Use Case #2: Client Onboarding from URL

New client onboarding used to take me a full day. Research the business, understand their content, analyze competitors, configure the system, build the instance, verify it works.

Now it takes one prompt.

TL;DR: I gave Claude a business URL. In 41 minutes, it researched the company, analyzed 5 competitors, extracted brand guidelines, generated a complete app configuration, built the instance, and deployed it to production—reducing a 7.5-hour process to under an hour.

The Prompt

A new client signed up for our ContentEngine. Instead of manually configuring everything, I tried:

onboard new client: [business name], website: [their URL]

That's it. One line.

The 8-Phase Workflow

Phase 1: Business Research — WebSearch found their LinkedIn, news mentions, industry reports. Built a profile of who they are, what they do, their market position.

Phase 2: Website Analysis — WebFetch crawled their site. Extracted brand colors from CSS, logo assets, tone of voice from copy analysis, content categories they care about, service offerings.

Phase 3: Content Catalog — Identified their existing content strategy: blog post topics and frequency, content gaps, keyword themes, audience segments.

Phase 4: Competitor Analysis — Found 5 competitors, analyzed their content: topics they rank for, content formats, publishing cadence, gaps we could exploit.

Phase 5: Configuration Generation — Generated a complete V5 configuration: content categories mapped to services, tone rules based on existing copy, keyword strategies based on competitor gaps.

Phase 6: Instance Creation — Created the actual app instance: cloned the template repo, injected the configuration, set up Supabase tables, configured authentication.

Phase 7: Build Verification — Ran the build. Fixed two TypeScript errors that came from the config generation. Re-ran until clean.

Phase 8: Deployment — Pushed to repo, triggered Netlify deploy, verified the live URL worked.

The Results

That's an 11x speedup. But the real value wasn't just time.

The Surprising Part

Claude found a competitor we didn't know about. They were ranking for a keyword cluster we'd completely missed. That intel alone was worth more than the time saved.

It also made a judgment call on content categories. The client had 6 services on their site, but Claude grouped them into 4 content categories because two were too similar to differentiate in content. That's the kind of decision that usually requires a strategy call.

Key Takeaways

• Research compounds — The competitive intel Claude gathered informed better configuration decisions downstream.
• Judgment calls are possible — Claude can make reasonable business decisions when given enough context.
• End-to-end automation works — When each phase feeds the next, the whole is greater than the sum of parts.

Try It Yourself

Copy this prompt to run your own client research and onboarding workflow:

I'll help you research and onboard a new client. Let me gather some info:

**Client Details:**
1. What's the client/business name?
2. What's their website URL?
3. What product/service are you onboarding them to?
4. Do you have a template repo to clone from? (path or "none")

**Research Depth:**
5. How many competitors should I analyze? (3-10, default: 5)
6. Should I extract brand colors and assets? (yes/no)

Once you answer, I will:
- Research the business (LinkedIn, news, industry context)
- Analyze their website (content, brand, tone, services)
- Find and analyze competitors
- Generate a configuration tailored to their business
- Create the instance (if template provided)
- Deploy and verify

Ready? Provide the answers above.

This was a real client onboarding from December 30, 2025.