We have written about the marketing skills we use that are not ours. This one is about the ones that are. We have spent since June building our own set of instructions for Claude to run the content for our businesses, and today we are giving away a public version of them, free, for anyone to use.
It is ten skills, MIT licensed, on GitHub: builtnotboosted/built-not-boosted-skills (opens in a new tab). It will not get you to where we are on day one. It should get you a fair way along, and it is built to get better the more you use it.
Why we wrote our own
General marketing skills are good at general marketing. What they cannot know is the stuff that only turns up when you post every day for months: which rule broke on which platform, which sentence your audience scrolled past, what you actually sound like when you talk rather than when you type.
Most of the rules in our skills started as a fix for something that went wrong. A caption that went out as one unreadable wall of text. An affiliate link posted without the word “Ad” in front of it. A video script that read beautifully and sounded nothing like Patrick once he said it out loud. Each time, the fix went into the instructions, so it could not happen twice.
Do that for five months and you end up with something closer to a working method than a prompt library. That is what we have tidied up and published.
What is in it
- Brand setup. Interviews you and writes your brand profile: who you are, who you are talking to, how you sound, which platforms you use and the rules your content has to obey. Every other skill reads it. Start here.
- Writing. Posts, captions, first comments, alt text and articles. A hook, one useful idea, and one genuine question at the end, shaped differently for each platform.
- Research. Finds what your audience is actually asking, and puts a dated source behind every claim. It will not invent a figure, a quote or a story.
- Scheduling. Gets posts into your scheduler without the classic mistakes: posting twice, the wrong time zone, a missing image. It works with any tool; we use Publer as the example, and the Publer connector Patrick built (opens in a new tab) is open source too.
- Platform data. Pulls your numbers each week and keeps a log of what works, with how sure we are about it. One good post is an anecdote, not a rule.
- Video scripting. Scripts for shorts and long videos, written to be read from a teleprompter, with notes for whoever edits it.
- Image generation. Images sized for each platform, with the headline built into the picture, and your real face kept as your real face.
- Video editing. Turns raw talking-head footage into finished shorts. It finds the clean take of every line, adds captions and checks the sound levels, then listens to its own finished video before it lets it go. This one needs Python and ffmpeg on your computer.
- Review loop. Everything is checked twice before it ships: once by the AI that made it, once by a fresh one that only sees the work and the rules.
- Voice loop. The quiet one, and probably the most useful. More on that below.
The rules live in one place, not in the skills
This is the part we would most like people to take away, even if they never install anything.
Skills hold the method: how to write a hook, how to check a caption, how to edit a video. They do not hold your rules. Your brand colours, the words you never use, the disclaimer your industry requires, the topics you stay away from, the research behind what you say: all of that lives in one place that every skill reads before it starts.
For us, that place is a set of knowledge bases Claude keeps for us, built on Andrej Karpathy’s LLM Wiki (opens in a new tab) pattern, which we wrote about in how we run our AI brains. They hold the research that drives the content, and they hold the rules: the brand, the boundaries, and the wording we have to get exactly right. When a rule changes, it changes once, there, and every skill picks it up the next time it runs. Nothing gets copied into ten places and forgotten in nine of them.
The public pack does a smaller version of the same thing. The brand setup skill creates a folder with your brand profile in it, plus a list of sources you trust and two learning logs. The skills read from it and write back to it. Your rules stay yours, in a file you can open and edit, and the skills stay general enough to share.
It is also why the pack was safe to publish at all. Everything specific to us was in the rules, not the method, so taking it out was a matter of leaving our files behind.
How it learns to sound like you
Patrick films outdoors, on his own, reading from a prompter. What he says on camera is never quite what was written, and that gap turned out to be the best information we had.
So after every video, the voice loop compares the captions file from the finished video against the script. Which lines he said word for word, which he cut, which he made plainer, what he added. It does the same when a caption gets rewritten by hand. The differences go into a voice log, and the writing and scripting skills read that log before they draft anything.
The first comparison taught us more about how Patrick talks than weeks of editing drafts had, and every video since has added a little more.
What we left out
Everything that belongs to our own businesses: our accounts, our contact details, our clients, and the industry-specific rules we work to. If you are in a regulated industry, the skills will carry your required wording, but they do not know it. You put it in your brand profile, and there is a worked example of a regulated industry in the pack so you can see the shape of it.
Platform rules change all the time, so anything that might go out of date says when we last checked it. Treat those as a starting point.
And the video editing tools have done a lot of miles on a Mac and not many anywhere else. They should work on Windows and Linux. If they do not, tell us.
Whose shoulders it stands on
Our writing skills started life as Corey Haines’ copywriting and copy-editing skills, from his free, MIT licensed marketing skills (opens in a new tab), and grew from there. If you want a broader shelf to pick from, start with his. We wrote about how we use them.
Getting it
If you use Claude Code, it is two commands, and they are in the README (opens in a new tab). If you use Claude on the desktop or the web, download the repository and add the skills from Settings. Then ask Claude to set up your brand profile, and it takes it from there.
We keep using and improving our own versions every day. As they get better, the lessons come across to the public ones, and we will write up the useful ones here. We will also write a proper guide for each skill over the coming weeks, starting with brand setup, because everything else depends on it.
It costs nothing. The worst case is that you take one idea from it and ignore the rest, which is roughly how we use most things.
