I Built an AI Employee With Claude & Obsidian

0:00I run a business that generates over 2 billion pounds every single year in revenue. I have a team of over 20 spread across the world. And by connecting Claude and Obsidian, it's like I have a whole new employee. It generates SOPs, contracts, helps me with my finances for my business. So, let me show you how you can do this, too. Fraser, I'm excited about this. Can I see how you use your setup like an employee? How about create an SOP? Okay. All right. So, essentially, what this is doing is it's telling Claude to go and use Obsidian, all the information that it has in the vault

0:35over there, in order to create me an onboarding SOP for my agency. So, what it's going to do is going to pull from all that information, but realistically, I don't even need to instruct it to pull from Obsidian because it will kind of do that for me already, but I have specifically set it in this. But, I'll just hit go. Obviously, this might take a little bit longer. I have found that with these um these prompts, when you're using Obsidian, it's obviously cuz it's pulling through a massive database, things do normally take a little bit

1:04longer.

1:10It's giving me a lot of a lot of different information here. And then, obviously, then I can work with it back and forth to make sure that it's got the information that it needs. One thing that I do use this a lot for is because it knows all of my staff because, basically, I uploaded every single one of my staff's contracts into Claude, and it digested them into Obsidian. I can ask it anything about my staff in terms of like, you know, whether it's like holiday pay or anything like that, and it will go and search it. I can rank all of my staff by how much I pay them, like,

1:47anything like that, and it will do it for me. Like, I it it's not going to read each individual uh PDF. Instead, it's just going to go to those markdown files that it's done and all the key and relevant information. Right on. All right, this is excellent. I love it. By the way, I'm sponsored by Zapier, which I use to connect about

2:0610,000 apps to any AI agent that I use. Show me how to connect Obsidian into Claude. So, one main thing, and Obsidian does recommend this, is that you put your vault folder in somewhere like Google Drive desktop. This way, no matter where you are, it always has access to that vault. So, that's one thing that I suggest first. But, in order connecting it directly to um to Claude, I use a MCP, which is, in my opinion, the easiest way to do it

2:36with. There is a ton of them. This is the one that I used, uh which is from uh Ian's Inn not. Um and it gives you all the instructions on here of how to install it. Honestly, how I installed it, I copied and pasted the URL into Claude, and I said, "Install this for me."

2:55Excellent. did it for me. Like, the you you don't There's a couple of things that you need to do. One, you need to turn on um you need to make sure that you turn on a certain feature uh within Claude, but again, uh within Obsidian, sorry. But, it will tell you to do that. But, that's how I do for like most of my MCPs. I

3:14just tell it to install it for me. All right. And of course, we'll have a link to this in the show notes so people can see it. Let's take a look at your Obsidian setup. How do you set it up so that it has the data it needs to run your business? So again, I asked Claude for the best way to do this. Um so, the main thing, it doesn't because I'd never go into Obsidian and I'm looking through the files myself, this is really only organized so that Claude can find everything Mhm. in the fastest possible way. So, I just asked it, "Can you organize my Obsidian in a way that

3:48will make information faster for you to find?" And that's exactly what it did. So, you can see like there is so many files. And they're all Yeah, they're all linked to these like key places, basically. Um So, what's this one? Prospecting deals in progress, one note per active deal, discovery page notes, proposal status. Now, this is not you setting it up. This is not you It just

4:18knows to create that that section. Yeah. So, there's these main things. There's a home one, there's an index, there's a client roster. So, that has a That links to a file then for each of my clients. Uh there's another index one there. And then these just all link to separate places, right? So, you can see these are my Claude Code Tools here. So, it knows about them, right? Uh like my whole

4:41system. Um So, these This is just like basically how the tool is made so that it always can reference them. There's a ton of tools. We can we can go through that, for sure. Um but if we're just sticking on here um on Obsidian, yeah, everything here is linked together in some way or other. So, it's constantly back referencing another one. So, you click on this and it goes to another file. You click on

5:05that one, it goes to another file. Again, I didn't build this. Claude built this. But the important thing is that I have a Claude um a Claude co-work task that runs on another computer, which isn't my laptop that I'm on now, that every single morning it does an audit of the entire Obsidian and makes sure that everything is connected and nothing is left off to one side. So, you can see here there's a couple of things which are left over

5:31here. And what it will do is it will pick up these when that scheduled task runs and it will find a place for them. Can I see one of these docs just to get a sense of what it's storing for you? Yeah, let's have a look. So, Okay. This the Nice Ads newsletter. this is my newsletter, right? So, it's pulled from a couple of other MCPs, but it's stored in information here, so it's got all my active subscribers, the acquisition like charts, everything,

6:01recent posts. filling this data in on a regular basis? It's just going out and grabbing it. So, you have an automation set up so that it will go and grab your data from your newsletter and put it into here. Yeah, so it uses the Beehive is the supplier of my newsletter. So, it's a Beehive MCP. Every single time that I have written a new newsletter, I paste it into Claude and say, "Write me a subject line." At that point then there's a skill that runs, which then basically tells Claude to use that MCP to go and get the most recent information about my newsletter, and then update that file that you just saw,

6:43and then it will use that in order to create me the best performing subject lines. So, it's also looking at all your past headlines that worked for you, or I all of them, and analyzing what worked best for you, and then it's creating one. Correct. So, if if it's saying that your 55% open rates come when you say something like,

7:05"Why your X isn't working." Yeah. Right? And it does like paradox contradiction does well, name brand named brand does well, or how we're etc. And then you're in the 50 to 55% if you have a bold death claim plus a replacement. Um so, something like Claude is dead. Yeah. Something else is better. That's the kind of thing that

7:30that gets you even higher open rates. But, you can see like just by the search here, right? It's pulled 200 and 17 mentions of Nice Ads to some extent, right? So That's your newsletter name. Yeah, exactly. So so it's so many times it's pulling information and saving it back to Obsidian on a regular basis. So now when you write, do you write in Claude and then Claude goes in and hunts all the stuff down and helps you write

8:02your newsletter? So no, cuz I'm old school. I like to I don't write it. I use WhisperFlow to dictate it. But what I will do is I will paste the final thing into Claude to then write the subject lines. Okay. But yeah, I mean realistically, it has pretty much every single issue of Nice Ads. So it probably could write me

8:24one. I just prefer to do it myself. But you're doing WhisperFlow into Claude chat and then Claude chat writes something for you and it's informed by your past messages. Mhm. Correct. Got it. Interesting. All right, I like the way that you that you do that. What are some of the other things that you that you do with it? Well, the main things is I'm on a lot of calls, like a lot of calls, right? With prospect clients, with staff members, everything like that. I use Fathom for my call recordings and I don't pay for it. I use

8:55the free version. So because of that there's no like direct link to any kind of like LLM or anything like that. So instead I use Zapier to send all the call recordings from Fathom and then put them in a Google Doc and then save them in a file in Google Drive. Um I then have a Claude co-work scheduled task that then pulls every single day, it pulls the last 24 hours worth of calls into Claude, it digests them and then it

9:28puts them into my Obsidian. Got it. Cuz there's no direct connection to Obsidian from uh from Fathom. Yeah. yeah. So it has a look at the transcript, it sees the transcript, it pulls out all the key information from it. So, it's not just saving just a, you know, huge transcript, it's saving like relevant information for me, and then it saves it all back in here, which then means if we do end up working with that client, I have all this back information on the client from when we started talking all the way to when we're working together

10:00that I can then call from. Can I see this app? It's the most simple Zap you're ever going to see. [laughter] A new transcript comes in, create a file from the text. That's it. And then if you click on the Google Drive, it's going to there you go, from my meetings. And then if you click on the drive, it's telling it where to store it, I'm assuming. No, not even telling it. Oh,

10:22there it is. into the Fathom calls in my Google [laughter] Drive. The file name is going to be call with whoever's the name is, and then the file content is the plain plain text transcript. And then it's going to convert it into a document. Done. Okay. Um can we see the co-work skills that you use that automate all this? They're on another computer. Can I ask you for it after the interview for a screenshot of them, and then we'll share

10:45it with people? Okay. Great. So, after the interview, we'll have a screenshot of the co-work skill below. All right. This has been really interesting to see. The exciting part for me is that you don't actually have to go into Obsidian and even touch it. I find Obsidian to not be the most user-friendly software. It's a pain. Yeah, it really is. It's like it's quite slow. Everything is kind of all over the place. Like I said, I don't organize it, I don't enter it. It's just open on my computer minimized all the time, and it

11:13just pulls from it on a regular basis. like a memory layer, and because it has that memory layer, it makes everything you're doing with Claude a lot better. Claude is like an employee who who sits in on every meeting you have and can be much more useful. Like an like an EA or chief of staff almost. Mhm.

11:30All right. Thanks for doing this. Since you watched this far, the next thing you should see is how people are using Paperclip to manage not just people, but agents and people together. It's an incredible piece of software. We've got the creator of Paperclip on. Click the link right here on your screen and go to that next.