Look. Most people open this thing, type a question, get a mediocre answer, and decide the hype is bullshit.
It's not the tool. It's that you never told it a damn thing about you.
You hired somebody, sat them at a desk, told them nothing about what you do or who you serve or what you sell… and then got annoyed when their work was generic. That's what's happening.
This is the 15 minutes that fixes it. One time. Then every conversation you ever have starts out already knowing you.
And breathe… you can't break any of this. Every single thing in here is a setting you can change back. Nothing gets deleted, nothing gets published, nobody sees it.
1. Custom instructions: tell it who you are, once
This is the big one and almost nobody does it.
Somewhere in your settings there's a box for custom instructions, or "personal preferences," depending on what you're using. Whatever it's called, it's the thing Claude reads before every single conversation, forever.
Here's what goes in it. Copy this, fill in your stuff:
About my business:
I run [what you do] in [your area]. We serve [who your customers are].
My customers usually come to me because [the problem they have].
What makes us different is [the honest answer, not the marketing answer].
How I want you to talk to me:
Be direct. Skip the preamble and the recap of what I just asked.
If I'm wrong about something, tell me I'm wrong and why.
Don't hedge everything. Give me your actual read.
When you don't know, say you don't know instead of guessing.
Write the way a person talks, not the way a press release reads.
What I'm usually working on:
[quotes / estimates / customer follow-up / scheduling / hiring / whatever eats your week]That's it. Save it and never think about it again.
The difference this makes is stupid. Same question, completely different answer, because it's not guessing at your world anymore.
Rest of it's yours
Drop your email and the whole thing opens up right here. No waiting on a confirmation, no download, nothing to install.
You'll also get the new ones as I make them. Leave whenever, no hard feelings.
2. Make a project for each thing you work on
A project is just a folder that remembers.
Regular chat: you explain everything, get your answer, close it, and next time you start from zero explaining the same shit again.
Project: you explain it once. It stays. Two weeks later you open it back up and it already knows.
Make one for each real thing in your business. One for quotes and estimates. One for customer follow-up. One for hiring. One for a big customer you deal with constantly.
Don't make forty of them. Make three or four you'll actually use.
3. Turn web search on
Without it, Claude answers from what it learned during training, which has a cutoff date. Ask about current prices, a company that just changed something, anything recent, and it'll confidently hand you old information.
With it on, it goes and looks.
It's a toggle. Find it, turn it on, done.
The honest part: it's slower with search on, and sometimes you don't need it. But I'd rather wait four extra seconds than get a confident wrong answer about a number I'm about to put in front of a customer.
4. Upload the documents you actually reference
This is the one that gets skipped the most and it's worth more than the other three combined.
It is roughly ten times more useful when it can SEE your stuff instead of you describing your stuff.
Put in the things you reach for constantly:
- Your price sheet
- Your standard contract or agreement
- A proposal you were genuinely happy with
- Your service list
- Anything a supplier or vendor sends you every month
Now when you say "write this customer a quote," it's not inventing a format. It's using yours.
One real caution. Once it's uploaded, it's out of your hands. Don't put in social security numbers, full card numbers, your employees' personal information, or anything under an NDA you personally signed. Your own contracts, your own prices, your own job photos, your own numbers… those are fine, I put those in daily.
The test I use: would I email this to a stranger? If no, it doesn't go in.
5. Pay for it
I was cheap about this for way too long.
The free version is a test drive. You can do a lot of shit with it, but it really isn't enough if you want to dive into all of this and have it be worth anything to you.
Twenty bucks a month. If it saves you one hour, it paid for itself four times over. If you're going to half-ass this on the free tier and then decide AI is overrated, save yourself the month and don't start.
While you're in the settings, check this one thing
There's a toggle about using your conversations to improve the model, or for training. On a lot of free plans it is ON by default.
Now, I'm going to be straight with you, because every guru turns this into a scare video. Nobody is sitting there reading your messages. It's not that dramatic.
But if you're dropping in customer contracts and your real pricing, you should be making that call on purpose instead of finding out about it later.
Most paid business plans have it off already. Check yours anyway. Takes thirty seconds.
And while you're there, look at how long your chats get kept. That one surprises people more than the training setting does.
When it starts acting stupid, here's why
You did all this and a week later it's forgetting your instructions and contradicting itself mid-conversation.
It's not broken. It ran out of room.
Every conversation has a limit. As it gets long, the earliest stuff falls off the back. That's the exact moment it starts acting like it's never met you.
Three fixes, in order:
- Start a fresh conversation. Nine times out of ten that's the whole problem.
- Put anything it should ALWAYS know into custom instructions, not into the chat. Custom instructions never fall off.
- Use projects, so the important stuff lives outside the conversation entirely.
That's it. It's not a bug and you're not doing it wrong.
The whole thing in one page
- Custom instructions, who you are, how to talk to you
- A project for each real thing you work on
- Web search on
- Upload your price sheet, contract, and a proposal you liked
- Pay the twenty bucks
- Check the training toggle on purpose
- When it goes stupid, start a fresh chat
Fifteen minutes, one time.
Skip it and you've got a chatbot. Do it and you've got something that actually knows your business.
The more you do with it, the easier it gets. That part's real.
— Jordan