Make The Numbers Move

The best content most small businesses own is sitting in a spreadsheet nobody opens.

Average response time. Jobs finished this month. Five star reviews since Labor Day. The before and after on a kitchen that used to look like a crime scene. That stuff sells. A prospect will scroll past your tenth "we care about quality" post without blinking, but "we answered 212 calls last month and the average wait was 41 seconds" makes them stop.

Nobody posts it because turning a number into a video used to take a designer, an editor and a week of back and forth, and nobody's spending that on a Tuesday post.

That changed on October 8. Anthropic launched Claude Dashboards and Claude Motion in beta. Dashboards builds live charts from your connected data. Motion turns a chart or an update into a short animated clip you can export as an MP4. Pair those with two newer tools most people haven't heard of yet, and you've got a weekly video habit that takes about 45 minutes and no timeline editor.

This is how I'd set it up.

Read the plan limits before you get excited, because they matter here.

Claude Dashboards is in beta on Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise, per Anthropic's help article. You ask a question in a chat (or pick Output, then Dashboards), and Claude writes the SQL behind each chart. Click any number and you see the query that produced it. Each chart shows when its data last refreshed. Data comes from warehouses like BigQuery, Snowflake and Redshift, or from apps you've already connected to Claude, like Salesforce. The help article doesn't mention uploaded spreadsheets as a source, so don't assume your CSV works there.

Claude Motion is the more fun of the two, and it's Team and Enterprise only for now. Team has it on by default. On Enterprise, an owner has to switch it on under Organization settings, then Artifacts. You describe the animation, attach your data or images, and Claude writes code that animates text, charts, shapes and images. You can edit by chat ("change the Q3 number to 18%") or in the built in editor, then export to MP4.

Three limits worth knowing:

Also, both are betas, so expect things to move around. Get the weekly habit going and don't lean too hard on any one button.

Before you open anything, decide what you'll show. My test for a number is two questions. Would a customer care? And does it change week to week, so you've got something new to say?

Take a four truck HVAC shop. Here's what I'd track:

Where the numbers come from matters. If your calls, bookings and reviews already run through Go High Level, most of this is sitting in your reporting. If it's scattered, a basic Make.com scenario can drop each closed job and each new review into one Google Sheet every night. One sheet, one tab, one row per event. Nothing fancy, and it'll still be running in six months.

One hard rule. Only real numbers. If the week was slow, post a different number or skip it. If a customer catches one padded number, they'll stop believing the rest.

If your data lives somewhere Claude can reach, build the dashboard once and reuse it every week. Open a chat, choose Output, then Dashboards, and paste this:

Don't skip the flag line. It's your circuit breaker. If a bad import doubles your job count, you want to catch it in the dashboard, not in the comments of a Reel.

Then click a few numbers and read the queries. You don't need to know SQL. Ask Claude "explain this query like I'm the owner, not the analyst" and check that it's counting what you think it's counting.

No warehouse and no connected app? Totally normal for a small shop. Export the sheet as a CSV, drop it into a regular Claude chat and ask for the same five charts as a file you can download. You lose the live refresh, so you'll redo it each week, but the prompt above still works with one change: replace the first line with "Using the attached CSV."

Here's where Motion actually pays off. Pick the one number from this week's dashboard with the best story. Just the one.

In a chat, type a request for an animation (or open the Artifacts tab and choose a Motion template), attach the dashboard screenshot or the CSV, and use this:

Anthropic's own tip is to tell it who's watching, where it plays and roughly how long it runs, and the prompt does all three. I put the "change the number next week" line in because every Motion animation is code. Next Monday you open the same artifact and say "change 41 seconds to 38 seconds and update the trend line with the attached CSV." Thirty seconds of work instead of a new build.

Before you post, check two things. The help article doesn't list aspect ratios or resolution, so play the exported MP4 on your phone and make sure nothing important gets cropped by the Reels interface. And since there's no audio, add a trending track inside Instagram or TikTok, or through Buffer (more on that below).

On Pro and not Team? You still get Dashboards, just not Motion. Your fallback is step four below, or the quick and dirty version: screen record yourself clicking through the dashboard while you say the number out loud. A rough video of the owner saying a real number does fine.

Numbers show you're good. But plenty of people don't call because they don't know what happens next, and a process video fixes that. The single most useful one most businesses never make is "here's how booking with us works."

That's where ngram comes in. Its 2.0 release landed on Product Hunt in early October. You upload a document, a deck or a screen recording, and it builds a narrated explainer. It cleans up the recording by cutting dead air, zooming in on the important parts of the screen, highlighting buttons and smoothing the cursor. It adds captions, and you can add an AI presenter if you want a face on screen. You edit by chatting with it instead of dragging clips around a timeline.

Here's the 15 minute version:

On pricing, check the ngram pricing page before you commit. As listed, the free plan gives a one time grant of credits good for about 60 seconds of premium AI video, Basic is $29 a month with 720p export, and Premium is $59 a month with 1080p plus one brand kit, one custom voice and one custom avatar. Credits get used per second of generated footage, so regenerating ten times costs ten times.

My advice: use the free credits to make the booking video once. If it's good, it'll run for a year. You might never need the paid plan.

Spira launched its Maxima video model on October 5 and took #1 of the day and #1 of the week on Product Hunt. You give it a plain text script and it returns a finished social video with a presenter, B roll, captions and music. You can upload product shots and recordings for it to build around, and it can schedule posts to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, X and LinkedIn from a shared calendar.

That makes it the Pro user's answer to Motion, and a good way to get two or three extra posts out of the same number.

Write the script from your dashboard in Claude first. Spira will make a slick video out of a lazy script without complaining, so the script is on you.

Paste the best one into Spira, upload two real job photos, and generate.

A few cautions. Creator is $15 a month for 1,200 credits and Growth is $59, per a third party breakdown of Spira's plans, and video eats credits fast, so test before you commit. Spira labels every post as AI generated, which I'd want anyway. And if you use its clone feature built from a photo and a voice sample, only clone yourself, and only with your own voice. Not your office manager, not your best tech, unless they've said yes in writing.

Now you've got a Motion clip, a booking explainer and a Spira video or two. Don't post them by hand across five apps.

Load them into Buffer. Two recent updates make this smoother. Since October 7, scheduled Instagram posts can carry the stuff you used to finish inside the app, like music, which fixes Motion's silent clips. And since September 28, a single post can hold images and video together, so your before and after photos can ride along with the clip.

Then give the number a second life in your customer email. If you send a newsletter on Beehiiv, add a standing section called "Number of the week." One number, one sentence of context, the clip embedded or linked. Customers who'd never follow you on TikTok will read it, and it costs you nothing because the work's already done.

Here's the rhythm. Same time every week, ideally before the phones get busy.

You only make the booking explainer once. Make it in week one, then reshare it once a month.

It's beta software. Dashboards and Motion launched October 8. Expect bugs and moving buttons.

Motion is locked to Team and Enterprise. Pro and Max users get Dashboards but not the animation, at least for now.

The tool numbers are vendor claims. Ngram's credit math and Spira's "one pass" promise come from their own pages and launch posts. Test on your own content before you pay.

Privacy still applies. Motion artifacts aren't covered under a business associate agreement, according to reviewers who dug into the limits, so keep patient data, customer names and addresses out of anything you animate. Aggregate numbers only.

Bad data travels fast. If your sheet counts a rescheduled job twice, you'll broadcast the error in high definition. That flag line in the dashboard prompt isn't optional.

Pick your five numbers and write them on a sticky note. If you can't name five, start with three.

Get those numbers into one place, whether that's a connected app, a warehouse, or one Google Sheet fed by Make.

Build the dashboard with the prompt above and click through at least three queries.

Record your booking flow on your phone and turn it into a 60 second explainer with ngram's free credits.

Block 45 minutes every Monday morning on your calendar and call it "Numbers."

Jordan

The AI Newsroom | Practical AI for people with a business to run.