how to actually create it. Okay, now let's work on agent number three, which is the lead agent. This is one that can actually help you guys make

[11:03] money. And what it's going to do is go and look at local businesses websites. It's going to find out what's actually broken and it's going to write each email about it. So, it's kind of like a customized website audit that runs on autopilot. We'll come here to projects again. We'll click on new project. Let's go ahead and call it lead agent. And let's write something quick like help find leads for my business. Click on create project. And now we'll do the

[11:25] same exact thing that we've done before. If you have any context that you can give it about your business, you can add that right here. For example, your pricing, some of your frequently asked questions, you can add all of that right here. And let's go ahead and prompt it. So, you're going to be my leads agent for my web design business. And what I want you to do is every single morning at, let's say, 700 a.m. I want you to find five local businesses around me. My zip code is we can start close to me and then, you know, get farther and farther as we go on. I want you to create a

[11:56] Google sheet called Lead Tracker. And for each business's website, what I want you to do is do an analysis about it. Find what's wrong, what can be improved about that website. and then write an email about it. For now, let's just draft it in Gmail and make sure to always check that lead tracker Google sheet to make sure we don't email companies multiple times. Do this to maximize my leads and give some real value to these businesses about what can be improved on their websites. We'll click on start task. So now it's going to say that we need to connect these two connectors, which is great. So I'll go

[12:30] ahead and connect those. We'll select all, click continue. Great. Google Calendar is connected. Now let's connect Google Drive so we can actually create that sheet. Select all here. Continue. So now I can actually read our Google Drive as well as create new documents within it. So of course I just connect to Google Drive. So we'll click one.

[12:47] We'll select this to sign off on. Okay. Okay. Let's prioritize restaurants. And of course we can tweak this as we go on. So if we want to not do restaurants and retail, we can later tell it. Okay. Let's expand it to service pros. Okay. We'll say Google Drive is connected. Cool. So, as you can see, it's created these five different steps. First, it's going to find local leads. Then, it's going to audit each website. It's going to create Gmail drafts. Then, it's going

[13:09] to create a lead tracker Google Sheet. It's going to schedule this daily at 7 a.m. I could also have it send out these emails automatically, but I'm not going to do that just for this video. Just know that you can get as creative as you want with these types of agents. You can have it do as much as you want or as little as you want. The great thing is it's running this in the background. I can go ahead and do other stuff. I can work in a different project. I could be playing tennis. It's just like having a team member that works without you needing to be there. Now, it's going to

[13:35] ask if you want to schedule this task. So, these are the instructions. Just make sure this all looks okay. We'll go ahead and click schedule. And now, this is going to run every single morning at 7:00 a.m. Now, we'll say for these types of agents, your computer will need to be on. And if your computer's not on, it's not going to be able to run. It will try

[13:51] to run when you open up your computer. Cool. So, it's gone ahead and done this. It's found five different restaurants. I'm actually know some of these. I'll open up the lead tracker Google sheet. Cool. We got this sheet right here. Let's go ahead and see some of the emails that I wrote. So, now we have a bunch of new drafts. So, as you can see, here is one of the drafts. It's pretty personalized. And if you have any feedback, just tell Claude. It will edit the voice profile for next time. Yeah, you can see this is a pretty customized analysis that I think they'll get some

[14:18] value from. One thing I'd probably do if I were in this case is put a book a call link. For now, we don't have one, but that's something that I would do to tweak this agent to make it even better. So, those are three of the more basic agents that we can build, but this is only like 5 10% of what Claude can actually do. Creating these projects, having it be scheduled so it runs automatically. These are pretty basic AI agents that anyone can build extremely easily. Now, the next agent that we're building is going to actually answer questions that customers submit. This is going to be a little bit different

[14:48] because we're going to run it on a VPS. And the great thing about this is that it's going to be able to answer questions all the time. It's literally having a computer that is always on so Claude can be running at all times. If someone asks a question and they get an answer, let's say an hour later, that's not that optimal. What we want for this customer service rep is to be able to

[15:06] answer questions as fast as possible. So, this is the more advanced part of the video. But if you want to use Claude to its fullest potential, I think this is going to be extremely interesting for you guys. And yes, I personally have multiple VPSs. I run Claude on my VPS for some of my stuff. I do think any business owner should have a VPS for many, many reasons. This video is sponsored by Blue Host, who I've been using for over a decade. I'll have a link down below for you guys to get the best possible deal, and it's going to take you to a landing page that looks

[15:34] just like this. By the way, I do earn a commission if you buy through my link at no additional cost to you. Now, we'll click on view plans. And as you can see, there are a bunch of different types of VPS's. All have different speeds, different storage. For most of you guys watching this video, I think NVME2 is going to be good enough. It's also the cheapest one at just under $5, which is insane. If you want more speed, more storage, of course, you can select one of these, but let's go ahead and select this for now. So, when you go through that link, it's going to be

[16:00] preconfigured for cloud code. So, we'll be able to run our cloud code directly on it. For this video, I'm going to select one year, and I recommend selecting either 1 year or 2 years to lock in this really low price for an extended amount of time. We'll click on continue to checkout. And now, you're going to just enter in your information and click submit payment. I was already logged into my demo account, but you may also need to create your own account. So now you're gonna come here to your hosting and under my plans, you're going to see your VPS. As you can see, it's currently building my VPS since I just

[16:30] purchased it. So the next part is going to seem a little bit intimidating to some of you guys, but essentially I'm going to show you guys how to connect your VPS within your terminal. Now, to open up terminal, you'll just type terminal into your computer. Click on open. And this might look a little bit different depending on if you're using a Windows or a Mac. So, let me show you guys how to create an SSH key. I'm going to actually put this down below in the description. And all you have to do is copy and paste it. We'll click on enter again. I already created one before, but

[16:56] I'm going to overwrite this for now. You probably won't see this. I recommend creating some type of passphrase. It's just going to be a password so that no one else can access it. We'll enter that again. Cool. So, now it's created the SSH key. Now, on Mac or Linux, what you're going to type is this right here. And I'll also have this down below in the description. On Windows, it is a different prompt, but I'll have that down below. So, this is going to allow us to see the public key. And as you can

[17:20] see, it should start with SSH something. And what I'm going to do is copy this. Now, within my Blue Host account, I'm going to go to our VPS. You'll come here to SSH keys. And let's click on add SSH key. I'm just going to name this demo, and I'm going to paste that right here, and we'll click save. So, now that that is created, what we're going to do is come back here to overview. You're going

[17:43] to come here and copy your IP address. We're going to go back to terminal. You're going to enter in ssh space root at and then your IP address right here. And once you have that, you'll click on enter. It's going to ask us to enter in that passphrase we had created earlier. And now we are sshed into our VPS. So to start cloud code, I'm just going to type claude and click enter. And now we are in cloud code on our VPS. You can select what mode you want. I'm going to go with dark mode. And now we're going to log into our account. So I'm going to

[18:16] connect using our cloud account with subscription. If your browser does not open, you will just copy this. So I've gone ahead and pasted that here. We're going to click authorize. It's going to give us this authentication code. We will click copy code. We'll come here back to our terminal and paste that right here. Click enter. And once your login is successful, you'll click on enter to continue. Cool. So now you can actually run different agents that you have within your cloud account directly on your VPS. Now I'm going to go back to actually showing you how to build that AI agent which is basically a customer

[18:48] service rep. And to that we're just going to go back to our normal Claude app. Now what we're going to do is come here to claude and you're going to be in the Claude code section for this one. And what we'll do is click on this plus button right here. So here you're going to be able to select where this Claude code session is going to run. So I'll click on that right here. And I'm actually going to select SSH. So we'll click this right here. We'll name this demo. For SSH host, what it's going to be is root at and then your IP address for your VPS. Again, to find that, all

[19:19] you have to do is go ahead and copy this right here in your Blue Host dashboard. You can actually leave all these alone. We'll click on test connection. It's going to have us enter in the passphrase that we created earlier. Looks good to go. And we'll click add SSH connection. So now this is actually running in our VPS, although it looks like we're running it on our computer. So let's go ahead and start building our agent. And I'm just going to make this pretty brief just for the sake of this video. So this is a very general prompt right here. But I'll go ahead and click enter. We'll

[19:47] select the remote folder. So just leave it as root trust workspace. Now building this agent is very self-explanatory. You're essentially just going to have a conversation with Claude code. It's going to ask you different questions. It's going to basically do a bunch of different things to build the best agent possible. So, let's go ahead and answer some of these questions. We'll go ahead and select draft replies only, and we'll

[20:07] just say build one from past replies. Now, this email doesn't really have any past customer service history, so it's not going to do a good job. So, cool. It's built it. And of course, this is just for a demo. So, as you guys build your own or whatever you're building, please be a bit more detailed in actually giving it more detailed prompts, answering questions better, it's just going to make a much better AI agent. So, from here on out, you'll be able to test it. And it's really cool because this is actually running within our VPS. You want to test it to make sure that it runs properly even if your

[20:36] own computer is off, but since it is running within the VPS, it should work well. Now, you also may need to set up your connections directly on your VPS. Again, sometimes it doesn't port over. So, you may need to connect your Gmail drive, whatever it is. So, yeah, we're confirmed. This one runs 24/7 on the VPS. And there's so many other uses to having a VPS. For example, we build a bunch of apps that we host on our VPS for my team to use. So, essentially, we just built four different agents and I show you guys how to build a very basic agent to a bit more of a complex one

[21:08] that runs on cloud code on a VPS, how to connect your accounts so that it can actually perform things on your behalf, how to get an affordable VPS with Blue Host, and show you actually how to connect your Cloud account to your VPS. There are so many other different things that you guys can build using Claude. For example, you could create a competitor watch agent where it slacks you every single day what your competitors are doing. You can build a proposal writer. So if a lead comes in, it will create a draft for a proposal that you can then send out. You can create a reporting agent. So basically,

[21:39] it pulls your numbers on Friday and it writes a summary. And yeah, people are charging local businesses a lot of money to set these up. But what we built today is genuinely sellable. It's also usable in your own business. So hopefully you guys got some value from the video. AI agents are the future. I save so much time, both my personal life as well as my business life, just by having these AI agents run 24/7. And there's no reason why anyone should not have their own team of AI agents. Building your first AI agent is always the hardest, but after you build one, every single one gets easier and easier. I encourage

[22:12] you guys pick a bunch of boring tasks that you need to do every single week and then create an AI agent on a recurring schedule to do it. After that, you can get into some of the more advanced AI agents. Anyways, if this video was helpful, please give it a like, comment if you have any questions, and also subscribe because I do a ton of content about AI, entrepreneurship, finance. My whole goal is to help you

[22:33] guys live a financially successful life. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next video. Peace.

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