I Spent $31,141 And 1,000 Hrs On Claude Code To Learn This

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➡️ If this is your first video: I'm Nick Saraev. I run LeftClick, an AI growth agency. We've done work for large brands you're likely familiar with, like Mr. Beast, Anthropic, OpenAI, and a few others.

In plain English: I help people build systems that generate leads, close deals, and scale businesses, mostly using new AI models like Claude. I also make videos about how to do all of that here on YouTube.

It hasn't always been this way. My family immigrated from a Soviet bloc country (People's Republic of Bulgaria) in the 90s. They worked extremely hard, and we were broke for a very long time. I grew up wishing for more security, stability, and freedom over my own life.

I don't have a programming degree, and never took formal education for IT or workflows. I learned it all myself from YouTube videos like you're watching now.

As for my path: I started my first business at 19 in college. We threw events (mostly parties) at campus bars, and charged people for entry.

That failed to provide me enough money to pay my bills, so at 21, I started another business, a door-to-door marketing agency.

From there, every year, I would start several companies, over 10 in total. I did this in a variety of industries, like e-commerce, photography, videography, SaaS, credit repair, etc. Each grew slightly more profitable, until, at 25, I would start 1SecondCopy, a content writing company. A friend and I eventually scaled that to over $90,000/m. It was my first taste of financial independence, and the reason I'm here today.

Since starting my journey, I've grown a fair bit of capital. To diversify my income, at 30, I began investing in other businesses and advising companies on how to grow in the AI era. These include SaaS businesses, like Clairvo, agencies like Dental Connect, and more.

Collectively, the businesses that I own outright or are a part of generate over $10 million per year. This returns far more than the 5-10% you would get in the stock market, but also requires a lot of my active time. There's a tradeoff there, but I greatly prefer active investing, where I have control over the entities I'm a part of.

It wasn't easy to get here. But I did in the end! For anyone on their own entrepreneurial journey: I wish you luck, happiness, and perseverance. You can make it!

Summary ⤵️
Here are some practical tips on Claude Code that I've learned after spending $31,141 and over 1,000 hours working with AI models. You'll learn how to make your outputs more reliable through evals and self-checks, minimize wasted context, run parallel work in defined scopes, and more.

Chapters:
0:00 I've spent over $30,000 on Claude Code
0:29 You can't trust the first output
3:19 A way to check their own work
4:38 Let the code be the context
6:38 Letting Claude write your prompt
8:11 Watch what is eating your context window
10:11 Loosening the leash
11:54 Diagnosing before you start a fix
13:01 MCP servers
14:56 Run scoped tasks in parallel
16:50 Always start fresh with a handoff note
17:52 Ask side questions with /btw
19:01 Fan out and fan in
20:53 Set up your CLAUDE.md
22:17 Keep a backup tool ready
23:52 Have Claude learn from its mistakes
25:21 Maker School