So What? How to Set Up Your Own Claude Marketplace

So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live

airs every Thursday at 1 pm EST.

You can watch on YouTube Live. Be sure to subscribe and follow so you never miss an episode!

In this episode, Katie, Chris, and John show the process to create a central update server for team tools.

Building a custom Claude marketplace eliminates version confusion and unites your team. Connecting a free GitHub repository to your setup delivers new skills to all members without manual file transfers. This simple method stops you from sharing outdated brand templates or broken prompts. You will gain total control over team updates while keeping your personal Claude marketplace organized.

Watch the video here:

So What? How to Set Up Your Own Claude Marketplace

Watch this video on YouTube

Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here.

In this episode you’ll learn:

What Claude marketplaces are
Why Claude marketplaces are the secret to team and company governance
How to set up your own Claude Marketplace

Transcript:

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live

airs every Thursday at 1 pm EST.

You can watch on YouTube Live. Be sure to subscribe and follow so you never miss an episode!

In this episode, Katie, Chris, and John show the process to create a central update server for team tools.

Watch the video here:

So What? AI Podcast Editing: Level Up Your Workflow

Watch this video on YouTube

Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here.

In this episode you’ll learn:

What Claude marketplaces are
Why Claude marketplaces are the secret to team and company governance
How to set up your own Claude Marketplace

Transcript:

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Christopher Penn – 00:00

Katie, I don’t hear your voice. Is it just me?

Katie Robbert – 00:44

Nope, it is not just you.

Christopher Penn – 00:46

There we go.

Katie Robbert – 00:49

Let me take two. Happy Thursday. Welcome to So What? The Marketing, Analytics and Insights Live Show. I’m Katie, joined by Chris and John. Howdy, fellas.

John Wall – 00:58

Hello, hello. It’s always good, because first I’m like, what didn’t I turn on?

Christopher Penn – 01:03

I’m like, crap.

Katie Robbert – 01:05

Did something get unplugged? In case somebody was worried that we’re avatars, we are not. We are humans who are flawed.

This week, we are talking about how to set up your own Claude marketplace. Chris and I have been talking a lot this week about skill and plugin governance, which is really just a fancy way of saying: how are you keeping track of the things you’re creating, and how are you disseminating or sharing them with your team members?

A really great example: we have a skill in Claude that can build a PowerPoint deck. If I decide to make changes to that, then it only reflects on my Claude instance, not on Chris’s, since we’re on different Claude accounts, even though we’re in the same company.

Katie Robbert – 01:55

So I then have to download the skill and put it someplace Chris can get it, either in Slack or in Drive. Then Chris has to download that skill that I imported for him, bring it into his system, check it, and close the loop to let me know that it was all set.

That is a really broken process, but that’s the process that we have and acknowledge. It’s the process that a lot of companies have for maintaining skills and their plugins, regardless of what large language model system they have. It’s very human-dependent, and our process is dependent on me remembering that I made updates and sharing them with other people.

That’s failure point number one, so there are a lot of things that can go wrong when you’re talking about this kind of governance.

Katie Robbert – 02:44

Chris, where would you like to get started today?

Christopher Penn – 02:48

We should probably explain what a Claude—

Katie Robbert – 02:50

—marketplace is. That is probably a good place to start. Chris, what’s the Claude Marketplace?

Christopher Penn – 02:58

A Claude marketplace is a central repository where your plugins and skills live that is centrally managed so that when you and your development teams have an update of some kind, you say, “Let’s update the marketplace,” and then every Claude client within your organization that is subscribed to it gets an update.

It’s just like a Windows update, a macOS update, or a Microsoft Office update: “Hey, new updates available,” and it updates things.

If you’ve ever used things like Claude Code in the terminal version, you’ll see from time to time: “Hey, eight new plugins have been updated. Restart Claude to use the new plugins.” You’ll see that in Claude Cowork, too.

Katie Robbert – 03:45

So let me say, for a company like ours, I don’t use Claude Code the way that you do, so I wouldn’t necessarily get that update. That’s not a way that you’d be able to push it to me in my instance unless we have some sort of connection.

Christopher Penn – 04:02

We can if you set up the central server, which is the marketplace. That’s what it is—it’s an unnecessarily fancy term for an update server.

Katie Robbert – 04:16

Amazing. John, there’s going to be a pop quiz at the end, right?

John Wall – 04:20

Is that part of your account, or do you have to buy that additionally, or how does that centralized piece work?

Christopher Penn – 04:26

You have to build it yourself. Even better, exactly.

Katie Robbert – 04:31

All right, well, this show is going swimmingly. Let’s get started.

Christopher Penn – 04:34

All right, the architecture to do this is a repository—a version control system called Git. The most popular service that provides this, which is well-known to most folks, is a company called GitHub. If you have a GitHub account, you can build what are called repositories, which are really just folders of stuff.

What makes it different and better is that it has the Git version control system in it, so you can make updates. People have to check things out or check things in. You can subscribe to a repository and get read-only updates, which is what something like Claude Cowork would do. You subscribe it to a GitHub repo, and it synchronizes with it. Every time it starts up, it goes to the GitHub service and says, “Hey, anything new?” And it says, “No, okay, carry on.”

Christopher Penn – 05:25

Or, “Hey, I see new things, I’m going to bring them down.” What makes this nice? Now, for Trust Insights, this might be overkill since we only have two accounts for Claude. However, once you start getting to three, five, 10, 100, 1,000, this becomes really important.

As the number of accounts grows that need a subscription like this, the complexity grows, too, because GitHub is free at the personal level. So what we’ll do today is a toy example—a minimal example using all free stuff.

At an organization where you have things like governance, controls, and IT stuff, you actually have to upgrade to—to John’s point—a paid GitHub account that allows you to integrate with your single sign-on so that if an employee leaves, they don’t take all your IP with them.

Katie Robbert – 06:16

That would be a good thing. To borrow a phrase from myself: new technology, old problems. It’s version control software.

When I was working with software developers, I didn’t necessarily know all the systems they were using, but I understood the notion of checking your code in and out, especially when you’re collaborating with other developers.

If Chris checks out the Trust Insights website code and adds a couple of lines, but John is also working on the Trust Insights code and checks it out, when they both check it back in at the end of the day with their notes of what’s changed because they’re following SDLC best practices, both of them are going to get a notification that the code has changed.

Katie Robbert – 07:05

It asks, “Do you want to merge it? Do you want to accept the changes?” That’s one version of it.

A similar, less technical version is a content management system where you would check out parts of the content, make updates to it, and check it back in. Then maybe your editor would say, “Hey, there are new changes for you to review.” It’s very similar to that. It’s just a notification that something is different and you need to know about it.

You can set up those kinds of notifications with your Google Drive: “Hey, there’s a new document in your Google Drive. Do you want to go check it out?” Or, “Hey, you know this document you’ve been working on? John just eviscerated it and totally edited it. Do you want to see what’s changed?”

Katie Robbert – 07:51

Really, that’s all it is. At a very basic level, that’s what we’re talking about. But to your point, Chris, Claude likes to make it fancy, so it’s a marketplace.

Christopher Penn – 08:00

Yes, it’s a marketplace. You run into this if you’ve ever been in your CMS. You’ll see: “Hey, this page is locked. Katie is currently working on this page. Do you want to override the lock?” If you have permissions to do so, you can. Otherwise, you just sit there and say, “Katie, can you get out of the Academy page, please?”

Katie Robbert – 08:18

Yeah, and that happens.

Christopher Penn – 08:20

A lot.

Katie Robbert – 08:20

But it’s nice that you can’t just override it, that there are those controls in place. I can see where that’s important when you’re managing skills and plugins.

Christopher Penn – 08:30

Exactly. Now where this really gets important is for larger companies and enterprises where you’ve got a skill like the Trust Insights PowerPoint slide deck skill that has our brand guidelines, standards, and logos. You want a version control system like a Claude marketplace in place so that if we rebrand, you don’t have 1,000 laptops out there all with the old style guide embedded on them.

Then you don’t have to go desk by desk and say, “All right, now you’ve got to uninstall the plugin, install the new one, and here’s the new template.” You just say, “Let’s update the server and push all of the Claude clients.” Now you automatically use the new brand standards.

Katie Robbert – 09:12

Which is fantastic, because that is such a headache for the person who is responsible for making sure everybody’s using the correct brand standards.

Christopher Penn – 09:21

Now, the other use case—and this is something we’re not going to do today because I’m still debugging it myself—is that the Git framework is free, open-source software. You do not have to use GitHub. You can use anything that supports it, including just a plain old Linux server.

One of the things that I’m exploring right now is what it would look like for Trust Insights to have a subscription-based server where you subscribe to the Trust Insights plugin service. Then we would make updates into things like plugins, such as our Deep Research suite, which you can find at academy.trustinsights.ai, or our free fact-check skill, which you can find at academy.trustinsights.ai.

Christopher Penn – 10:07

So as we develop new skills and plugins, A, you don’t have to pay $20 every time we update something; and B, as I make changes to things, it propagates to anyone who’s got an active subscription.

If you’re using the enterprise controls, which not only have version control but have things like single sign-on, the moment you stop paying, it goes away.

Katie Robbert – 10:33

Also helpful.

Christopher Penn – 10:34

Yes, but that’s for another time. Today, let’s go ahead and get started actually setting this thing up.

You’ll need two things: first, you need a GitHub account; second, you should probably have an AI tool like Claude. By the way, all of the major tools—ChatGPT, Google, Microsoft, GitHub Copilot—can all integrate with GitHub repos for their skills. They do it all in slightly different ways, so today is focused on Claude. But if you build a good GitHub repository that follows standards, then when your company changes providers or updates things, you don’t have to throw it all away. You’ll be able to adapt it.

This is the Trust Insights GitHub account. We have a bunch of free stuff on there as well that nobody knows to go look for.

Christopher Penn – 11:24

I’m going to start a brand new repository. Anytime you’re starting a repository, you have to do a whole bunch of things like naming it, so I’m going to call this “Claude Skills.” This is for our Claude skills. If you’re doing this for your company, please keep it private. You do not want your internal stuff public.

Whether you want to add a README is up to you. README documentation is not a bad idea for this because employees who go to that page can see instructions like how to connect this to their client. The .gitignore is going to depend on if there’s any code involved in your skills.

Christopher Penn – 12:10

If you don’t know, leave this as it is, and for license, select no license because this is your private company repository. If you’re doing this publicly, you could choose your licenses. If you were an open-source software developer, you might have a public repository of all your plugins and skills that you’re giving away, in which case you would choose the appropriate settings here. We’re going to create the repository.

Now what you end up with is an empty repository. This is going to be our marketplace. I probably should have named it something clever, but I didn’t.

Katie Robbert – 12:44

No, it is what it is.

Christopher Penn – 12:47

It is. That’s unfortunate.

Once you’ve got the repository set up, you can do this in anything that can connect to the repository and to wherever you have your plugins. I’m going to use Claude Code in my terminal, but you can use the desktop app or Claude Cowork as long as you’ve got a folder with all of your plugins and skills in it.

Today, we’re going to set up a Claude marketplace. I’ve got some documentation or instructions on how to do this. This is going to be a very minimal private repository using a personal GitHub account, so it won’t have things like access control and single sign-on. This is just a toy example.

Christopher Penn – 13:35

We’ll be starting there. I’ll tell it where the documentation is. The documentation is in my output folder, called Clean Master Report.md. I did some deep research using the Trust Insights Deep Research suite, which is at academy.trustinsights.ai.

Katie Robbert – 13:54

I should have had that handy.

Christopher Penn – 13:58

I know how to set up a basic GitHub repo, but I wanted to know if there were specific weird things that I needed to do for this. It turns out it’s actually really simple.

We’re going to say, “The skills and plugins we’re going to use are in the Claude folder. The skills and plugins are in this project Claude folder. As we always do, ask me up to 20 clarifying questions so you have enough information to succeed at the task, using your superpowers brainstorming skill if needed.”

Now with that, we’re going to get Claude underway. It’s probably going to ask things like, “Where’s the repo?” I’m going to proactively tell it that this is the repo we’ll work with.

Christopher Penn – 15:00

While it’s doing this, you should think about this: anytime you’re working with GitHub, you have to have a local copy on your computer that it can push and pull information from to keep things in sync. Somebody in your organization has to be the maintainer; somebody has to be in charge. Before you embark on setting up a Claude marketplace, you should probably sit through—

Katie Robbert – 15:32

—the 5P Framework by Trust Insights, which is Purpose, People, Process, Platform, and Performance.

Purpose: What the heck are you doing and why? People: Who’s involved? Who owns this thing? Someone’s got to own it. Who are the end users? Process: How are you setting it up? How is it being maintained? How is it being secured? Platform: What are you using? In this case, we’re using GitHub and pushing into Claude. Performance: Did you accomplish the thing that you meant to do?

Christopher Penn – 16:01

Right. If you’re not clear on that, you should think that through.

Let’s see what it says: “What do you want to push into this?” I want to push in my Deep Research suite plus all my standalone skills. “Do you want themed plugins, or one skill equals one plugin, or one big toolkit plugin?” I’m going to do themed plugins here.

“What’s the source of truth? Is it your computer or is it GitHub?” If you’re setting this up for your company, the source of truth should be your repo.

“What’s the governance level?” This is where you start getting into questions like, do you want CI—which stands for continuous integration—where GitHub itself can run checks to see if you uploaded garbage or malware?

Christopher Penn – 16:48

If you were going to do this for your organization, I would say you’d want CI/CD, which is Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment. Basically, it’s constantly running a script saying, “Is what’s in the repository correct? Does it contain any junk code?” For today’s toy example, we’re bypassing that. Please do not bypass that—instead, actually use that feature. It’s there, and it’s free.

Let’s see. Is this the correct target? Yes, that is correct. License and author: no license field, because this is a toy example. Do you want a one-time export or a synchronized script to keep it in sync? I’m going to do a one-time export because this is a toy example. Do you want to exclude anything?

Christopher Penn – 17:42

No, this is fine. It’s not like we have anything inappropriate in this particular project.

Katie Robbert – 17:49

Okay, I think I’m with you so far, but I’m going to have to watch the replay to make sure I’m really consuming everything. This is a little above my understanding of how Claude, code, and GitHub work.

For someone like me, I’d say, “Let me start with the README,” because that’s probably going to tell me most of what I need to know. For a lot of the work that I’m doing in coworking, Claude is automatically creating a README file. It’s something that I think people should get used to because it’s going to answer a lot of the questions that you have about the stuff that you’re looking at.

Christopher Penn – 18:34

The good news is Claude itself, if you’ve given it good documentation—which I made in advance—can at any point answer if you say, “What the—”

John Wall – 18:45

—heck are we doing?

Christopher Penn – 18:46

“Stop and explain this to me,” and it will totally do that.

How long is this documentation? This is 29,000 words—it’s a book. I built a book for this on how to do all this stuff last night because I wanted to make sure that it actually works.

It says, “I’ve got the plan. Here’s the plan. Do you like the plan? Here’s what’s going to be in the README. Does this look good?” Looks good. Now based on that, it’s going to do the implementation plan. It’s going to create the layout for the README, which says what everything does.

Let me make this full screen. The Deep Research suite has four categories of plugins: your document tools like your PowerPoint and PDF tools…

Christopher Penn – 19:38

…your research tools like Fact Check and Deep Research Prompt, your writing tools like QA Text and Peer Review, and your strategy tools like Job to AI and Ask the ICP. It’s creating essentially a layout for this.

Let me go ahead and say, “Proceed with implementation.” It decided to make plugins out of all the individual skills. It asked if you wanted to do this or leave them standalone. I chose to say, “Go ahead and make some cool plugins,” but you don’t have to. You can certainly say, “I’ll leave it exactly where I made it because that’s the way I want it.”

Katie Robbert – 20:22

Okay.

Christopher Penn – 20:26

So after all of this is done, you go into a system like your Claude desktop app. Inside Claude desktop, under settings and things like plugins, you’ll notice there is a button here called “Add a Marketplace.” If we’ve done our job right, there’s a setting here called “Add from a repository.”

It will say, “Please make sure that you trust the repository.” Don’t connect this to randos on the internet, please. Let me see how the actual process is doing here—it’s still working.

I would take just this URL from our repository and say, “Here is the Claude Marketplace.” “Do you want to keep your plugins up to date?” Yes, I do.

Christopher Penn – 21:24

If I finish the repository, then I, as the maintainer, would update the plugins as I make changes to them. Or if Katie makes a new plugin, she would contact me as the repo maintainer and say, “Hey, can you put this in the repo, or can you update this in the repo?” I would make those changes, push it to GitHub, and then all 10,000 of our employees, if we were at a big enterprise, would suddenly get boom—there’s the newest version of Katie’s Ask the ICP.

Katie Robbert – 21:55

I was trying to follow along in my Claude. If I go to Claude plugins on my desktop app and add the marketplace, I don’t have to get the latest stuff through Claude Code, like the marketplace you’ve already built is going to push all of the changes to me. Am I going to get some sort of notification, or does it silently update in the background?

Christopher Penn – 22:21

I believe in desktop, it just does it every time it starts up, so every time you restart the Claude app.

Katie Robbert – 22:29

Got it, which is helpful. I’m guessing the answer is yes, but is there an instance where you would want to loudly notify people that things have changed?

Christopher Penn – 22:41

There are plenty, especially if you’re doing things that are not bug fixes. If I’m doing a bug fix, that’s just my job. But if design says, “Hey, we got a brand-new style guide for the company,” you can’t send a notification inside Claude. You would have to send an email to all staff saying, “Hey, your Claude is going to update. This is the new thing. If it produces a deck that looks like this, that’s not an accident. Nothing’s wrong with your Claude; this is the new brand style guide. If your Claude produces a deck that looks like the old version, that’s the old style guide and you need to restart your Claude.”

Katie Robbert – 23:21

Doing this doesn’t bypass the human part of this, which is the communication. When I was doing software development, every time we did a release, we would have what are called release notes, and they would be sent around to the entire organization. Even though they were not the end users, they would have to answer questions from our customers about what changed, what’s different, big or small, and why you should care about it.

It’s just a good practice to get into. New tech does not solve all problems. Bug fixes, as Chris mentioned, can happen silently, but when there are major changes, it’s good to get into a consistent schedule so people know when to expect things, versus, “I changed this thing.”

Katie Robbert – 24:16

“Okay, I changed this thing. Okay, now I changed this thing,” and it’s hard to keep track of it. If you find things changing weekly, try to get into a schedule like, “Okay, every Friday afternoon we’re going to commit the changes, and while we’re doing that, we’re sending out a company-wide email.” People start to expect those things and look for them, taking a lot of the guesswork out of, “Wait, there’s something new? What do you mean there’s something new? Nobody told me there was something new.”

Whatever that communication channel looks like—maybe a Slack message, your company’s intranet, or your email system—say, “Here’s what changed, here’s why you should care,” and get on a consistent schedule of communication.

Katie Robbert – 24:59

That’s going to save you a lot of headache.

Christopher Penn – 25:00

Of headache, and that is very much a part of AI enablement itself. You almost want that weekly email to be something that people look forward to, like, “Ooh, what kind of goodies am I getting this week?”

Katie Robbert – 25:16

Yeah, maybe it’s an opportunity for people to say, “Hey, I thought I was going to get this thing.” John was looking for his “Do Sales for Me” skill. “When’s that coming? What do you mean it’s not in there?”

John Wall – 25:36

Grab the Bag skill.

Katie Robbert – 25:38

I couldn’t think of a clever name, but where’s my John Wall skill? What we’re talking about, if we’re being honest, is software development—that’s what this is. Again: new tech, old problems.

Follow SDLC best practices, and you will be able to do things like this without stumbling too much. Make sure you outline your 5Ps. When you talk about things like release notes, you’re now going to have a backlog of requests. How do those get managed? This is sort of the dark side of doing this stuff.

Katie Robbert – 26:16

As these things become available, you start to get into true software development: feature requests, custom requests like, “Well, this is only going to work for me this way, so now we need the custom version of this.” As you’re building this, just be prepared for that trickle effect to happen.

Christopher Penn – 26:38

We actually have some questions. Christopher says, “I’ve been hoping for a marketplace standardization so skills can be used with multiple platforms.” You can, however, it’s different from platform to platform.

For example, if you want to do this with ChatGPT Enterprise or ChatGPT Team, you can, but you have to package it up, I believe, as an archive. OpenAI has an API for this: you set a bridge between your Git repo and the OpenAI skills API, which people on your team then have the ability to access. It’s a pain in the butt, but you can run it from the same GitHub repo internally.

Katie Robbert – 27:28

Okay.

Christopher Penn – 27:30

Sandra asks, “If it’s a private repo, how do people in your company or clients get access?” At the top of the episode, I said today is a toy example. We’re using a personal GitHub account; under no circumstances should you ever do this for work.

What we’re showing today in an enterprise would require a paid GitHub account that integrates with your single sign-on. In the URL, instead of a naked GitHub URL like we’ve been using for the demo, you would get one with a token that, when someone connects their Claude to it, negotiates with single sign-on.

Christopher Penn – 28:05

If that account is not on the approved list from your single sign-on system, GitHub itself will bounce it and say, “Nope, this is not an authorized user from your instance.” That’s also what prevents it from being shared outside your organization. The moment you authenticate with GitHub, it calls your single sign-on and asks, “Is this an authorized user?” But you have to be on a paid plan, do all your seat management there, and pay about $25 a month per seat.

Katie Robbert – 28:37

So it’s almost like doing the 5Ps to plan it out, and I say that mostly not facetiously. There’s a reason that we really encourage people to do their requirements ahead of time to understand the pitfalls of doing something like this. Chris, to your point, it’s a lot more complicated than we are able to show in a short demo, especially when you get into enterprise-size organizations.

It’s not just enterprise size, but also enterprise AI, which is a different thing. You have the enterprise organization, which is size-based on revenue and headcount, and then enterprise organizations that are held to stricter standards of how and when they can use AI.

Christopher Penn – 29:26

Even a tiny doctor’s office with 10 people in it has to adhere to essentially enterprise requirements because of HIPAA and protected health information. You may have 10 people on staff, but you must play by the same rules as a massive hospital institution.

Katie Robbert – 29:47

It’s interesting—and this is perhaps a conversation for another time—but I’ve noticed a lot of doctors’ offices are now using AI transcription services. Whether small practices or large practices, I don’t know how much governance there is around those specific services.

With this GitHub repo and this Claude marketplace—and I recall, Chris, I believe you said at the top of the episode—this is not a Claude-specific thing. You can do this for Gemini, OpenAI, or other large language model providers; we just happen to be showing it on Claude.

Christopher Penn – 30:32

Exactly. That goes with using the skills API with OpenAI’s system, which is always a headache.

Katie Robbert – 30:46

Sandra has a follow-up question: “That adds up quickly if it’s a big company.” It does. “Would it be easier to save skills or brand files somewhere in the company’s OneDrive or Google Drive?”

That’s what we advise a lot of our clients to do. It’s a good starting place to pilot whether people are even using these things. Chris has created a lot of skills that I probably haven’t installed, so he and I are out of sync in that respect. That’s a place for us to start: am I aware that there are things in there that I need that would be helpful? Am I replicating work? I would definitely start with OneDrive or Google Drive just to get people used to the idea that there are things available to them.

Christopher Penn – 31:32

The downside is that approach doesn’t have version control. If I download and install a skill or plugin, the obligation is on me, the user, when that email comes out on Fridays saying, “Yeah, you need to go update your plugins now.”

John Wall – 31:52

If you have the full marketplace, does it actually automate that? Does it check in when you first fire up?

Christopher Penn – 31:57

It does.

John Wall – 31:59

So that closes the loop on diffs there.

Christopher Penn – 32:03

That’s right. Other questions?

Katie Robbert – 32:11

I understand the concept of it, but you went through the setup pretty quickly. Can we go back to that for a minute?

Christopher Penn – 32:19

Sure. To recap, the first thing you have to do is decide what plugins and skills you want to have. If I am in my Claude, do you want to load all of these? The answer is maybe yes, maybe no, so you have to think that through first.

Once you’ve thought through what plugins and things you want, Claude, funny enough, has a plugins skill that gives the background information it needs to learn how to structure a plugin for a marketplace. But I did some deep research to figure out how to set up marketplaces in GitHub.

Christopher Penn – 33:05

I put that research into a document that I could read last night so I knew what I was doing today. That document contains all the rules.

I then went to Claude Code—you can use Claude Cowork or anything that has access to wherever you put those plugins and skills—and said, “I want you to help me set up this thing.” Then I went to GitHub to start a new repo with the appropriate privileges.

We walked through setting up the bare-bones GitHub repo set to private, given a name that probably should have been more clever, and connected the repo to Claude Code by giving it the URL and confirming access. I glossed over that.

Christopher Penn – 33:58

You have to have your Claude Code able to talk to GitHub. That can be a connector if you’re using the desktop version of Claude Code, or in my case, it’s a command-line tool because I have a full developer environment.

One of the gotchas is that if you’re doing it on GitHub, you should probably have the ear of someone with experience with GitHub repos so that when something goes wrong—and it will—you can ask, “Hey, Chris, why is it doing this? I gave it permissions; why is it not working?”

You then give Claude the instructions: “Here are the plugins that we want to use, here is the repo where it’s going to live, and here’s the privacy level. Arrange the marketplace, build it, and push it to GitHub where it will live.”

Christopher Penn – 34:51

That configures the Claude marketplace. Finally, you take the Claude marketplace URL and give it to your individual Claude clients, saying, “Now go subscribe to this marketplace.”

Going back to what Sandra was saying, for Trust Insights, here’s the URL. There are only two Claude accounts. But at a large organization, you need the paid version with single sign-on integration. At a larger enterprise company, there’s a very good chance you already have that; I have yet to run into an enterprise-sized company that does not already have developers with GitHub accounts and internal repos. You can just ask them, “Hey, can you spin up another repo for us?”

Katie Robbert – 35:36

That makes sense. You keep talking about a Claude marketplace, but what is the Gemini or OpenAI version? You would want to use their coding system.

Christopher Penn – 35:53

You can, but you don’t have to. You just have to follow their standards.

Katie Robbert – 35:58

What I’m asking is this: you’re talking about setting up a Claude marketplace, but not everyone is using Claude. Some people are Gemini shops, and some people are OpenAI shops. Could they use that version to make their own Gemini marketplace?

Christopher Penn – 36:15

No, the marketplace lingo is unique to Claude. A regular GitHub repo can be given directly to something like Google Anti-Gravity or OpenAI Codex, and it will know what to do with it.

Katie Robbert – 36:29

Got it. That’s what I was trying to understand, because obviously we’re focused on Claude today, but I know not everyone is a Claude user. What about a Copilot user?

Christopher Penn – 36:39

If you’re using Microsoft GitHub Copilot, it works great with this because GitHub Copilot is a creation of GitHub itself.

Katie Robbert – 36:48

That makes sense. I’m just trying to think through this because not everyone is using Claude. I understand we’re demonstrating on Claude, but anyone using a large language model with more than a couple of people is going to run into version control issues.

Christopher Penn – 37:06

Exactly, and that’s really why we’re doing this. To Sandra’s point earlier, you can put stuff on a shared drive, but you don’t have version control or auto-update capability other than telling people, “Hey, update it.” This provides the automation mechanism of updating it for you.

Katie Robbert – 37:24

John, do you prefer things automatically updating for you, or do you want to have control over updating so that you know what’s being updated?

John Wall – 37:32

I’m always a fan of updates and notifications—I want to know about conflicts and if anything has gone wrong. But you reach a certain point where you’ve got so much stuff that you don’t want to have to manage it manually.

That leads into my question: you’ve got this set up, but you can’t just have an open directory. We talked about how somebody has got to be responsible for it. What are some best practices for that person? Is there a suggested file structure, or ways to organize this instead of it just being a pile of files?

Christopher Penn – 38:10

There is a required file structure for marketplaces when using Claude. To Katie’s question earlier, other systems can work with it, but Claude in particular is very specific about exactly how it has to be set up.

You do need someone who is going to be the librarian or custodian of it—there has to be a caretaker. It’s not a full-time job; it’s five minutes a week for shops that don’t do a lot of custom skills. If you are a shop that creates a lot of your own skills, it could be a greater time commitment.

Katie Robbert – 38:45

There does have to be a named owner, and you have to be clear about what that person does. When we talk about AI champions and culture carriers, those are great places to start in terms of who is going to own it. They obviously have to have GitHub skills, but it’s a job that has to be done, and someone has to take responsibility and ownership for it.

Christopher Penn – 39:11

That also means—huge surprise—you need to have a process for how updates happen and who is allowed to request them. If you have a system like Jira or Asana, how can somebody say, “Hey, I made a new skill. How do I get it into the company marketplace?”

Katie Robbert – 39:32

Again, this is software development. If you understand the SDLC—which is the software development life cycle—this should all feel very reminiscent. You have a backlog, sprints, releases, and communication. It’s all the same; it’s just a different piece of technology now.

Christopher Penn – 39:50

It looks like Claude has actually finished up in our repository now. Where there was a blank screen, we now have different folders and a nice README that says, “This is the Trust Insights Claude Skills Marketplace. You can add it to your Claude Code session.”

If I go back to our Claude client and hit “Sync now,” it will probably say, “Hey, you need to add this user to your GitHub account.” I would have to install Claude there, which I’m not going to do now because it requires passwords. Because this is a private repo, our client services account would need to be added to that repo so it can use this.

Christopher Penn – 40:35

That goes back to the question earlier of how we protect this from randos: you need to add your account in there. Once you’re in, you have access to all these different skills, and if I make updates to them, it will auto-update.

Katie Robbert – 40:58

Amazing. Bing, bang, boom, done.

Christopher Penn – 41:02

Yes, it only took 42 minutes and a lot of hand waving behind the scenes.

Katie Robbert – 41:08

Through these livestream demos, I hope we can show the essence of a thing, with the caveat that a lot of setup actually goes into it. But here’s what’s possible if you are invested in doing it.

Christopher Penn – 41:26

Any final thoughts, dad jokes, barbecue recipes?

Katie Robbert – 41:32

We actually just made a peach habanero barbecue sauce, which is very good, but that’s beside the point.

What I would say for people is to start with a basic documentation system. We talked about this in the newsletter this week, which you can get at trustinsights.ai/newsletter. Start with a simple spreadsheet of what you’ve created and log everything. Maybe that lives in Google Drive, SharePoint, or OneDrive to give people transparency.

If you start getting more requests like, “I need it updated” or “I need this different thing,” then you may start looking into a version control system. But start with the basics—I don’t think you need to immediately invest in building new software or buying something off the shelf.

Katie Robbert – 42:16

Look at the tools you have. For a lot of people, those are going to be good enough.

Christopher Penn – 42:21

Exactly.

John Wall – 42:23

Yeah.

Christopher Penn – 42:27

Have a process of some kind.

Katie Robbert – 42:29

Yeah.

Christopher Penn – 42:29

All right, that’s going to do it for this week’s show. I believe next week we are off because we will be at Event Nexus, and we’ll be back the following week talking about AI writing, so stay tuned for that.

Thanks for tuning in, folks, and we’ll see you on the next one. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it.

For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights podcast at trustinsights.ai/tipodcast and our weekly email newsletter at trustinsights.ai/newsletter.

Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode? Join our free Analytics for Marketers Slack group at trustinsights.ai/analyticsformarketers. See you next time.

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