Claude for DealersSession preparation
Competitive intelligence with Claude Code.
You will not write code. You will direct an agent that does, and you will leave with a dashboard of your own market — what the stores around you are stocking, where they undercut you, and every price they have cut — fed by a scraper that reads their websites into a database you own, every morning, on its own.
A dashboard of your own market, and the three things underneath it that keep it fed. All of them yours at the end of the session, all of them running on your own accounts rather than somebody else’s platform.
What your competitors stock that you do not, who is undercutting you on the trims you both carry, and every price cut they have made with how many days they held out first. Real charts, drawn from your data, on a page you open in your own browser.
It works out on its own which platform a dealer site is built on — DealerOn, Dealer Inspire, Dealer.com — and reads the inventory that site already publishes for Google. Real code running against real stores.
Every vehicle, every asking price, every day, landing in a Supabase project that belongs to you. Not a vendor dashboard you rent and not a report somebody emails you.
It runs every morning on GitHub’s machines rather than yours, whether your laptop is open or not, and the dashboard is a little smarter every time you open it. Price history is worth nothing on day one and real money in a month — the whole asset is the fact that it never stopped.
This session is for dealer marketing, sales, and ops leaders. You do not need to know how to code. You do need to be comfortable following setup instructions on your own, before the session. Three things to have with you, and that is the whole list.
Mac or Windows. Not a tablet.
The public inventory site your shoppers see. The tool reads yours the same way it reads everyone else's, and that is what turns a list of competitor cars into a dashboard that can tell you where you are losing.
The ones you actually lose deals to. Have them in mind before you sit down.
Pick stores you genuinely compete with. This is the one choice on the list that decides whether the output is worth anything. Three rooftops you trade against every week put a real gap and a real price cut on your dashboard at the end of the session. Three names picked at random give you a beautiful chart of nothing.
Complete every step before the session. Your progress is saved in this browser, so you can work through it across a few sittings.
Setup progress
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Free. Sign up before the session so nothing is waiting on an email confirmation.
This is different from having a GitHub account. Mac usually has it already. Windows users should install it from git-scm.com.
The tool you build is written in Python, so this one is not optional. Mac: you almost certainly have it already — run python3 --version and check it prints 3.9 or higher. Windows: install from python.org, and tick “Add Python to PATH” on the first screen of the installer. Missing that one checkbox is the most common reason a Windows laptop cannot run any of this on the day.
python3 --versionFree. Sign up and confirm the email now, because waiting on a confirmation link in the room is the one thing that cannot be hurried. Do not create a project. We build the database together in the session, from an empty account, so you can see where every table comes from. An account and nothing else is exactly where you should be.
$20/month minimum. The free plan does not include Claude Code.
Open your terminal and run the install command for your laptop. Windows: install Git for Windows first, then run the command in PowerShell. Never put sudo in front of it. When it finishes, close that terminal window and open a brand new one. The installer only adds claudeto windows opened after it finishes, so in the window you installed from you will get “command not found” even though nothing is wrong. In the new window run claude --version; it prints a version number followed by (Claude Code). Then work through Step 0 on rainelabs.io/liveto make your project folder, connect Supabase, and log in — doing it before the session means the browser login is already behind you.
Mac
curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bashWindows (PowerShell)
irm https://claude.ai/install.ps1 | iexCheck it worked (in a NEW terminal window)
claude --versionMac: Terminal. Windows: PowerShell or Windows Terminal. A code editor like VS Code is nice to have, but it is not required.
Needed when you ask Claude to add your own charts to the dashboard. Install it now so it is not downloading on hotel wifi. Get the LTS version, then run node --version to check. It needs to be 20.19 or newer, or 22.12 or newer. Anything in between (21.x, or 22.0 to 22.11) looks new enough and then fails the build.
node --versionOpen your terminal and run these three commands. If all three return a version number, you are ready.
terminal
claude --versiongit --versionpython3 --versionAny of them printing command not found means that install did not finish. On Windows, try python --version for the last one. Sort it out before the session, not during it.
No, and you will not be asked to. You point Claude Code at the project and tell it what you want in plain English; it writes and runs the code. What you do need is to be comfortable following setup steps and typing a command into a terminal.
GitHub and Supabase are both free for everything this session covers, including the daily automated run and the dashboard, which runs on your own laptop. The only paid piece is Claude Code, which needs a Claude Pro plan at $20/month minimum.
What we read is public. Every dealer website publishes its full inventory in a machine-readable file so Google can index it, and the tool reads the same file Google reads. Nothing behind a login, ever. It checks each site's robots.txt and obeys it, and it waits between requests instead of hammering anyone. The one rule on top of that: use what you learn to price and stock your own store, do not resell the data.
Most franchise dealer sites in the country run on one of three platforms — DealerOn, Dealer Inspire, or Dealer.com — and the tool works out which one it is looking at on its own. If a site you bring turns out to be something else, that is a good problem to have in a live session: we look at it together and you leave knowing how to point the tool at it.
No. Once it is automated it runs on GitHub's machines, not yours, on a schedule you set. Close the lid, go home, and the new numbers are in your database and on your dashboard by the time you open it in the morning.
Yes, and that is rather the point of building it yourself. The dashboard lives in your own copy of the project, so you change it the same way you built everything else: open Claude Code, say what you want on the screen, and look at it. Add a chart for a single model line, filter to one rooftop, change what counts as a price cut. No vendor to ask and no ticket to file.
Contact Elijah Surratt. A broken install is a five-minute fix today and a wasted session on the day.
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