3. Client Marketplaces
Note: The video covers material not in the guide below — please watch in full.
Action Step
Complete this before moving on.
Using the Coactive story as your model, write up your own short "standing up a client marketplace" checklist — the obstacles you'd anticipate and how you'd handle each: getting their GitHub/IT team to create a private repo, the Claude GitHub app install, enabling them on what a marketplace even is, recording a Loom to walk an admin through adding it at the org level, requesting a client Claude account for QA, and a Google Drive folder to collect their existing skills. Keep it tight — this becomes your playbook the first time a client asks.
Training Guide
This is a quick walkthrough of the Coactive customer marketplace we've been working in. It matters because standing one up for a real client surfaced a number of issues — and doing this for clients is going to become more and more common, so you want to be aware of them before you hit them.
The first hurdle showed up before we even had a repo.
Getting the Repo Created
To create the marketplace, Coactive had to contact their engineering team that oversees GitHub. Their head of IT had to reach out to their head of engineering, and that took a while.
There's also an enablement gap. When they created it, they didn't really understand what a marketplace is — it was treated like "cool, LeanScale needs a repo, make them a random one." So part of the job is educating the client on the concept itself, not just collecting a link.
Then there was a security requirement that's worth knowing even if it's changing.
The Claude GitHub App
A couple of weeks ago, adding a marketplace required the Claude app to be installed into the GitHub repo. As of recently I haven't seen that requirement show up — they may have moved away from it — but you should still recognize it.
Every GitHub organization has GitHub Apps, and there's a Claude GitHub app among them. When we created the Coactive marketplace, they did need the Claude app installed in their organization, and they didn't have it. That was a small security item their engineering team had to go back and forth on. Once it was sorted, we had proper admin access to the repo and I could pull it down through the normal GitHub Desktop process shown in the earlier training.
Access to the repo was only half the problem.
Adding It at the Org Level — Without Admin Access
Coactive didn't give us admin access to their Claude instance — I asked, and they said they didn't want to. So I recorded a Loom walking their admin through it: go to organization settings → plugins → add plugins → sync from GitHub → add the marketplace → make it available to install for everybody.
But that raised a QA question. Sure, I could add the marketplace under my own personal account and sync it — that works all day long. But that tells me nothing about what the experience looks like for the sales reps and GTM leaders inside Coactive's org. The real test is as close to reality as you can get: does it show up under their organization, set up the way their admin set it up?
Since I'm in the LeanScale org, not theirs, we had to request a Coactive Claude account. Two reasons: marketplace verification (arguably optional if the admin didn't mess it up), and — the firmer one — verifying the Salesforce MCP connector showed up properly on their end (that gets its own course). Requesting a client Claude account, ideally an admin one, is going to be a more and more common occurrence.
With access and QA sorted, the actual project could begin.
Collecting Existing Skills
Before building, we created a Google Drive folder in the Coactive shared drive and asked them to drop in any skills they were already using across the org.
Because we have Google Drive sync, I downloaded the whole folder and started rebuilding — figuring out how to consolidate everything into sales, RevOps, marketing, and leadership plugins. That consolidation is what kicked off the real project: building the plugins and pushing them into the marketplace (more on that in the plugins course).
Wrap-Up
Standing up a client marketplace is as much about people and access as it is about code: their GitHub team, the Claude app, enabling them on the concept, a Loom for the org-level add, a client Claude account for honest QA, and a Drive folder to gather what they already have. There'll be plenty more learnings as we do this for more customers — and as Anthropic keeps changing the settings — and we'll update the academy as the playbook grows.
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