Everyone says connector. Nobody says what connects.
I nodded along to that word for most of a year. “Just add a connector.” Sure. Connect what to what? And who sets it up?
So here’s the plainest version I’ve got.
A room with no windows
Claude on its own is a very good writer locked in a room with no windows. It knows language, but it doesn’t know your files or your brand, and it has no idea what you did last Tuesday.
An MCP is a window.
You open one to Google Drive and it can read your last deck. One to Figma and it can read your actual type styles. One to Gmail and it can see how you wrote to that vendor in March.
Nothing else changes. Same Claude. It just stopped guessing.
The letters stand for Model Context Protocol, which is the last time I’ll say that. In your Claude settings it’s called a connector, and that word is doing a lot of hiding. “Connector” sounds like plumbing. It’s closer to permission. You’re letting the tool look at one specific place you already keep things.
If someone asks you what an MCP is, say “a window” and move on.
What is an MCP, actually
Three things worth knowing, and then you know enough.
It reads. The main job is looking at what’s already there. Your deck. Your brand PDF. The email thread with the printer. You point it at a place and it can open what’s in it.
It asks. Before it changes anything, it checks with you. I’ve watched it ask permission to do things I’d already told it to do, which is mildly annoying and exactly right.
It forgets. Close the chat and the window closes with it. Next time, it opens the files again. Nothing gets copied into a second library you now have to maintain. (If you’re the careful type, this is the one that matters. The answer is a little boring.)
That’s the whole thing. Reads. Asks. Forgets.
Why this matters for you specifically
You’re probably not short of AI. You’ve got Claude, or something like it, open in a tab all day.
What it can’t see is the thing you actually need it to see. The deck from March. The boilerplate paragraph legal finally approved. The way you phrased the last note to the agency, which worked, and which you now can’t find.
So you paste. You describe. You retype the brand rules for the ninth time and get back something that sounds like a robot who read your website.
Most brand management is remembering where things are and making the new thing match the old thing. A tool that can open the old thing is doing half your job before you’ve typed anything.
The four windows worth opening first
Practical mode. About ten minutes each, no developer, and you can do the first one on your phone.
1. Google Drive
TStart here. It’s free and almost everyone already has it. No seat to buy. Your last deck and your brand PDF probably already live in it.
Read access is enough for “this is my brand, this is my last deck, match it.”
2. Gmail
The sleeper. If most of your brand work is writing, a tool that can see how you wrote to that vendor in March is already doing the core job.
Ask for the next note in the same voice as the last one, and it can actually read the last one.
3. Slack
Where “can you send me the logo” actually gets asked.
Open a window here and the answer to “what did we decide about the tagline” is in a thread it can find, instead of in your memory.
4. Wherever your brand assets live
Canva or Figma. Connect the one you have.
I connected Figma, because that’s where my brand lives and I’m a designer. If yours lives in Canva, open that window. One honest thing to know: a Canva design reads to a machine more like a picture than a file, so it will get less out of it than it gets out of Figma. That’s a later post. For now, the point is that it can see your assets at all.
The part I’m not going to pretend about
The first time you do this, it’s a little anticlimactic. You open a window, ask for something, it works, and you wonder what you were worried about.
Then it opens the wrong deck. It will find the 2024 version because that’s the one with “FINAL” in the name. That’s a folder problem wearing a technology costume, and the window is what showed it to you.
And it’s only as good as what’s in the folder. If your brand exists as a PDF that says “our blue is a confident blue,” the window opens onto a wall.
What’s next
Next up, connecting your first one properly, start to finish. It’ll be Google Drive, and I’ll show every screen.
If you missed the first post, it’s here: https://wizardly.co/teach-claude-your-brand/
Meg
