I don't know about you, but I heard that you can put MCPs within LLMs Claude and you can get 100x more out of them. The problem is it's kind of difficult to set up. So I brought on Riley Brown, who's going to go through a tutorial with how to set it up in a simple way so that you can actually transform your business, save hours of time, and outcompete 99.9% of the people who are using AI today, you're not going to want to miss this one. Riley Brown, back on the Startup Ideas podcast. What are we going to learn today? So today, we're going to be using MCPs, but I don't want to frame it we're using MCPs. I think, personally, that MCPs is kind of a buzzword. It's distracting you from the sauce, and it's distracting you from the core ideas that you should be focusing on, right? What does MCP mean? Doesn't matter. For the sake of this video, doesn't matter. What we're talking about is agents with tools. And if you look at the trends right now, if you look up MCP on Google Trends, Greg, I know you love Google Trends. If you look up the trends for N8N, if you look up the trends for the next biggest AI agent builders, people are dying to build AI agents. And by the way, Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4 are literally agents. out of the box. And so what we're talking about is giving tools to agents. That's all I really want to talk about today because it is so significant. It is so important to basically any workflow. And the one that's going the most viral right now is N8N. So what N8N is, is it's a kind of Zapier where you can create these workflow automations, except you can create this AI agent node. And AI agents are really hard to build, right? I am working at a startup where we're building an AI agent and doing it in a code base is impossible for non-technical people to wrap their heads around what it's actually doing. And I think what N8 ended is they made this interface for AI agents so that non-technical people can understand them. Where instead of it being a workflow. I think I included it. Yes, right here. It's not if one thing happens, then the next thing happens, then the next thing happens. Maybe you have some conditional logic, right? You have a lead or you have an email and depending on what type it is, maybe it sends it down one path and then it sends you result A or sends result B. Instead, something happens and then it sends it to an agent and it has access to tools. So the agent will decide what tools to use and for how long, right? An AI agent, if you've used cursor, it might spend 10 minutes on a prompt or it might spend 30 seconds on a prompt depending on how much resources it needs to allocate to that specific task to get a specific result. And so the best definition for AI agent that I've ever heard that kind of removes all of the extra noise because so many people think automations are agents. So many people think the definition for AI agent is very elusive right now. And so AI agents are models using tools in a loop, right? It can spend as much time as it wants in this step. It can use tools over and over again until it's done, and then it will send out this final result, right? That's how I see it. And so today we're going to be talking about MCP and giving Claude, which is an agent, access to tools. Right. So you get to choose which agent model you want to use, Sonnet 4 or Opus 4. And then we get to actually add tools, which if you have used Claude, it's this little button right here. And we're going to talk about how to actually give it access to tools, which has actually been the biggest barrier so far. No company, even to this day, has made it really easy to add external tools. I'm going to show you one company that has made it somewhat easy, but it has a lot of room to get easier. Is this making sense so far, Greg? It makes sense, but I have a dumb question to ask, which is, why should the person listening to this podcast care? Absolutely. Okay, so as you know, let's actually go over here. Tools matter a lot, right? If you think of the original ChatGPT and you asked it to create content about some event that happened two days ago, ChatGPT would have just hallucinated some random script not in your voice, and it would also not have context surrounding whatever it is that you're talking about. Perplexity built a billion-dollar company, right, in the beginning, adding one single tool, basically, which was search the Internet before responding. They built a billion-dollar company doing that, and this gave its responses incredible context where no other AI model had. Now, all of these tools have a search tool, and so now it's no longer their sauce. So they're searching for other things. They're trying to create other products for their sauce. The same thing with Cursor. Why does it matter that you have an agent with tools, right? Cursor is a really great example of a really powerful AI agent. By the way, it's a very familiar AI model, right? It's Claude. Most people use Claude. and it is a familiar interface with VS Code. But what they did is they created tools so that it could search the code base, which was one of their tools. Now it can search the internet. So you can say, search the internet, find documentation on whatever AI feature you want to create and it will implement it correctly. It's amazing. It's a miracle. And that's because of tools, right? And so then why is Boring Marketer talking about MCPs and NAN workflows, right? So the same way that Cursor surrounded a smart AI models with tools it needs to create apps the user wants, Boring Marketer is surrounding smart AIs with relevant tools so he can create content, copy, and different things that, anything that's relevant to marketing, right? So he's creating his own code base, if you will, of marketing topics and giving AI agents access to YouTube summarizers, AI ad copy creators, maybe the documents to his voice, allowing it to scrape other people's websites. And I've come around to the term by marketing. And just because I have to, I just have to accept that it's just going to win. And I think MCP and NAN, the reason why he's talking about this is I think it is the two best ways right now to kind of give AI agents tools. Okay, at least for this specific workflow, because we're going to be using Docker. Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, just said that it is the era of the idea guy and he is not wrong. I think that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup. and if you listen to this podcast, chances are you think so too. Now, I think that you can look at trends to basically figure out what are the startup ideas you should be building. So that's exactly why I built ideabrowser.com. Every single day, you're going to get a free startup idea in your inbox and it's all backed by high-quality data trends. How we do it, people always ask. We use AI agents to go and search what are people looking for and what are they screaming for in terms of products that you should be building. And then we hand it on a silver platter for you to go check out. We do have a few paid plans that take it to the next level, give you more ideas, give you more AI agents and more, almost a chat GPT for ideas with it. But you can start for free, ideabrowser.com. And if you're listening to this, I highly recommend it. So Docker is traditionally, it's a pretty technical platform. But I just ended up seeing that they created this MCP toolkit. And since I already had Docker on my computer, it made it really easy to just add tools. So if you go to Claude right here, you'll see if you're just starting out on Claude and maybe you have it downloaded for the first time, you're not going to see anything down here. You're just going to see nothing. In order to give it access to tools you need to go to Docker or any other tool I think Composio does something similar I not specifically it doesn matter which platform you use Docker is just the one that I use. And so if you go to MCP toolkit, you can go to catalog and they have 116 tools that you have access to. And they're adding a ton more apparently. And so this is kind of , you know, Zapier. Zapier has so many integrations with all these different tools, and I think that's where this is headed, where basically all of these external tools that you might need are just going to be in a giant catalog. And so, for example, we could add Firecrawl, which searches the internet. For this one, you're going to need a ton of configuration keys, so I may not use this one right now, and that's where this is still annoying. I can't wait for the client that comes in and handles the keys for something Firecrawl, and then we just pay one company instead of having to set up accounts on all of them. Which is a startup idea in itself. , why doesn't, right? A thousand percent. That is one of the biggest startup opportunities right now. I think people understand that. I think people just realize that this is a much tougher problem than people think, connecting all of these together for many reasons, which we don't need to get into. But I want to talk about my two favorite tools that I've used so far. The first one is Notion, and the second one is Glyph. And this Glyph tool is literally creating AI employees, and you can basically create an AI agent that has access to little AI employees. And I'll explain that more in a second. But let's start off with the Notion tool, right? So whenever you want to enable a tool on Docker, once you enable it, on Notion, there's this little integration token you need, right? You basically need to give it your accounts key so it knows which account that it's using. And you can very easily find that. So let's go ahead and open up Notion. And I have a Notion team space that's literally called AgentMind. It's made for AI agents. And so the homepage of this, and by the way, this is where I keep a lot of my content stuff. The top of the page is, here are your instructions if you are reading this, AI agent. And so it's made for AI agents to be able to navigate it. Because with MCP, it can do all of the tasks that I do on Notion manually. It can do with MCP. And again, MCP is just giving an agent tools for the sake of this video. And so what we can do is we can let's go half screen here. And when you use Docker, you make sure that it is still on, don't exit out of it. You get access to the tools, but it needs to be running. That's the MCP server running just by having Docker open. And so when I go here, I will see all of my Docker tools that I've enabled. And so I have all of my glyph tools and all of the Notion tools, which is a total of 31 tools. So these are all of them that it can do. And so now we can say something , so in Notion, I have a content, I have a how to create content SOPs, right? I have this page right here. And so this goes over short form hooks, long form hooks. And so I can ask it, I can say, look at my short form hooks in this database and write. What's a tech news thing that came out recently? Dude, I'm so overwhelmed. Oh, DIA Browser, DIA Browser. Oh, yeah. So short form hooks in this database, write short form content about the new DIA browser, search the Internet first and find info. Right. In this case, oh, wait, I need to tell it to use Notion because we haven't set up our custom prompt. So use Notion MCP. And I'll show you how to avoid having to do this every time in just a second. Use Notion MCP. Find the database below. And write three options. So right now we're just giving it instructions and there's no system prompt for this. So right now it's using a tool, right? More and more of these chat apps ChatGPT, Claude, have tools just built into them, right? Claude three weeks ago didn't have search or maybe a month ago didn't have search. Now it has search. Here it's actually doing API post search. So it's actually finding. See, perfect. I can see there's a short form hooks page. Let me grab the contents from that page and understand the hook structure. Okay, I see there are tables with hooks. Let me grab the content of these tables to see the hook structure is great. Now let me search for information about the DIA browser. So it searched all of the available Notion database, and then it found the how to create content database. Then it found this short form hooks, and now it's giving us options. So here are the two options, right? And we can see this. Today, I realized that browsing the web is about to change forever, right? If we go into short form hooks, we can see that one of those hooks is today. I realized that. And so in terms of business ideas, some of the best business ideas might literally come from collecting good examples. I mean, look at this example, right? , AI never gave me good hooks until I created this little hooks database. So whenever I'm scrolling, , if I find a hook that I , I'll just write it in this database really quickly. And that in and of itself could be a huge company. If you can, , provide the right context, maybe you have, , some custom system instructions at the top. , if you're writing, I don't know. You have to find the sauce. And so it's all about finding the right output, giving really good examples to get that output. there's a lot of really good business ideas in that space, right? The next one was this feels illegal to know. And so I'm sure that's on here. This feels illegal to know, right? And so it's pulling that. And so now what we can do is we could just say, , can you please add these as separate entries in my content database? and now it should in theory add them to the content database because it not only can read things from it, it can also paste things, it can type things, it can add comments, which is my favorite feature actually is being able to add comments on what I'm doing so it doesn't change what I've written, but it'll provide feedback and give me options. Is this all making sense? It makes sense. One thing I was thinking about is, you know, how should we think of MCP versus Claude artifacts? How should we think of MCP versus Claude artifacts? So it just added it here. So you can actually get Claude. You could make a custom project within Claude and give it instructions that, , anytime it creates an artifact, you could get it to also upload it to whatever database you're working in. I've always found that that for me, one of the biggest things is whenever I create something with AI, it kind of gets lost. And I, , especially if I edit it or change it, I to store it somewhere. So that's one thing that's really useful for me is being able to quickly just tell AI to store it somewhere. , artifacts is obviously this separate feature. I don't know if they're complementary, but Claude basically just renders your chats on the side window, and you can share them. You can edit them. Oh, you can't edit them on Claude directly. You have to highlight it and tell AI to do it. On OpenAI's version of this is their Canvas feature. Gemini has a Canvas feature. I know XAI is working on a Canvas feature, so they're all kind of adding this. I personally think at this point they're a little overrated. I hardly ever use them just because, I don't know. Do you use the artifacts on Cloud? Well, that's kind of, that's what I was getting at really, which is I'm trying to find a way to use artifacts just because it's, it looks a core feature, but I'm kind of , I don know if I dumb for not using it you know So Claude Artifacts was one of the most impactful features for me because it allowed me to render say create front component and or create a landing page to mock up and build it, and it would render it right there. It was the first time because Claude Artifacts was the first one to do it. Now, there's so many tools that do that, and they allow you to add AI features, and they allow you to add backends that, , it's just not what I really want to be doing. I know that in the episode that I did with Boring Marketer, he had a really cool way of doing it where he's using MCP and he's bringing in information, right? So the same way that I'm searching the internet, he's deeper in the trenches in terms of analytics, where he'd scrape Reddit for specific things. And then he would take the information and render it in the, you know, he would say something , Please create an artifact of actually we can say, please create a mermaid diagram of all of the new features of Dia. Right. And so you can actually go out, find external information. And this will actually just render this in here. And Mermaid is a very cool, , little coding language that renders this code in a really cool way. You're going to see it in a second. It's very cool. And it makes information more visual, which I love. I'm very visual. And, of course, this is, , the wackest diagram ever. That's, , horizontal. but by the way if you copy this and you go to a tool if you go to if you ever use mermaid you can go to mermaid.live is a much better renderer this code right here is rendering to this this is still going to be pretty horizontal but it makes it easier to see it, in my opinion. And you can edit things directly. But it just made a really horizontal diagram, which makes it really hard to read because it included everything. But you can see here that... How do I get rid of this thing? But it's DFS browser. You can see that it's a personalization engine. Et cetera, et cetera. So that's just one little side thing. But what I want to get to, what I really want to focus on is the idea of having little workflows that you can run they're little AI employees. So if we go, let me go back to this. So let me go to glyph.app. This is a tool that I just found randomly that I think is the easiest workflow builder out of all of them. And you don't need external API keys. I actually couldn't believe that because I've been hearing about this tool and I thought it was just kind of some comfy UI builder. It's not. So here, let me show you. So what I created the other day was this. So there's this workflow, right? And these are really easy to make. You can edit. So you have an input image. And here, let me go this. I'm just going to, there's Greg. So now we can drag Greg. into there, right? And we can just run this glyph. And so it's going to go through this workflow, right? And there's a step in here called fix ratio. I didn't create that because glyphs are default public. You can just constantly remix other people's flows. And why am I showing you this? You're , all right, why is he using a different tool? Because on the... Oh, shut up. See, and you can just create these little workflows. And so you can make them, this transfers them to be vertically oriented. And yeah, and so these little workflows are called VibeCodeHack. So after you have set up the Docker integration, right? After you've sent up the Docker integration for Glyph, then in Claude, what we can do is let's just go ahead and open up a new chat and be , what glyph workflows have I created that I can use? And this uses the MCP and it sees all of your glyphs, all of the glyphs that I created. That one was called Vibe Code Hat for my company. There's another one called You'd Get YouTube Thumbnails. And so here are so we have this thumbnail ideator real photo realistic. And so I'm making a video on using Docker for MCP. Please use this to make a thumbnail. And then you can include, , it empowers the Claude agent for better agent. So it's 10 times smarter. Right? We can add some, , buzzwords in there. And so we can just run this. And let me see if this works. okay so it's running that same glyph so right now it's doing the equivalent everything that we could do in here where we go because we would have to click here we have to say your glyphs we'd have to find thumbnail ideator and we can do that i still do that all the time but it's very nice to be able to just use them in the chat interface and you can tell it to use if you have four different workflows you could say run all four of them with this one prompt and it will just run them And so what it's doing, this is a longer workflow where it takes your idea. And by the way, you could say search the Internet, come up with a good prompt for it, and then give it to this workflow. And it will go through this long process. And this is my thumbnail ideator thing. So it basically generates five different thumbnails and puts them on a canvas with a title so I can get an idea of which one I want to do. And then maybe I'll screenshot my favorite two and send them to my thumbnail guy. And that's kind of how I come up with ideas. And it's doing this process here. And it's also doing it on quad. Any questions, Greg? It's funny because Glyph I've seen, but I always wrote it off. I don't know what it, what is about it, but I do think going through this now, I mean, this is, I don't believe that most people are actually going to go create any end workflows, make workflows, Zapier workflows. , I don't think that they should, , I think the future of all of this is you're just remixing other people's workflows. Yeah. So this to me makes a lot of sense. No, I a hundred percent agree. I'm trying, so I've been learning NAN and I've actually gotten quite good at it. But I agree with you. It actually requires some pseudo-technical knowledge that I just don't believe. So look at this. It went through this full workflow, and here we have five thumbnails that we can choose from. So yeah, that's the output of Glyph. What do you think? These are pretty good thumbnails, right, for just quick ideation thumbnails. And it also puts a title there as well. I mean, what do you mean? These are dope. , I spend a lot of time, I spend some time coming up with thumbnail ideas, and, , these are, you know, I think I'm good at it, but, , these are as good if not better. And you want to know what's funny? You want to know what's funny? Is you are part. So remember I talked about examples earlier, right? We talked about really good examples. That's my secret now. I collect examples. I want to hire someone full time and all they do is just pull. They're just finding really good examples. So part of the input of this Claude step. Right. So you just type your idea and there's I don't this. I can make a whole video on this, so I'm not going to go too deep into the details. But one of the things is that it is looking at this PDF. And so , what is this PDF? Right. It's downloading this PDF right here. and we can see what it's doing is it's looking at these thumbnails that I've saved. And since Claude, it doesn't just convert this into text. It can actually ingest a PDF, see all of them, decide which ones it wants to make and then it uses it as an example here. And so obviously we have some Callaway, Cleo Abram, I think she has thumbnails. Shout out Greg Eisenberg. And so it basically just And so yeah and so I just give it some really good examples You can make this as long as you want and you can make this as sophisticated as you want However I always recommend starting with simplicity if you're just starting out, make it very simple. Maybe only use Greg's thumbnails, and also make it use his face and just rip it. No, I'm just kidding. But, yeah, and then it goes through all of these steps, and so if you get really good at these workflow builders. Now you can start thinking of yourself as an orchestrator of an AI agent that also has access to this. Because what I'll close on is this, right? You're , okay, you're probably thinking, okay, this seems cool. You can set it up on Notion so it can read things, it can create things. You also have this workflow builder. So if you're kind of working on an idea, you can pass your ideas to this workflow builder. What you need to do, it sounds kind of annoying to have to type that in every time. You can create projects. And so I created one called VibeCode CEO, right? And what it does is you're the CEO of VibeCode. You answer questions in order to create content. It's the CEO of the content team. And so it says you have access to Notion. This is the most important tool you have access to. Use it. When asked to make content, Please comment on the actual blocks or when asked to comment on. Wait. Found a little mistake in there. And then I also have these little fun little things where if I ever put double brackets around something and I were to say resolve comments, that's just my thing where it's just going to go through the current Notion page and it's going to look for single brackets and double brackets. If it sees double brackets, I want a thumbnail. So I want it to use that thumbnail glyph, and it will paste the link into the comments. And so it'll literally just , doink, it'll paste it in there. It won't crowd the page. The AI will comment on it. And you'll even see that whatever you name your Notion integration, which I actually will show you that real quick for those of you who actually want to just practically try this, which I recommend. It's the best way to learn. If you go on Notion and just hit settings and you click on connections and you click on this develop or manage integrations, this is the key that you're going to need to plug into Docker. Oh, yeah, I set up DIA. Dang it. I did not want that to be my default browser. Right. Okay. So I have one called MCP Ange, who's my co-founder. I have one called N8N. And so you can basically just create a new integration. And maybe you want this to be your content integration. And then your associated workspace is going to be the company. But I'll show you if certain times you may want to give certain MCP integrations access to only specific files within your code base. You only want to give it the marketing stuff. And so in access, you can hit select pages, team spaces, and that's why I've only given it agent mind. There are other team spaces in there with important sensitive information that we don't want to give up. or it just wouldn't be relevant to the AI agent. It won't help it get any better. So part of your job as kind of the quarterback of the AI agent with access to tools is you need to decide what tools it has or hasn't. The more tools you give it access to without corresponding instructions, the more it's just going to get confused and it might actually make your life harder. And yeah, and so you can give access to this. And so this token right here, I would hit show and copy, but I obviously don't want you to have access to my notion. That'd be weird. You just go into Notion. You go to configuration, paste that key right there. Then every time you add a configuration, what you need to do is you need to go to clients. You need to disconnect from Claude, quit Claude. Anytime you make changes and you just basically need to restart the server so you can just restart it back up. And then any changes you made to your MCP tools will actually be updated. and yeah does that all make sense? It does, two quick thoughts one is we use Notion I've been using it for years I actually hate Notion, I find it sluggish and just yeah sluggish and slow but all this MCP stuff is making me appreciate Notion again, as long as I'm not spending time in the interface that much I don't really care, that's the first thing Yeah. No, no. Do you want to go? I guess I'll have to respond to that. First of all, I'm not a huge fan of Notion. I'm not a huge fan of note taking apps where you have a lot of creative freedom because anytime you try and collaborate, things become unclear. where Notion, there's just too many options and bells and whistles, in my opinion. But it is by far, and I've tested all of these tools, Google Docs is kind of a nightmare to do these similar work. You have to set up all these special integrations. You need many. See here, it says you could not attach to MCP Docker. Very interesting. But Google Docs makes it impossible. But Notion, literally every single action you could take in Notion is now programmable. through this MCP. So an AI agent can just do those things directly if it has access to the Notion MCP server with all of those different tools. You have to enable all of them, but you can't. every single thing you could do, it can do in Notion. So yeah, you now have this little AI agent that can do it. And if you set very specific Claude project rules, or you can actually put the rules directly in Notion. So you can just say, read the rules in Notion, then do your thing. So you just type into the system prompt in Claude projects to always follow the instructions on X page. So it'll look at that first and then it will follow those instructions. Everything will stay organized. And you're right. You basically never need to touch it. You just kind of write whatever you want in Claude, do research in Claude, and everything gets organized perfectly into your Notion, which is pretty cool. The second point I was going to make is I think everyone should play with this, set this up, do it yourself. Stop listening to us. go and get your hands dirty. At the same time, I think it's mind-boggling how janky this experience still is today. with the Docker and , oh, you know, it gets disconnected. Oh, quit the app and then reopen it. It's bonkers. It's really bad. And I think most of the leverage, most of the leverage from these tools comes from doing things when they're janky and bad, understanding that it's not going to be janky and bad, right? I was interested in AI coding, or now it's called vibe coding, when it was really bad because I knew it would get really good. It got really good. And you can, , grow with the progress of technology. If you can't see the potential of this technology, of, , making your normal chat interface have access to tools, , that is a failure of your own imagination. At least that's my opinion. Because it is inherently useful to ground it in context that can search the web better. It can scrape the Internet. It can look through your notion. It can do all these things. Is this process janky? Yes. But will it be solved by the end of the year? I think for sure. I think Claude might build it in directly into their platform. They should. Anthropic, I know you're watching. Plug it into the platform. It would be great. And make it easier. Make it as easy as possible on people to add these tools. and if Claude were to do this first, they could take a lot of the market share from the prosumer crowd. I truly believe that. It's that important. We can end the pod here. Thanks for being so generous with your time. Riley, I know by the time this is out, Vibe Code App will be live. Can you give them a quick one-liner on it? We're building the cursor on your phone that builds mobile apps. So you open a mobile app, you type your idea, it builds a mobile app, and it's awesome. I've been working on it 10 hours a day to 12 hours a day for three and a half months straight. We're building a team in San Francisco. It's going to be awesome. Check it out if you want. Yeah, we're doing a launch video. It should go out tomorrow if all goes well. We filmed it yesterday, so it's a very tight time loop. But, yeah, thanks for having me on. I mean, Riley, not to make you blush, but I have a lot of respect for Riley and how simple he's able to explain things and how generous he is with all he's doing and all the content he's putting out there. So I highly recommend you follow him. I'll include social links where you can go ahead and do that. And hope to see you soon, Riley. Appreciate it. Thanks, Greg.