Live & Recorded · Monday, August 17, 2026

IWAI’s Claude Bootcamp

Stop stumbling upon Claude’s best features by accident. Learn it fast and deliberately – Projects, Skills, Connectors and MCP, Cowork and Claude Code, explained for non-techies so you can hit your full potential.

Two 90-minute sessions, live on Zoom
Recording yours to keep
Handout with every prompt and template
No tech experience required

Delivered by Innovating with AI, an independent education company. Not affiliated with Anthropic, the creator of Claude.

Limit: 88 Spots

Reserve Your Spot

Recording included · One payment of $297

3-day grace period. Cancel within 72 hours of purchase for a full refund.

“I’ve paid for Claude all year… why am I still discovering features by accident?”

I hear that constantly. We know Claude has potential, but the best features are buried, confusingly labeled and hard to use without guidance, especially when you’re new. I’ve been a software developer for 20 years and it still took me months to truly figure it out.

Most of what Claude does feels like common sense once you figure it out. The vocabulary and lack of documentation are what get in the way. A Skill is basically an agent, but then a Plugin is a bundle of Skills? 🤯 And Claude Code has a name that sends non-programmers straight past it (the useful part has nothing to do with writing software).

Anthropic barely documents any of it, which means you have to hope you catch the right tweet or YouTube video to find out about the most powerful features.

You’re paying hundreds or thousands a year for this tool – why would you only use a fraction of its potential?

Now that I’ve become a Claude pro, I use it for both life and work. On the company side, we have Skills and Connectors running our monthly financial reports. That alone saves me and my team 10+ hours a month.

Once you figure this out, your Monday looks different. Claude already knows your services, your pricing and how you write. Recurring tasks happen seamlessly and life gets a lot smoother.

But if you just sign up and click around, you’ll probably miss more than half of the best stuff Claude can do. So we built a bootcamp to make sure you can reach your full potential.

The Bootcamp · Live and Recorded

What happens on August 17

Two 90-minute sessions with a break in the middle, live on Zoom and recorded. I build while you watch, and you build over the break and afterward, from a handout with every prompt and template in it.

Session 1

Build Claude a Memory for Work and Life

The three Claudes: The chat app, Cowork and Claude Code run the same model with different reach. Most people have only opened one.
Context engineering: Why chasing the perfect prompt stopped paying off. You leave with four questions to ask of any misbehaving AI setup.
A Project, built live: Six badly organized files. I throw one away (it deserves it), restructure the rest and write the instructions.
Why it almost never hallucinates: Hallucination is a gap-filling problem: ask for what your files don’t cover, and Claude reaches for the next likely thing. Close the gaps, let it say it doesn’t know, and it nearly stops. Three instructions do it.
Work and life, deliberately: Same setup, client proposals or next week’s groceries.

Session 2

Connect It to Everything (Safely)

Connectors and MCP: What MCP actually is, and what a Connector hands over once it’s on. Enough to explain on a client call.
Reading a permission screen: I connect Gmail live and read the whole screen out loud before Allow. They ask for far more than they need.
Skills, and breaking one on purpose: We get a Skill working, then I break it the way most people do by accident, and fix it.
The Switchboard: Where Projects, Connectors and Skills behave as one setup. You get the template.
Claude Code for people who don’t code: Twenty-five minutes, nothing to install, no terminal. It works on whole folders, not one file at a time, useful even if you never write software. I finish on two hundred badly named files.

What you take away

The recording, yours to keep
The handout, with every prompt and template from both sessions
The instructions I use for Projects, which adapt to any job you do repeatedly at work or at home
The routing block for the Switchboard, ready to fill in
A starter Skill that works the moment you install it
A seven-day plan so the week after doesn’t evaporate
One thing you’ve built, because there’s a build brief and I’ll ask you about it

Who this is for

I built this day for beginner and intermediate Claude users. Every term gets a plain definition, every step happens on screen, and nothing assumes you write software.

You’ll get a lot out of this if

You’re new to Claude and would rather learn it in a sensible order than find things by accident
You use Claude most days but have never set up a Project, a Skill or a Connector
You’ve heard MCP said out loud and would rather understand it than nod along
You pay for Claude every month, you know there’s more it can do, and you haven’t unlocked it yet

It might not be for you if

You already build your own MCP servers and ship your own plugins, in which case a good chunk of the day will be ground you’ve already covered
You want a deep engineering course. This one is paced for people who don’t write code
You want a file of prompts to copy, rather than a setup you understand well enough to rebuild
You need someone to work through your particular setup with you, which a group session can’t do

What you’ll need. Cowork runs on the Claude desktop app and needs a paid Claude plan. On the free tier Session 2 will make sense while you’re watching, though you won’t get far afterward until you upgrade. That’s Anthropic’s rule, not mine. The cheapest paid plan is $20 a month, and I’d rather you knew that now than find out on the day.

If your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account belongs to an employer, an admin can block Connectors on it. We cover what that looks like and what to do, so bring a personal account if you have one.

Meet Your Coach

Portrait of Rob Howard Hey 👋, I’m Rob Howard.

I’ve spent 20 years in the tech industry, and I started coding at 12. I founded a cloud-storage startup that reached a million users and was acquired in 2009, and I’m CEO of HDC, a development firm whose software has powered more than 100,000 websites, including Harvard, MIT, The World Bank, Marriott, Intel, Facebook and The Oscars. My work has appeared in Wired, Forbes, Fortune and TechCrunch, and through Innovating with AI I’ve helped tens of thousands of people get comfortable and confident with new technology.

On a personal note…

These days, it’s easy to fall prey to the mantra of the Endless Hustle. Yes – it’s important to work hard, push yourself out of your comfort zone and have serious goals.

But it’s even more important to have a solid reason why you’re doing all that work. Is it to keep up with the Joneses or the Instagram stars? Or is there deeper meaning to what you’re doing?

For me, that deeper meaning takes the form of ensuring that my team, my students and I can devote more time to family, health and relationships. That’s why everybody at my company has the freedom and flexibility to take off at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday – they don’t have to ask for permission. It’s just built into our rules.

Rather than allow the success of my business to suck me into more and more work, I very intentionally parlay that success into more time with my family.

I know it’s a cliché to say “you only live once.” But how many nights, weekends, bedtimes and school days should we sacrifice at the altar of work? When we look back, which are we more likely to regret: turning down a project, or missing those special family moments?

This philosophy applies to pretty much every area of life: I am not my job.

Instead, I am defined by how many people I can help with the resources I’ve accumulated from having a successful tech career. One of those resources is time – so I can give my son 100x more love and attention than my dad was able to give me. Work comes and goes, but kids are only kids for a very limited time.

To paraphrase some ancient wisdom: “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken adults.”

And to my surprise, I’ve discovered that teaching – helping tens of thousands of people achieve comfort and freedom – has been even more fulfilling than the tech consulting that filled the first chapter of my career.

Real growth and happiness come from helping others – and business success is just a path to helping as many people as possible.

For me, the second act of my career wasn’t about tripling my productivity, or about escaping the grind to a tropical island. It was about teaching and sharing, so that as many people as possible could benefit from the good luck that got me to where I am today.

Questions

What if I can’t attend live?

You get the recording of both sessions and the handout, and a lot of people buy it for the recording alone. You’d miss the live Q&A, which is the one part I can’t put in a file.

Do I get the recording and handout?

Yes, both, and they’re yours to keep. The recording covers both sessions, and the handout carries every prompt and template from the day, so you can build from it afterward at your own pace.

Do I need to be technical?

No. I built every part of the day for people who don’t write code, and nothing asks you to install or set up anything technical. If you can hold a conversation with Claude, you can follow all of it.

Will it work if I mostly use ChatGPT?

Yes. Context engineering applies to whatever model you’re on, and so does everything about permissions and Connectors. The demos are Claude because that’s what clients are asking about.

Is this the same as your other programs?

No. It’s one day on a single topic, and if you’re already an Innovating with AI student it goes further on Claude than any lesson currently in the curriculum.

Can I expense it?

Yes, and plenty of people do, through their own business or by claiming it back from an employer. You’ll get a receipt at checkout, and if your finance team needs an invoice in a particular format, reply to any email and we’ll send one.

Live & Recorded · Monday, August 17, 2026