Claude for Operators — Issue 002

Since our first issue, the headlines haven't stopped. Anthropic raised $30 billion at a $380 billion valuation. OpenAI put ads in ChatGPT. Anthropic fired back with a Super Bowl campaign that pushed Claude from #41 to #7 on the App Store. The SaaSpocalypse broadened — over a trillion dollars wiped from SaaS stocks. Analysts can't agree whether it's a reckoning or an overreaction.

None of that changes what you should do this week.

Here's what actually matters: Claude's free tier expanded on 11 February. Skills, connectors, and file creation — previously paid features — now available to everyone. Anyone on your team can connect Claude to Slack, Google Drive, and Notion without a paid seat. The practical floor just dropped to zero.

Meanwhile, the 11 plugins we covered in Issue 1 have been live for two and a half weeks. The operators who moved early aren't debating stock charts — they're building custom plugins that encode how their specific business works. That's the part all the market commentary misses.

The SaaSpocalypse isn't about whether software companies survive. Most will. It's about whether your business captures the gap between "Claude can do this" and "Claude does this our way, automatically, every time." That gap is where custom plugins live. And it's what we're building today.

What it does: You describe a plugin in plain English. Claude builds the entire thing — folder structure, manifest, skills, slash commands — and delivers it as a ZIP you install in under a minute.

Why it matters: Anthropic's 11 plugins cover generic workflows. Your business isn't generic. You have your own report formats, your own terminology, your own way of segmenting customers. Plugin Create turns institutional knowledge — the stuff in your head or buried in a Google Doc nobody reads — into something Claude follows automatically.

Key details:

The honest take: Your first attempt probably won't be perfect. Claude occasionally gets the folder structure wrong or misses required metadata in the plugin files. Budget for a round or two of feedback.

Worth it if: You have any recurring workflow with specific rules or formats that you find yourself re-explaining to Claude every time.

Last issue, we said we'd walk through building a plugin for trial conversion and churn analysis, segmented by subscriber type and marketing cohort. Here's how it went — including the parts that weren't obvious.

The context: We run a subscription product on Stripe. Every month, we manually pull subscriber data, try to figure out who's converting and who's churning, and attempt to spot patterns by acquisition channel. It takes half a day and produces a report nobody reads carefully enough.

Stripe already tracks some of this. Your Stripe Billing dashboard has built-in analytics — MRR, churn rate, trial conversion, basic cohort retention. The depth varies depending on your Stripe plan, but check what you already have before building anything.

Where this plugin adds value is combining Stripe data with acquisition source data that Stripe doesn't have, applying your own segmentation rules, and getting findings in plain language rather than charts you have to interpret yourself.

This produces directional insight, not audit-grade numbers. A Stripe export is a point-in-time snapshot, not an event log. We're reconstructing subscriber journeys from date fields — when someone started a trial, when they were marked active, when they cancelled. That's good enough to spot which cohorts are underperforming and where to focus, but it's not a replacement for proper analytics infrastructure if you're at scale.

1. A Stripe subscriptions export.

Dashboard → Billing → Subscriptions → Export. Select "All columns" to make sure you get everything. The fields you care about: subscriber status (trialing, active, cancelled, past due), creation and trial dates, cancellation timestamps, and pricing details (amount, billing interval). You'll also get a customer email or ID, which is how you'll link to the acquisition data.

A note on column names: Stripe's export headers don't always match their API field names, and they've changed terminology over the years (Plans → Prices, for example). Don't worry about exact column names in advance — when you feed the export to Claude, tell it what you're looking for and it'll map the columns for you. That's one of the things it's genuinely good at.

2. An acquisition source mapping.

Here's the part nobody tells you: Stripe has zero marketing attribution. It processes payments — it doesn't know where customers came from. You need a second file that maps each customer (by email or customer ID) to their acquisition source: organic, paid search, referral, content, partnership, whatever your channels are.

Where does this live? Depends on your setup:

If you don't track acquisition source yet, start. Have your developer store UTM params in Stripe customer metadata at signup. Future you will thank present you.

On data size: Claude handles a subscriptions export comfortably up to a few thousand rows — it depends on how many columns you include and what else is in the conversation. If you're well beyond that, trim to the columns you actually need for the analysis, or filter to the last six months.

Step 1: Install Plugin Create

Claude Desktop → Cowork tab → Plugins → search "Plugin Create" → Install.

Step 2: Describe what you want

In a Cowork session, we typed:

Note: Stripe column names vary between accounts and versions. The plugin should ask me to confirm which columns map to status, trial dates, cancellation dates, pricing, and customer identifier when it encounters a new export format."

That last line is important. Rather than hardcoding column names that might not match your export, we told the plugin to ask for confirmation on the first run. After that, it remembers.

Step 3: Answer clarifying questions

Claude asked whether we wanted the report in markdown or HTML (markdown), what currency (AUD), and whether to treat past-due subscribers as active or churned for the calculations (active — they haven't left yet, they've just missed a payment).

Step 4: Review and fix

First version had a structural issue with one of the skill files — the metadata that tells Claude how to discover and load the plugin wasn't formatted correctly. We pointed it out, Claude fixed it in thirty seconds.

This is normal. Budget for one round of fixes.

Step 5: Install and test

Download ZIP → unzip → Cowork tab → Plugins → Upload plugin → select the folder.

We uploaded our Stripe subscriptions export (about 1,400 subscribers) and the acquisition source mapping. Typed /churn-report. On first run, Claude asked us to confirm which columns mapped to what — took about thirty seconds of clicking through confirmations. Then, about two minutes later: a segmented breakdown with conversion rates, churn rates, and revenue per subscriber, split by both plan type and acquisition channel.

The headline finding: our referral cohort converts at roughly 3x the rate of paid search, but we're spending 80% of acquisition budget on paid search. Not a new insight — but one we'd been slow to act on because the manual analysis was always "next week's job."

It also flagged that the most common cancellation reason for monthly subscribers was price-related, but that barely registered for annual subscribers. That's a pricing signal worth investigating — even if the numbers are directional rather than exact.

What the plugin remembers vs. what you feed it: The plugin encodes your segmentation rules, your metrics definitions, your output format, and (after the first run) your column mappings. It doesn't store subscriber data. Each time you run /churn-report, you upload fresh exports. The plugin ensures the analysis is consistent every time — same definitions, same format, same thresholds.

What it won't do: This isn't a replacement for a proper analytics stack if you need precise month-over-month cohort trending or real-time dashboards. What it will do is turn a half-day manual task into a two-minute routine that gives you useful, directionally correct insight — consistently, every month.

Where to go from here: This version is a starting point. Once you've run it a few times and know what questions you actually care about, build a second version. Add a script that pulls from Stripe's API directly instead of CSV uploads. Fold in payment data for LTV calculations. Layer in your NPS scores or support ticket counts by cohort. The point of Plugin Create is that iteration is cheap — describe what you want changed and Claude rebuilds it.

Claude's free tier just got serious. Skills, connectors (Slack, Google Drive, Notion, Asana, Stripe, and more), and file creation (Excel, PowerPoint, Word, PDFs) — all free as of 11 February. If you've been holding off recommending Claude to your team because of per-seat cost, that barrier just dropped. MacRumors

Enterprise event next week. "The Briefing: Enterprise Agents" — 24 February in New York, with a livestream. New product announcements, live demos, and sessions on deploying agents with security and governance. Worth watching if you're evaluating Claude for your team. Anthropic

The Super Bowl ad worked. Anthropic's "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude" campaign drove an 11% jump in daily active users. For context: OpenAI started showing ads in ChatGPT's free tier the same weekend. Two business models, diverging fast. CNBC

One thing to try this week: Install Plugin Create and build a plugin for your most tedious recurring task.

Don't start with something as involved as the churn analysis above. Pick the report you write every week, the checklist you follow every time, or the process you keep re-explaining. Describe it the way you'd brief a sharp new hire who doesn't know your business yet.

The operators who win this wave aren't the ones reading the most market commentary. They're the ones encoding how their business actually works.

Next week: We're launching an expanded version of the Operator's Toolkit — a complete, freely accessible reference guide to every Claude feature, plugin, and workflow that matters for running a business. Everything we cover in this newsletter, organised, searchable, and kept up to date in a handy reference library. More on that soon.

Claude for Operators is an independent publication. Not affiliated with Anthropic.

Built a custom plugin? Got a workflow that works? Reply to this email to have it showcased in the newsletter.