CLAUDE COMMUNITY CHICAGO

Everything from tonight

September 1, 2026 at 1871. Both prompts you built with, six more to grow the library, how your credits work, and how to put your page on the internet.

1. The context file

This is the one that makes everything else work, so if you only keep one thing from tonight it's this. Paste it into Claude and answer honestly, in your own words, because the file is only as good as what you tell it.

THE INTERVIEW PROMPT

I want you to build a context file about my business that I can reuse in every future conversation.

Interview me first. Ask me eight questions, one at a time, about what my business does, who it serves, how I sound, what I'm working on right now, and what good output looks like to me.

Then write the file. Keep it to one page.

Where it goes depends on your plan, and both paths work fine. On a paid plan you'd start a new Project and paste the file into the Project instructions, and then every chat inside that project already knows your business. On the free plan you'd save it as a doc and paste it as your first message in a new chat, which is the same artifact and one extra paste.

2. Your weekly workflow

Five slots, filled in against something real you actually do every week. Run it, then run the critique pass on whatever comes back, because draft one is never the one you'd send.

THE FIVE-SLOT TEMPLATE

ROLE     You are my [role]. You are working on behalf of my business.

CONTEXT  [paste your context file, or run this inside the Project]

INPUT    Here is the raw material: [paste the real thing]

STEPS    1. ...  2. ...  3. ...  Ask me if anything is missing.

OUTPUT   Give it to me as [table / bullets / email / memo].

THE CRITIQUE PASS

What is weak about this?
Where would a skeptical client push back?

Then fix those things and give it to me again.

3. Put your page on the internet

That link-in-bio page Claude built you is a single HTML file, so getting it live needs no terminal and no install, and it takes about three minutes.

  1. Download the HTML file out of Claude and drop it into a folder on its own.
  2. Make a free account at dash.cloudflare.com, then open Workers & Pages.
  3. Choose Create, then Pages, then Upload assets, give it a name and drag your folder in.
  4. Deploy it, and you'll get a live yourname.pages.dev URL you can put anywhere.

If you want your own domain on it later, Cloudflare does that from the same dashboard and you won't have to rebuild anything.

4. Your $50 in API credits

Redeem against an ORGANIZATION, never your personal account. Redeeming against a personal user trips a fraud check and the code quietly fails, and it's the most common support issue in the whole program.
  1. Go to console.anthropic.com and sign in or create an account, which is a separate login from Claude.ai.
  2. Create or select an Organization, since credits attach to the org and you'll need its Org ID, which lives in the Console.
  3. Open the redemption link that came with your credit code.
  4. Create an API key in the Console for whatever you're building.
  5. Check Billing, then Credits, and watch the balance land.

If the code won't apply, it's almost always getting redeemed against a personal user when it needs to be the Organization, so switch over and try it again.

Worth saying plainly: credits live on the API side and can't be spent on Claude.ai, so nothing you built tonight touched them. The friendliest way to spend them is the Workbench inside the Console, which is just a chat window running on the API.

5. Six more recipes

The rule for growing your library is one line, and it's that anything you type into Claude twice becomes an entry.

Meeting notes to actionsEvery item comes back with an owner and a date on it.

Inquiry to qualified replyIt answers them and asks the two things you actually need to know.

Notes to a proposalYour format, your pricing posture, your terms, every time.

One post to fiveThe same idea genuinely rewritten for each platform.

Messy week to a planPrioritized against what you already said matters.

The document you dreadHave it interview you first, then let it draft.

6. What's next in Chicago

Workshop twoWhere you'll spend those credits, and this room hears the date first.

Claude Impact LabA full day building for a civic organization, in teams.

MeetupsFounders showing what they actually built, and they're free.

Tomorrow morning you'll get one email with one question in it, and it would help a lot if you replied even when the answer is that nothing happened yet, because those replies are how the next session gets built.