Had our team's quarterly planning this past Friday and I'm super excited that they're gonna join Clief Notes to go through The Foundations course! Jake is such a rare find and there's no words that can express the gratitude. But we sometimes forget that gratitude can be expressed via actions, and I'm telling anyone who's willing to hear about Clief Notes. Even got my son in there LOL! Out of all my kids, he's the one with the most interest and his brain is best wired to dive into a community like this.

💰 $325 CASH PRIZE 💰 That's a full year of Premium. Win this and your membership pays for itself. 📋 THE CHALLENGE You just got hired again. Different client this time. Meet Sarah, a freelance copywriter who's drowning in context-switching. 📎 Download the full client brief attached to this post. Short version: She works with three types of clients (SaaS founders, ecommerce brands, local service businesses) and starts from scratch every project. She doesn't need another tool. She needs a system. Your job is to build her a folder-based AI specialist she can drop into any Claude project. The folder IS the deliverable. 🗂️ THIS WEEK YOU LEARN ICM Up until now, comps have been "build a thing." This week you utilize the methodology taught throughout the community. 🧠 Folders as architecture. That's it. That's the whole concept this week. Your specialist is a folder with five things: - 📄 identity.md (who they are) - 📐 rules.md (how they respond) - 💬 examples.md (what good looks like) - 📚 reference/ (source material) - 📖 README.md (how to use it) Drop the folder into a Claude project. Claude becomes the specialist. Reusable. Shareable. Portable. 🎯 PICK YOUR SPECIALIST Don't pick copywriting. That's Sarah's example. Pick something YOU would actually use. A few sparks to get you thinking: - A salary negotiation coach - A meal planner that knows your dietary restrictions - A code reviewer for your stack - A real estate market analyst for your city - A technical recruiter screener - A grant writer for nonprofits in your space The more specific, the better. "Marketing expert" is not a specialist. "B2B email expert for enterprise SaaS targeting CFOs" is. 💼 WHY THIS ONE LANDS ON YOUR RESUME Real talk. Winning a comp in a Skool community doesn't get you a job by itself. But shipping a working folder-based AI specialist with a clean README and a public repo? That's a portfolio piece.

Inspired by @Curtis Hays, I finished an experiment that I had started a few weeks ago. I started my company as a local web design agency in 2014. I've pivoted a few times since, where our core offer is that of Fractional CMO services, but we still do some agency type work for existing clients, friends, and family. I was ready to throw in the towel on web builds just because they take so much time and I hadn't cracked the code on building sites with ongoing content. I finally got it this evening! We've gotten good at building unique sites using Claude with next.js, files live in github, website runs on vercel. This evening I was able to get a headless WordPress environment where I can add/edit/delete content, but the design still lives in Vercel! I realize this might seem like a small thing for some, but it's a ginormous win for the 8 SIGNAL team :D It's gonna save us sooooooo much time rebuilding from next.js to Elementor. Huge shoutout to Curtis. By sharing his win, he inspired me to dig further into this and figure it out! Here's the site that was previously just a "static" site on vercel, now all the content is coming from a wordpress install: https://century-rentals.vercel.app/ P.S. If you have a better way of managing websites that require a CMS and SEO/AEO, don't hold back. I won't be deflated. I'm always looking for ways to improve and do things better. P.P.S. Website's for a buddy, and still not finalized yet, so I'm taking some liberty to mess around with him about baseball because he knows less than I do, and I don't know much LOL!

Here's how we build new pages for client's now. Takes about 25% less time. First: an interview. We get the client on a call, follow a structured intake, get everything we need. Claude ingests the transcript and maps the requirements — buyer, intent, conversion action, messaging priorities. That's the foundation. Then Cash, our copywriter agent, writes the copy. Then Ruby, our front-end designer, takes the copy and the client's identity system and builds a clean HTML/CSS mockup. We hand it to the client. They give us feedback. We collect assets — photos, logos, screenshots. Then Cody. Cody has access to the Elementor JSON templates our human designer originally built for this client's site. He reads the approved HTML. He generates a new JSON file in the same structure — same design system, same component logic, same brand patterns. We import that JSON into Elementor. The page is 90% built. The humans still do the review. The humans built the original templates. The humans ran the interview. But the production time? It collapsed. Jake's folder system didn't replace the agency. It restructured where the human work actually lives.

Twenty-four days ago I posted about Jake's folder system video. This is what happened next. Same foundation — markdown files, orchestration prompts, clear roles. I just kept building. Fifteen named specialists. Each one with a soul file, guardrails, and a playbook. Duke orchestrates. Cash writes. Trace pulls the data. Hank runs the financials. Clint handles the MCP integrations. Behind each one is either a human counterpart doing the real work alongside them — or a role I can't afford to hire yet. Katie who's been with me for 18 years, now has her own orchestrator running the same system. Twenty-seven client folders. Twelve live MCP integrations. One shared repo. The folder system isn't replacing my agency. It becoming my agency. Jake gave me the unlock. This is how it's going.