You Need a Private Claude Plugin Marketplace (Cowork) — Transcript

So I run a couple of different operations in my business, I've got my own brand, which includes things like my Substack, my newsletters, YouTube, all of this different content stuff.

And then I've got, you know, client work as well on top of that, and right now, what's happening is my personal brand, a lot of it runs on Claude Code, but my client work mostly runs through Co-work for various reasons.

I like to do a lot more automated stuff on Claude Code, a lot more hands-on work on Co-work, that's just my split here, and I'm doing some of this on my laptop, on my MacBook, but I also have some of it running on my Mac Mini, which I run as like an isolated environment with all the dangerous permissions enabled, specifically so I can leave that, you know, scheduled with tasks running overnight all the time when I'm away, right?

And every single one of those, uh, you know, involved different machines, different contexts, different projects, and each one has its own Claude skills or its agent skills spread out in this in their own folders all over the place, right?

I had newsletter skills over here, client ghost writing skills over there, YouTube skills somewhere else, and at the same time, a lot of it was inconsistent, I might have duplicates where one was updated with the latest version and the other wasn't, and every time I would start a new project or jump to a different machine, I'd be looking for the skill, copying it over, you know, reinstalling it, making sure everything was right, and just at some point I realized like, what am I doing?

I'm wasting so much time and this is like highly inefficient, but here's where it gets even more important, if you are, for example, on a team or you got people using Claude Co-work, every single person on the team, uh, probably is going to face that same problem if you're if you're using agent skills right now or going to in the future.

Even if you're not on like a human team, but even if you are using AI agents to supplement your business, whether you're a solopreneur or whatever, the same situation is true, right? You can have one person or yourself building a great skill, uh, but then it gets lost, nobody else can use it, or you get mixed up, right?

You update it, everyone else has the old version, there's no real shared library, all right, and that's what I was operating on, super inefficient, it's incredible that it took me this long to fix it, but the fix is a plugin marketplace like you're looking at right now.

This is one private GitHub repo, you know, mine's private, where your whole team can add it to Co-work or and install any skill that you've built, and whatever you update something, everyone gets the new version.

Whether like I said, whether that's you, yourself getting the new version across your devices and accounts and machines, or a team or your agents, right?

So today I'm going to show you how to build one just like this from scratch, even if you've never touched GitHub before.

Now, you absolutely do not need to be a developer at all, you do not need to know anything about, you know, development, you don't even need to be familiar with GitHub, it's super easy, I myself always assumed that setting up a marketplace would be kind of complicated, and honestly, the first time I tried to have Claude build it for me, it didn't get the structure completely right, and I had to iterate.

Um, you know, but once it clicked, I realized it's not complex at all, it's just a GitHub repo with a specific folder structure that Co-work and Claude Code both know how to read, and today I'm going to give you everything you need to even, you know, not even run into any of those little problems I ran into, it's going to be super easy for you, right?

And here's the real reason this matters, though, it's it's, you know, it's the the compounding aspect of it.

Every skill you build, uh, you know, you build because you're going to use it more than once, right?

That's the whole point of it, if there's a skill that only lives in one project folder, it's not compounding, it's just sitting there, a marketplace means every project, every machine, every person on your team or agent can pull from any skill in one command, and that's what turns a collection of files really into an actual system like you're looking at here.

So I now have two, or actually more than two marketplaces, I have one for my personal operation, which you can see here.

The Alex McFarland plugins, Alex McFarland's personal plugin marketplace for Claude Code and Co-work.

There are currently, I think, like eight plugins in here, everything I use to run my content operations, YouTube scripts, newsletter sales, voice builder tools, all of it lives here.

You can see, we have Alex for plugins, our current available plugins.

And I just started building this out recently, so I'm adding on more and more, but we got a YouTube plugin with scripts, descriptions, companion newsletters, thumbnails, I have a newsletter one for thought leadership, how-to guides, Substack, I have HTML slide presentations, email sales sequences for digital products that I use for my big products, my big, you know, training programs and big ticket items.

We have um content stuff, like extracting content ideas.

We also have a builder plugin that I use specifically to build things like these Co-work plugins, marketplaces, and front-end design.

And then I have my super important uh voice profile plugin, which has my um auto-loaded voice profile.

So at the root of this plugin, we have a dot Claude plugin uh folder, you can see, and inside of it, we have a marketplace dot JSON file, and that's just the indexed Claude Code uh and Co-work read it to know what plugins exist in this repo.

And then we have the plugins folder, and each plugin, you could see here, has its own folder, so if you click here on plugins, we could see each one has it.

Those ones I just showed you, so we have, for example, let's take a look at this uh newsletter plugin.

You could see inside of the plugin, we have also the skills, so inside of here, we have a bunch of different skills.

So each plugin has its own folder inside of here, and inside of each of those folders, we have slash commands and the skills that are in there.

This is the desktop app I pulled up here for Claude, um, and yeah, this is super important.

So you need to do this, like the actual building, you need to do inside of Claude Code, not Co-work, and that is because Co-work runs in a sandboxed environment, meaning it can't really access your file system or run terminal commands.

You're going to run into a lot of, you know, speed bumps.

So building, you know, the marketplace is going to require both of that, it's going to require to get into your system files and run stuff in the terminal.

So if you're in Co-work right now, like what you're looking at here, and you're going to run your team skills, you work with Co-work, maybe you're going to, you know, be actually using this as your work environment, that's fine, of course.

But to build the marketplace, you need to flip over here into the Claude Code tab, and here is the Claude Code tab.

There is no reason, and you know, for this, there's no reason for you to actually open up the terminal unless you want to, you don't have to use VS Code, you don't have to use anything like that, I just I'm trying to make this as smooth as possible, uh, you know, I've for most people that watch my stuff are non-developers.

And Claude Code tab here on the um on the desktop app is getting better and better, it used to be a little rough, but it's really good.

It's really good for non-developers if you need to just run terminal stuff, um, you know, you're not like fully relying on Claude Code.

The tab is perfect here, and it's so easy just to switch between Co-work whenever you want to actually work.

Code if you need to do more intense stuff, running running stuff in um running commands and stuff like that, so easily able to jump back and forth here, and then lastly, it's also important that uh the skill I'm going to give you to set up your own marketplace is going to you're going to need GitHub.

You're going to need a GitHub account, so if you already have that set up and you know all about GitHub, that's great.

You'll be able to skip through that part easy, but if you're like completely new to this, um, you know, and don't have any GitHub account or anything like that.

The skill will just walk you through that, right, it's going to ask you if you have GitHub set up, and if you don't, it'll just walk you through creating an account.

It'll take like less than five minutes to get it all set up, all right?

All right, so the first thing you got to do is get the skill installed that's going to help you build this marketplace.

You can find the skill below in my Substack, so once you have the skill downloaded, you're going to just download a zip file.

You're going to come over to customize, you're probably familiar with this if you've done it before, skills, plus button.

You'll be able to upload the skill right here, okay?

I already have it uploaded right here, we can take a look at it.

You can see here in our skills now, we have the plugin marketplace builder.

You're going to need to make sure that this is um, you know, enabled here.

And here it is, build and maintain Claude plugin marketplaces.

You're going to use this when creating new plugins, adding plugins to a marketplace GitHub repo, updating existing plugin commands or skills, adding new plugins to a marketplace, or setting up a private skill library.

So that's what we're doing, setting up a private skill library.

It's going to cover everything from the correct plugin structure to the command format.

To the marketplace dot JSON spec and even deployment, so end-to-end complete walk-through.

Works with both Claude Code and Co-work, remembering that to actually build this, you need your command line, so you're going to use Claude Code, all right?

You can read through this skill on your own, um, it's just the step-by-step that I wrote to put have Claude walk you through it.

And we're going to come back here now to Claude Code, and we are going to open a folder with our skills in it.

So there are a couple ways, you know, probably that you can do this, but one way that I would recommend doing is, for example.

Let's say you have a bunch of different uh, you know, skills spread out all over the place, whatever it may be, it may be your own skills, skills you've collected, skills you find online.

You can get all of these together and stick them inside of one single folder.

So all the different skill files and folders, put them all inside of one folder, and then open that folder up here in Claude Co-work.

Or inside of Claude Code, I'm sorry.

So I went ahead and created a little um example folder here.

So you could see these are not really real skills, these are just uh a bunch of different um placeholder ones.

But let's say we open up this folder here, I have it, I just named it test skills, you would name it whatever.

It could be all one type of skills, or you can have many different types inside, and Claude itself will organize them into correct plugin groupings.

But let's say we have this here, for example, we got ad copy, blog post, brand voice, case study, SEO articles, sales, whatever, whatever.

You could throw them all inside of here, then we're going to go into Claude, and we're going to make sure that folder is open inside of Claude Code.

Once we select that folder, I'm going to use voice dictation here, we can literally just tell Claude, for example, um.

Hey Claude, this folder that you're working in right now is a big collection of Claude's skills that I have.

Take a look inside of this folder, and I want you to create a plugin marketplace out of the ones that are here.

Make sure you're very clear in telling Claude that you're using the skills that are inside of this folder.

Or else it might, you know, always just be as clear as possible with the AI.

Because one time I told it this, and it went into my actual skills in the configuration of Claude, and it used those.

So we want to make sure that it is looking inside of this folder that we're working in.

So you can see it's going to start by exploring what's in this folder to understand what skills are in here.

And then here you can see that it launched the skill that we installed for plugin marketplace, all right?

So here, you can see launching skill, plugin marketplace builder.

And the first thing it's going to do is ask us, before we build anything, do you have GitHub set up?

Specifically, do you have a GitHub account, do you have the command line installed?

Are you already logged in and authenticated?

If yes, just say yes, and we'll move straight to building.

So if you're familiar with GitHub, you know, of course, you know all about this, you can just say yes.

And you're going to go straight through, you're probably already logged in on your through your terminal and stuff.

But if not, if you're completely new to this, don't worry at all, don't be scared, just say no.

And Claude Code will walk you step-by-step very simply how to set up a free account.

How to do all this, how to authenticate it on your computer, on your uh terminal.

So then you can always just work together from there on out with Claude, and it will have direct access to your to your um GitHub repos, all right?

So here, I already have it set up, so I'm just going to say, uh, yes, I already have GitHub set up and authenticated here.

You're connected to it.

So we're going to tell it, and then it should explore our folder of skills.

Group them up and present a grouping to us.

All right, so it's going to explore all of them.

There you go, it explored, you can't see behind because it's actually asking questions here.

But you can see in the background here, it explored all of the skills, the 20 skills.

And it proposed a plugin grouping here.

You could see it's a little faded out, but it it put them into groupings of plugins.

So social media, email outreach, content writing, sales copywriting, video webinar, brand strategy.

That's six plugins covering all 20 skills.

And then it's going to ask us, does this grouping of six plugins look good, or would you prefer to adjust it?

You're going to answer depending on you, uh, you could choose fewer, more, whatever.

I'm going to say looks good, go ahead and build it, and um, I'm going to accept that grouping that Claude itself gave us.

All right, it's going to check the existing marketplace folder, then build everything.

What should we name the GitHub repo?

We're going to say, let's name this just marketing plugins.

And then should the repo be public or private?

All right, so before I choose this here, um, there's a very important point to make about this.

Uh, about public versus private here.

So you can see private's recommended, but this is definitely going to depend on what it is you're doing.

Why do I say that? Because if you are using, for example, just a regular personal Claude account.

You know, not a team or enterprise, a normal personal Claude account for your work.

You're going to need your marketplace to be public, all right?

If it's not public, when you go to install the marketplace, uh, through um Co-work.

Uh, using the GitHub connection, right, using your GitHub repo.

It is not going to work, it's not going to allow you to do that if it's private.

So it needs to be public, or else it can't access that.

The only way you would actually be able to install, let's say, a private repo on Claude Co-work of plugins.

Would be just to export that marketplace as a zip file and upload it manually.

But that just defeats the whole purpose of everything we did, right?

The whole purpose of doing this was for us to put it on GitHub, so we have it living out there.

So that we can always update it and pull it down into everything, right?

So um, there is really no good way of doing that if you're on a personal account.

Now, if you are on a team plan or an enterprise plan, for example.

You can make it private, which would then be recommended, right?

You can make the repo private, um, and why is this?

It's because team and enterprise plans have the option of connecting directly to GitHub.

Into private repos and pulling those into your organization, which I can show you here in a couple minutes.

But that's the the main part to understand here is that if you're using a personal account.

And you need it, you need to use uh the public.

If you're using a team or enterprise plan, you can use private, all right?

So here I'm going to do uh private, just so you can see what's going to happen when we go to install it, all right?

So it's going to do all this, then push it onto GitHub.

All right, so it took like, I don't know, three minutes maybe, and here it is.

It went ahead and it pushed everything to GitHub, it created the repo itself, it pushed all the plugins.

You can see now, your marketplace is live here, here's what we built for plugins, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

We can click this, and it should open it up, and there it is, we have marketing plugins now on my GitHub repo.

You can see the little lock here, it's private, we can go see what's all in here.

A private plugin marketplace for Claude Code and Co-work with 20 content and marketing skills across four plugins.

We got the social media, content writing, sales outreach, brand foundations, just like it said.

There's even a readme file here, all right, so now we have that pushed and ready to go on GitHub.

So from here now, all we have to do is literally install it into Claude Co-work.

Oh, and I forgot, before I show you this, if you come back to our original folder here.

What we were using to build all this out in Claude Code, you can see now that it dropped the repo in here.

So we have the marketing skills marketplace here, which literally means we can literally like get rid of all these skills if we wanted to.

We don't have to organize or deal with this anymore, the source of truth is on GitHub.

And now we have the repo here, and anytime we make changes to this, we will make changes here.

And then push it onto GitHub, right, so it always keeps updated, and Claude will handle all of that for you.

All right, so now we have the GitHub repo, let's install this so you can use it with Co-work, for example.

So we'll go back here to Co-work, right, now to do the plugins.

You're going to come back over here, we're going to do customize again, and we are going to browse the plugins.

All right, and here you can see we have the plugins from Anthropic.

We have the personal plugins, and you're not going to see this your organization unless you're running a team or enterprise plan, all right?

So personal here, and your organization.

Now, if you remember, I said all about that public versus private, and this is where you're going to see what's going to happen here, right?

Um, so we made our in this video, I made it private.

So if you make it private, and I'm going to show you how it doesn't work on personal.

You're going to come to personal, you're going to try to add it, you're going to say add a marketplace from GitHub.

All right, and you're going to need the URL, so you would literally just come here.

You would grab the URL of your marketplace, all right, and you would drop it in here.

And then look, you're going to see, boom, the this marketplace could not be accessed.

Private repositories are only supported using the GitHub owner/repo format.

Um, that you're going to see how it it works with uh private.

Or with uh team accounts.

But now, for example, if you're running a team plan, you see your organization, it says no plugins available.

We got to come out of here, all right, we got to come to here.

You can see it's my settings, this is my Alex McFarland LLC account.

We're going to go to organization settings.

From organization settings, we're going to come here to plugins.

All right, and we see I have some here, we have the Anthropic ones.

Let me zoom out, I have some Co-writer ones I'm using here.

And here's where you add in the private repositories for organizational plugins.

And what an organizational plugin means is that you can use this across all the accounts on your organization, right?

So here we're going to add plugins, and here we can sync from GitHub repository.

And it is automatically connected to my GitHub.

So the first time you're going to do it, it's going to ask you to just authenticate your GitHub.

You're going to authenticate it, and now your your repositories are already here.

So we can see all of my repositories, a bunch of these are plugins.

And we are going to go down to the one we just created, marketing plugins.

Click that, and then it create it, all right, and boom, here we go.

The marketing plugins are syncing from the repository.

So there you have it, it took like 20 seconds, it's it's synced.

So now we can see Alex McFarland AI marketing plugins.

We can see all the different ones, we can make them all available for install across the organization.

And then boom, you're good to go if you have an organizational plugin.

Now, what I'm going to do, just for all the users who do not use a team plan.

I'm going to make the repository public, so now that you'll see how it works here.

All right, so we're back here on the GitHub again, and I didn't change anything except for you can see now.

The repository is public instead of private, that's the only thing that's different.

So we'll go back to Claude again, all right, we can just uninstall the organizational one I did really quickly.

All right, all right, and let's go back here to Co-work again.

And into our settings here, where is it at here?

Okay, Alex for settings, all right, now we're in our regular settings, not our organization settings.

So now it's if you just have a regular account, you can come over here to uh customize here in the left again.

We're going to go to browse plugins, we're going to go to personal, and we're going to add it.

And we're going to add it from GitHub, we're going to grab our marketplace URL again.

All right, and now this will work, we're going to sync it in, and now because it's public, you're going to see here it is.

Boom, so now we have our marketing plugins, all of our skills inside of here.

We have like brand foundations, you can click on it and see what it is.

You can install one at a time, you don't even have to install all of them.

So we can install, install, install, you can manage each one.

You can see the skills that are inside of it, right?

So let's go to here, like sales outreach plugin, you can see the skills.

We can do social media, we can see the skills, all right?

And that's how you install it if you're just running a normal Claude account.

Now, whenever you're working, you can open up whatever folder it is in Co-work.

You can launch the skills, you can use them across your account.

And really just to close out now, anytime you want to update a skill, for example.

You could be here in Co-work or Claude or Claude Code or Co-work.

You can make an update to a skill, and since it already is connected to your GitHub.

All you got to do is tell it to uh, you know, change it inside of that folder.

Inside of that repo on your computer, and then tell Claude to push the changes to GitHub.

And once you do that, you'll be able to update your plugins automatically.

So then anytime you make the changes on GitHub, and you want to update your uh plugin marketplace on Claude.

You know, whether whoever that is across your team or across your devices or whatever.

All you got to do is here in Co-work, you got to come over to customize where your plugins are.

We have the plugins, you know, browse plugins, personal, all right.

We have the marketing plugins marketplace, and you literally just click these little three dots.

And you check for updates, and anything that was updated on GitHub is going to now pull it into Claude.

And everything will be updated across your team, across your devices, across your agents, whatever.

You just have to do this for each, you know, account or device.

So if it's another, you know, you know, if you have multiple team members, each team member is going to need to update.

Uh the marketplace, or if you're running different devices, you know, for example, I have this Claude account here.

Then I have another separate one on my Mac Mini with my agents, they all will have to come update it.

But that's how you keep it across the board, um skills updated 24/7.

And like I said, there is such a huge, like, I don't even know if I said this, but there's an incredible opportunity here.

For building plugin marketplaces for brands, for companies, for clients, for yourself.

Um, an incredible opportunity here because this is how these companies and organizations.

These more professional non-development work will be using plugins.

So for example, if you want to make a ton of money doing this, you could probably go out there.

Um, build private marketplaces for clients, which is something I already do.

I built it for myself, I built it for uh CEOs and ghost writing clients I have companies.

I have people coming to me reaching out to give master classes of plugins for their big organizations, right?

Because they're using plugins on a team plan, on an enterprise plan.

That's another reason why I would recommend, you know, if you're somebody who's trying to do this as a business.

Trying to sell plugins, sell skills, whatever, um consulting stuff like that.

It's really good to get familiar with the team plan because that's what businesses are using.

And I didn't even know that this was really happening on the team plan.

Because I've always used the personal plan, right?

When I found out that I can have this organizational plugins here.

And I can make these, I can put them on a GitHub repo and give them the, you know, a teams.

It's just really opened my eyes into the opportunity here because like I said.

You can do this for clients, you can build private marketplaces for their brands, for their companies.

That include uh unique and um, you know, uh unique skills to their company.

Their team's voice, their workflows, and then each they can add it to their organization.

On Co-work, and whenever you update something on the GitHub repo.

All they have to do is pull in the newest version of the organizational plugins.

And that's what makes this like uh possible at scale.

And as like an actual professional um type of work now that you can or service that you can offer to these companies that are using Claude uh for their workflows.

All right, so now you know how to build a private or public plugin marketplace.

The shared Claude skill library that works across your entire team.

And keeps everybody on the same page and updates everywhere.

So whether you're like a solopreneur like me, running it across multiple machines and multiple projects.

Or you're a team of 10 people sharing, you know, the same tools across the board.

This is the infrastructure that will make Claude skills compound and scale up.

Instead of like, you know, get all scattered all over the place, all right?

So there are two resources in the description for Substack members.

The playbook I use to build this, which you can give to Claude and work with it to build your own marketplace.

Or this exact plugin marketplace builder skill, which is way easier that we just walked through.

Which you can just give to your Claude, and it will build and maintain the marketplace for you.

All right, so make sure to check that out.

And if you want a complete library of pre-built skills that you can install in Co-work, check out my Co-writer system as well.

But get started with this, huge opportunity for plugins.

Many companies will be using this, um, and the only way to do this cleanly and professionally is by building and maintaining these marketplaces.