Build Sprint · No. 02 · Season One
This is recap No. 02 of Build Sprint, an eighteen-Thursday live-build series at Granite City Coworking. Each week we ship a working thing you can take home. The prep page is for the forty-eight hours before; this is what remains after.
What we built
Thursday we did not install another social dashboard. We connected Claude to the accounts you already have, through a layer that actually holds the tokens, and we ran the only two loops a social practice is made of: putting things out, and bringing things back.
Zernio is that layer. It holds Instagram, LinkedIn, X, TikTok, YouTube, and the rest. Claude never touches a platform directly; it asks Zernio to. You authorize each account once, on a normal login screen. After that, a conversation is the whole social presence: draft per platform, validate against the real limits, drop the week into a queue — then sweep comments and mentions into one inbox, draft replies in your voice, and hold the send until you say yes.
You can rebuild this. The two flows below are the rebuild. Connect Zernio, add the MCP connector in Claude, and paste the prompts. Nothing publishes without your yes. Zernio MCP setup
Why it's built this way
The dashboard was never the problem. You already have six of them. The problem is the distance between having a thought and having it published, and the second distance between a comment landing and you seeing it. Both distances are made of logins. The design decision of the session is that Claude should talk to one connector, and that connector should talk to the platforms — not that you should learn a seventh dashboard.
That is what an MCP connection actually is, stripped of the acronym: a signed-in pipe. In Claude you add https://mcp.zernio.com/mcp as a custom connector and sign in with Zernio. In Claude Code it's one command. Either path gets you to the same place. The test is one sentence: list my connected social accounts. If it comes back with your handles, Thursday is easy. If it doesn't, the connector is theater and you will spend the hour in Settings.
The other half of the decision is the hold. Every draft stays a draft. Every reply is batched for you to skim. The pill on the board was "Nothing publishes without your yes," because the failure mode of this category is an agent that is helpful and also slightly wrong, at 9:01 AM, with your name on it.
The setup is the easy half. What separates a good Thursday from a mediocre one is whether you arrive with raw material: three or four of your own posts that sounded like you, a rough sense of who you're talking to, and one thing you actually want to say this month. A page of notes is plenty. That becomes the voice brief, and everything Claude drafts after that reads off it instead of inventing a personality. Without it you get a competent intern. With it you get a week that sounds like you.
Where it broke
No recording or transcript of this session was captured. The section below is reconstructed from the prep page and the designed failure modes we built around — not live notes from the room.
The prep page already named the bite: Instagram and Facebook take the longest. Meta asks you to pick a Page and grant a long list of permissions in one flow. If you manage Pages through a Business Manager, doing this on a phone in a coworking wifi is how the first fifteen minutes disappear. The reconstruction of the room is that step — not the drafting.
The second failure is a connector that looks connected and isn't. You added the server URL, Claude showed a green dot, and list my connected social accounts came back empty because the Zernio OAuth never finished, or finished against a different workspace than the one holding the accounts. The test sentence is the whole diagnostic. Skip it and you will debug prompts for twenty minutes that were never the problem.
The third is the hold, misread. People type the content-run prompt, watch Claude draft five posts, and think it's broken when nothing is live. It isn't broken. It is waiting. That is the product. The session only works if the room believes that waiting is the feature.
Two accounts minimum is enough to make the hour interesting. Cross-posting only gets fun once there is somewhere to cross-post to. Zernio can hold Instagram, TikTok, X, LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, YouTube, Bluesky, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, Telegram, Google Business Profile. You do not need all of them. You need the two you actually post on, connected, and a connector that answers with those handles.
The content run is thirty minutes on a Monday, and the week is posted. Find the angle from what's actually moving and from your own last month's engagement before writing anything new. Draft per platform, not once — a LinkedIn open, a shorter X cut, a caption with the hook in the first line. Validate character limits and media dimensions up front so nothing fails at 9:01 with you asleep. Queue into slots your data already favors. The engagement sweep is the other half: pull, sort, draft, hold, hide the bait, close the loop. Run both and you have a practice.
The prompts
Everything we build is one of these two loops. One puts things out. One brings things back. Run both every week and you have a social practice; run neither and you have an account.
Thirty minutes on a Monday, and the week is posted. Paste this after the MCP connector answers with your handles.
Read my voice brief. Draft five posts about the pricing thing I've been chewing on — LinkedIn and X variants each, validate them, then queue them into next week's slots and show me the calendar before anything goes out.
The half nobody automates, and the half that actually compounds. Comments and mentions across every connected account, handled in one pass.
Sweep the inbox for the last 48 hours across all my accounts. Group it by what people actually want, draft replies in my voice, flag anything that looks like a lead, and show me the whole batch before you send a single one.
Take it home
There is no zip file for this one. The take-home is the connection, the two prompts, and a voice brief you actually wrote.
- Zernio MCP setup — Add https://mcp.zernio.com/mcp as a custom connector, then sign in.
- Claude Code one-liner —
claude mcp add --transport http zernio https://mcp.zernio.com/mcpthen/mcpto sign in.
Next Thursday: A website you run by talking to it
Session 03: a live site at a real address, and an agent that edits the repo so keeping it current survives the week after the workshop. Save a seat on the season calendar.