Right now, to know how the business is doing you log into five different websites. Shopify for orders. Meta for ad spend. Google for search. Klaviyo for email. Triple Whale to try to tie it together. Then you copy numbers into a spreadsheet and hope the maths is right.
We are going to replace all of that with one thing you can just talk to.
You will have an app on your laptop. You type a question in normal English, like "how did last week compare to the same week last year, and where did the growth actually come from?" It goes and gets the real numbers from all five platforms itself, does the analysis, and answers you. No spreadsheet, no logging in, no copy and paste. Everything below is just the plumbing to make that possible.
Not in the cloud. Your data never sits on anyone else's server. The keys that unlock your accounts live in one protected file on your machine. That is deliberate, and it is the safest version of this.
Every key you create is locked to look, don't touch. It can read orders, ad spend and email performance. It cannot spend money, change a product, pause a campaign or send an email. We unlock things later, one at a time, once you know how it behaves.
Five jobs, about an hour in total. The first one has a waiting period at Google's end, so please start that one today even if you do nothing else. Tap any step to open it.
You get a token immediately, but it starts on "Test Account" access which does not work on real data. The approval upgrades it to Basic Access. Let Casey know the moment that email lands.
Claude Desktop. Download from claude.ai/download, install, sign in. That is all for now.
Homebrew. Open the Terminal app (Applications > Utilities, or press Cmd+Space and type "Terminal"). Three commands, in order. Wait for each to finish before pasting the next.
1. Install Homebrew. It will ask for your Mac password, which is normal.
2. Tell your Mac where Homebrew lives. Do not skip this one. The installer prints something similar at the end, and skipping it is the single most common thing that goes wrong.
3. Install node and git.
Check it worked. This should print two version numbers:
Almost always it means command 2 above was skipped, so your Mac cannot find Homebrew even though it installed fine. Run command 2, then close Terminal and open a new window (the change only applies to new windows), then try again. If it still fails, send Casey the output of ls /opt/homebrew/bin/brew.
That is the only time you need the Terminal. Everything after this happens inside the Claude app.
You are about to create five API keys. These are effectively passwords to your business data, so they need to live somewhere proper. Not in Notes, not in an email to yourself.
If your team already uses Bitwarden, Dashlane or similar, use that instead. The point is a real vault with a master password, not a file.
The API keys never go into GitHub. Only the code does. We will configure that on the call so it is impossible to do by accident.
Name each 1Password item clearly, like "Shopify API token" or "Meta system user token". If you close a tab without saving, you have to regenerate that one.
Shopify changed this in January 2026, so ignore any older guide that says to use "Develop apps" inside the admin.
Save the Client ID and Client Secret to 1Password.
Without it you only get the last 60 days of orders, which kills any year-on-year comparison. There is one more step to turn these into a working token, but it needs a command run on your machine, so we will do that together on the call.
You need to be an admin of the Hyde & Hare Business Manager for this.
Copy the token into 1Password immediately. It is shown once, and it does not expire, which is exactly why we keep it view-only.
Alongside the developer token from step 1, you need two smaller pieces:
Also note your Google Ads Customer ID, the 10-digit number at the top right of the account, formatted like 123-456-7890. A third piece (a refresh token) gets generated on the call.
If you cannot find that menu it may depend on your plan tier. Flag it and we will sort it on the call.
So you know exactly what is left. Budget about 90 minutes.
Short list. These are the ones that actually matter.
You are not one typo away from spending money or deleting a product. If a key can only read, the worst case of a mistake is a wrong number on a screen.
1Password, and one protected file on your laptop. We will set that file so only your user account can open it. Nowhere else. Not in an email, not in Slack, not in a document.
Including into Claude itself. It does not need you to, it reads them from the file automatically. If you find yourself about to paste something starting with shpat_, sk_ or EAA, stop.
We configure this on the call so it is blocked by the tooling rather than by you remembering.
Every key here can be deleted and regenerated in about two minutes from the platform that issued it. Deleting instantly kills access. Worth knowing the emergency button exists and is easy to press.
Delete anything you are not using. Ten minutes, and it is the highest-value security habit there is.
Tick these off as you go. Your progress saves automatically in this browser.
Do not fight it. Screenshot the error and send it over, and we will do that one together. Getting four of the five done is a completely fine outcome for tomorrow.
If you only have half an hour, do this instead. It gets you a working assistant today, and the rest of the guide becomes follow-on work.
Triple Whale is already doing the hard part. It blends Shopify, Meta, Google and Klaviyo behind a single API, so connecting just Triple Whale gets you revenue, orders, AOV, blended ROAS, new-customer cost per acquisition and your Meta versus Google spend split. The other four connections add depth later. This one gets you answers now.
It is also the only connection with nothing standing in the way. Google Ads has an approval queue. Shopify and Google both need a sign-in round trip. Meta needs Business Manager admin. Triple Whale is: open settings, create a key, paste it in.
Summary Page: Read scope or the calls will be refused. Save it to 1Password.starter-server. Put it somewhere sensible, open Terminal in it, and run npm install..env.example to .env and paste your key in next to TRIPLEWHALE_API_KEY=.Then ask it "check the connection". If it comes back OK, you are done. Asking for last week's performance returns something like this:
Real figures, not zeros. The shape above is just to show you which fields come back.
Things worth asking once it is live:
You need to be able to create API keys inside your own Triple Whale account. If the API Keys menu is missing, that is a permissions or plan-tier issue. Flag it to Casey and we will start with Shopify instead, which gets to the same place with one extra step.