1. Claude Marketplace Fundamentals
Note: The video covers material not in the guide below — please watch in full.
Action Step
Complete this before moving on.
Make your own marketplace from scratch. Create a new private GitHub repo (call it something like "Marketplace Academy Test"), clone it down, then ask Claude to create a marketplace.json in that folder and register a demo plugin — it doesn't matter what it is. Commit and push it up to GitHub. Then in Claude, go to Customize → add a marketplace, find your repo (by URL or search), and hit sync. If you get "failed to add marketplace," that's because the marketplace.json isn't in the repo yet. One gotcha to remember: plugins are cached copies, so if an update doesn't show up, close and reopen the app.
Training Guide
A marketplace is a Claude- and Anthropic-specific concept — not something you'll hear from Gemini, OpenAI, or Microsoft. The problem it solves: how do you share skills across your team, consolidate them in one place, auto-update them across the whole org when you change one at the top, and even make certain ones required for certain people?
Despite the name, it's simpler than it sounds.
A Marketplace Is a Repo With a Manifest
I'm not the biggest fan of the word "marketplace" — it sounds like a place you go to buy something. Right now it's really just a folder the organization controls at the org level so it can disseminate everything to everyone else.
In one sentence: a marketplace is a GitHub repo that's basically a local folder with a marketplace.json at its root. On LeanScale's marketplace, that file lives under the .claude-plugin folder. When you load the repo into Claude, that marketplace.json is the key that tells Claude this entire folder is a marketplace. It holds all the marketplace info plus each plugin with its description — that's what makes the whole repo a marketplace.
If this pattern feels familiar, it should: a folder with a manifest, the same way a plugin is a folder with a plugin.json.
And what goes inside a marketplace matters.
Marketplaces Are Made of Plugins
The big relationship to understand: marketplaces are made up of plugins. As of right now there's no way to put only skills into a marketplace — you register plugins, and a plugin can contain commands, hooks, sub-agents, connectors, and skills. (All of that gets its own treatment in the plugins course.)
One important safety note: plugins can run real code on your machine. Inside a skill, scripts don't automatically run when you download it. Inside a plugin, they can. So be a little more careful when you're working with plugins.
Where a marketplace lives changes who controls it.
Two Levels: Personal and Organization
There are two places marketplaces live: the personal level and the organization level.
On the personal level, you can add any marketplace to your own Claude account — even one that isn't an official org marketplace. You can find marketplaces all over the internet and pull them in. Do we recommend that? Absolutely not — be security-minded first.
On the organization level (admin only), you manage marketplaces and plugins for everyone. The key difference is default access: per marketplace and per plugin, you choose not available, installed by default, available to install, or required. That's where governance starts — you could imagine a LeanScale sales marketplace, an architects marketplace, and an engineering marketplace, each required for different teams. It's early days for those best practices, but the control is there. And because it's all GitHub, you get version control through pull requests, push, and commit.
You can reach all of this from more than one surface.
Where Marketplaces Live
Sync is how updates flow: when the GitHub repo gets a new plugin, sync brings it in across the org. Note that sync automatically is off by default — turn it on so updates show up without manual work.
You can manage marketplaces in several places: Cowork and the desktop app (the first-party citizen, and what most of these demos use), the VS Code extension (less seamless, second- or third-party), the terminal for Claude Code (first-party there), and the browser at claude.ai. The universal way to invoke anything once it's installed is the slash command — it tells you the skill's description and which plugin it belongs to.
One gotcha worth repeating: on these surfaces the plugins are cached copies, so edits don't always show up live. A marketplace push sometimes requires closing and reopening the app to refresh.
There are also official marketplaces you already have access to.
The Official Marketplaces
There's an official Anthropic marketplace synced to every Claude account — browse "Anthropic and Partners" and you'll find plugins like Knowledge Work, Life Sciences, Financial Services, and Legal. You can also find it by Googling "Claude marketplace GitHub." Getting a RevOps or GTM Ops source adopted there is part of our own demand-gen play.
And there's the official LeanScale marketplace — the place we'll distribute the skills and plugins we make as they get adoption across the org.
Why So Much Cowork?
Most of our customers are go-to-market teams living inside Cowork, so most of our R&D and use cases are about simplifying things for Cowork's UI. When Cowork ships updates, we stay on top of them so we know how to build for our clients.
One thing to keep in mind: you may not have access to the admin settings shown in the video — that requires being an admin of the LeanScale Claude instance, which you likely aren't. The same way we request admin access to a customer's Salesforce, there's a world where we request Claude access too. (A workaround for the constant logging out: use Chrome profiles.)
Wrap-Up
A marketplace is just a GitHub repo with a marketplace.json, made up of plugins, controlled at the personal or organization level, and reachable from Cowork, VS Code, the terminal, and the browser. Understanding exactly how this works — and clearing up the "marketplace sounds like a store" confusion — is what makes you valuable when you explain it to clients. Next, we'll walk through creation and the action steps to build one yourself.
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