Hey World 👋
A couple of months ago, I (Becky) was ignoring Claude Code tweets from my timeline.
“Vibe coding” felt like one of those things that was technically impressive but practically useless for anyone who isn’t a developer. Like watching someone solve a Rubik’s cube blindfolded. Cool. Not for me.
Then Alex Dobrenko` got on a call with me and shared his screen.
He wasn’t building an app. He wasn’t writing code. He was asking Claude, in plain English, to pull action items from his emails and organise them. Like talking to the world’s most competent intern.
I went quiet for about ten seconds. Then I said: “Wait. I could use this.”
🤖 What Claude Code actually is
Quick context for anyone scrolling past the hype.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are basically autocomplete on steroids. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. You’ve probably used at least one. Claude Code is a version of Claude that doesn’t just chat with you. It can actually do things on your computer. Open files. Build websites. Organise your downloads folder. Create databases.
Despite the name, you don’t write code. You just describe what you want in normal sentences.
My first prompt was literally: “Hey, I want to scrape my Substack notes. I want them all to go into a database. Probably the properties are like URL, date posted, maybe number of likes and shares.”
That’s it. That worked.
🛠 What I built (and why it matters for small creators)
In three weeks, I built four tools that would’ve previously required either hiring an agency or learning to code.
💬 A YouTube Quote Carousel generator that takes a YouTube video and automatically creates Instagram/LinkedIn carousels from the best quotes. This used to take half a day to a full week. Now it takes minutes. We’re already using it for Team Ali, The Gimbal Podcast, and Paul Millerd.
🎙️ A Podcast Packager that generates episode titles and thumbnail text trained on successful YouTube podcast formats. Bhav has been testing it and feeding back requests, and I just keep iterating.
🎬 A YouTube Channel Analyser that finds peer channels one level up in subscriber count, identifies what’s working for them, and generates video ideas based on patterns across at least three successful examples. Particularly useful if you’re a small creator without hours to spare on competitive research.
📈 A data analytics tool that analysed 776 videos across 57 channels to identify thumbnail best practices. Three full days of manual work, done in an afternoon.
All hosted on free or very low-cost platforms. All built by someone who genuinely cannot code.
⚡ The gap just got smaller
The stuff that bogs down small creators isn’t the creative work. It’s the operations. Scheduling. Repurposing. Exporting CSVs. Reformatting carousels. Building landing pages. Uploading course content.
These are the tasks that big creators hire teams for. Thousands per month for agencies. Specialised roles for thumbnail design, social media management, data analysis.
If you’re in the early stages, you can’t justify those hires. But you still need the output.
Claude Code plugs that gap. Not by replacing your expertise or your creative judgement (it genuinely can’t do that), but by taking the tedious operational work off your plate so you can spend more time developing your craft, doing your research, building your taste.
I also rebuilt my personal website in under an hour. Migrated from Squarespace (£200/year) to a self-hosted solution with a custom D&D character sheet theme. Claude scraped my existing site to preserve the content and I just kept saying things like “make the loading bars more dramatic” until it looked right.
The newest model (Opus 4.6) is particularly good at debugging itself. So instead of getting stuck in a loop of “why isn’t this working,” you mostly just watch it fix its own mistakes while you drink your coffee.
If you can write a decent brief for a freelancer, you can use Claude Code.
🎓 We’re hosting a workshop
If any of this made you think “I want to try this” — we’ve got you. We’re putting together an Intro to Claude Code workshop for the community. The current plan: Install Claude, learn the basics, walk away with something real. All you need to do is click here to sign up 🤖
💌 Over to you
We’d love to know: what’s the one tedious task in your creator workflow you’d automate first if you could just describe it in plain English?
Hit reply and tell us. We’re genuinely curious.
Now go hit publish 😉
Becky & Bhav x
📺 For those of you who prefer to watch on YouTube 👇
💼 Want to work with us? Book a call with Becky or Bhav
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🎧 Watch or Listen to Small Creator Big World: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts
