Building your own Dashboard A to Z (no prior experience needed)

Grab the dashboard I built in this video, ready to hand to your AI: https://go.redwaterrev.com/yt4 I take a pretend landscaping company from messy spreadsheets to its own custom dashboard, using Claude. This is part 4 of the series for small business owners. First I connect the tools: Google Drive, Calendar, Stripe in test mode, Apify and Vercel. Then I give Claude two jobs at the same time: clean up a messy customer list, and sort a messy payments sheet into categories a CPA can use. When it isn't sure about something, it asks me. Then the build. I tell Claude what I want with a voice transcription tool, answer its questions, and let it work. About 45 minutes later there's a dashboard with four tabs: customers, books, government bids and a weekly intel brief, plus a read-only login for the CPA. One round of feedback fixes what I didn't like. Along the way: why to start with the work that makes you sigh, what an API token is, front end vs back end in plain English, my five-step build process, and what context and compacting mean. 0:00 Intro 0:43 What we're building today 1:59 Start with the work that makes you sigh 2:45 Connect Google Drive, Calendar and Stripe 3:32 The messy spreadsheets 4:05 Stripe in test mode 4:38 Have Claude clean up the customer list 6:02 Have Claude sort the books 7:19 Answering Claude's questions 9:57 Why I run several chats at once 10:48 Front end vs back end, in plain English 12:34 Sign up for Vercel and Apify 14:03 What an API token is 15:13 Connect Apify and Vercel to Claude 16:05 Plan the dashboard: 4 features 17:36 My 5-step build process 18:49 The build prompt 22:03 Answering Claude's questions about the build 22:57 What Claude does while it builds 23:45 45 minutes later: the finished dashboard 25:11 The books tab 25:49 The bids tab 26:35 The intel brief 27:07 Giving Claude feedback with a screenshot 29:55 Round two: testing the fixes 33:04 Context and compacting, explained 34:03 The fixes work 35:27 Get the dashboard About this series: AI for Local Business Owners is a free, plain-English series for local business owners who want to use AI without the hype. I'm Nick Rougeau. My brother Jack and I run Redwater Revenue in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where we build AI systems for local businesses. Our website: https://go.redwaterrev.com/yt4 Connect with me on LinkedIn:   / nicholas-rougeau