Make Claude watch your niche and build a live outlier leaderboard
Hey, it's Cindy 🌱 Claude watches the competitors in your niche, and the moment one of their videos starts breaking out, it deep-analyses it and drops it into a live leaderboard in Notion, ranked.
btw the waitlist for AI System Club is now open! If you're keen on using AI to automate your content, video editing, job search, business or build AI agents, feel free to sign up (only if you want to hehe). Ps. the waitlist gets first dibs:)
what you're building
A morning board of breakout ideas, ranked for you
An "outlier" is a video that's massively out-performing an account's normal numbers, the clearest signal that an idea is hitting. Instead of hunting for those by scrolling, you build a system that surfaces them to you:
👀 Claude watches your niche It keeps an eye on the competitors you choose and detects when one of their videos starts breaking out of its usual range.
🔬 It analyses the breakout The moment a video pops, Claude deep-analyses why (the hook, the format, the angle) so you get the idea and the mechanics, not just a link.
🏆 It ranks them in Notion Every breakout lands in a live leaderboard in Notion, ranked, so your best ideas are sorted for you in one place.
🔔 It pings you in Slack When a video is big enough to crack the top of the board, Claude sends you a Slack ping so you catch the wave early.
the honest bit first
What it runs on and what it costs
The engine underneath is a plugin called Sandcastles (sandcastles.ai), which connects Claude to live Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts data. You run a leaderboard skill on top of it. I'll be straight with you about what you need:
💳 Sandcastles (paid) Roughly $39/month on Pro billed annually (about $49 month-to-month), higher tiers above. It's credit-based. Check sandcastles.ai for current plans.
🗂 Notion (free tier works) Where the leaderboard lives. A free Notion account is enough to start.
💬 Slack (free tier works, optional) For the breakout pings. Optional, you can run the leaderboard without it and just check Notion.
🤖 Claude The brain that ties it together and does the analysis. You'll want a paid Claude plan for the heavier automated runs.
💳 This is a real stack, not a free hack. The value is time: if you're a serious creator scrolling for ideas hours a week, automating that is worth it. If you post occasionally, start with the free manual version at the bottom of this guide instead.
the setup
Wire it together
Connect Sandcastles to Claude. Set up the Sandcastles plugin so Claude can read live social data. This is the bridge that makes the whole thing possible.
Connect Notion and Slack to Claude. Add Notion as a connector so Claude can write to a leaderboard page, and (optionally) Slack so it can send you pings. Both connect to Claude as plugins.
Build your Notion leaderboard page. Make a simple Notion database with columns like video, creator, why it's an outlier, hook, format, and a score. This is where breakouts get ranked.
Pick the competitors to watch. List the 5 to 15 accounts in your niche you want Claude keeping an eye on. Tighter and more relevant beats a huge list.
Run the leaderboard skill. Point the Sandcastles leaderboard workflow at your watch-list. It detects outliers, analyses them, writes them into your Notion board, and (if you set it up) pings Slack when one cracks the top.
💡 Set it to run on a schedule. Once it works when you run it by hand, have it run every morning so the board is fresh before you sit down. In Claude you can set a scheduled task to trigger the workflow, so the leaderboard is waiting for you with coffee.
make it pay off
Turn the board into posts
Open the board first thing. Instead of opening Instagram to "get inspired," open your leaderboard. The best ideas are already ranked, no scroll required.
Pick one, understand why it worked. Read Claude's breakdown of the top item: the hook shape, the format, the angle. You're borrowing the mechanics.
Rebuild it in your voice. Take that structure and make it about your topic, your example, your take. Same skeleton, completely your content.
Ship it while it's hot. Outliers are a timing signal. The faster you put your version out while the wave is rising, the more you catch.
🚫 Remix the structure, never the script. The leaderboard shows you what's working so you can learn from it, not copy it. Rebuild the idea around your own angle and voice. A line-for-line clone reads as a knock-off and rarely performs like the original.
the honest bit
Start free if you're not ready to pay
💡 The manual version costs nothing. Pick 8 competitors, and once a week glance at their recent posts for anything doing far better than their norm. Drop those into a simple Notion table with a note on the hook and format. It's slower and it's on you to remember, but it builds the exact same instinct for spotting outliers, and you can automate it later once it's clearly worth it.
Want the whole system, not just the leaderboard? Inside AI System Club I teach you to build a full AI content engine end to end: watching your niche, finding ideas, writing scripts, and editing, all wired together so you can switch off the scroll and still never run out of content. Doors open soon and founding pricing dies at close. 🌱 Join the waitlist (link in my bio too) so you're first in when we open.
the waitlist is now open
AI System Club is launching soon
Build AI systems with me through recorded lessons you can follow at your own pace. Join the waitlist for first access and the founding price.
btw this list gets first dibs the moment doors open :)