What 16 People Built with Claude in Three Hours: Notes from a Sydney Workshop

<p>Almost everyone in the room used Claude every day. Almost nobody in the room had ever built anything with it.</p><p>That gap - between knowing how to chat with Claude and knowing how to make it do the work - is what brought sixteen people to a Build Club workshop in Sydney. Three hours later, several of them walked out with something running.</p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><img height="970" width="1456" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zKVL!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ff6d866-e3bc-4ba0-a288-a63ae03a57e1_2048x1365.jpeg"></figure></div><h2>Who was in the room</h2><p>The workshop - “Build with Claude for Work (for non techies)” - was a three-hour, in-person Build Club session co-hosted by Annie Liao, Talin Roche, and Clinton Lui. Sixteen people came, mostly from finance, operations, customer success, and HR, with a handful of founders and executives in the mix. Individual contributors, people managers, and executives in roughly equal weight.</p><p>The pre-workshop survey told us the rest. Daily Claude users dominated the room. But when asked which Claude features they’d actually used, the most common answer was that they hadn’t heard of them.</p><h2>What we covered</h2><p><strong>The standard foundation:</strong> where AI sits right now, the Anthropic product suite (Claude, Cowork, Code, Design, and the Chrome, Excel, and PowerPoint integrations), and a working introduction to skills as an open standard.</p><p><strong>Tailored for a mixed public audience:</strong> because the room spanned finance, ops, HR, customer success, and exec coaching, we skipped industry-specific case studies and ran the session around the workflows attendees had named in the pre-survey. We split the room into two groups: people who already knew what they wanted to build, and people still figuring out where Claude could compress their week. The second group facilitated problem identification; the first got straight to building.</p><h2>What they built</h2><p>One attendee ran an executive coaching practice. Every month he was meant to send invoices on the first. Every month he sent them late - sometimes weeks late - because the task kept losing to whatever else was on. By the end of the workshop he’d built a Claude skill that handles the invoicing for him and scheduled it to run on the first of every month. A small workflow on paper, but one he’d been failing to do on time for months. Now it runs without him touching it.</p><p>Others started on workflows surfaced in the pre-survey. Someone running an agency began on a BD contact pipeline that scans Gmail for new prospects, logs them to Airtable, and drafts follow-ups in their voice if no outreach has happened in 30 days. A finance IC began on a commentary QA flow that turns finance commentary into executive narrative, with gaps in the underlying data flagged for review. A strategy IC started on a daily industry news brief compressed into a one-page strategic summary.</p><p>Three hours doesn’t ship every one of these. But it breaks the “I don’t know where to start” block, which was the real reason most of the room hadn’t built anything before.</p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><img height="970" width="1456" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PNRW!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d4dcece-2084-49c0-8be3-f2cb3d0e415c_2048x1365.jpeg"></figure></div><p><strong>Want to run a session like this with your team? <a href="https://solaris-signup.buildclub.ai/">Book a Solaris lunch and learn</a></strong></p><h2>The bigger picture: what Solaris does</h2><p>The Build Club workshop is the public, paid version of a format we run with companies through Solaris. The full Solaris programme combines an AI capability assessment to baseline where teams actually are, targeted upskilling through workshops like this one, email programmes, and ongoing office hours, and ROI measurement to capture what’s actually changing month over month. The goal isn’t training for training’s sake - it’s measurable adoption that compounds.</p><p>The public workshop is a good entry point for individuals. Solaris is what you run when a whole function needs to move.</p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><img height="970" width="1456" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RfxV!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F43429327-241e-485a-a4a5-688bb9f28426_2048x1365.jpeg"></figure></div><div><hr></div><p>Curious where AI could compress the work your team does every week? <strong><a href="https://solaris-signup.buildclub.ai/">Let’s run a Solaris session for you</a></strong></p>