A beginner's guide to using Claude

How-to AI: everything you need to know about how to use Claude

In 2022, ChatGPT was released to the public and overnight the future of work, play and every day use of the digital world changed forever.

In case you are new here, my background is in early-stage venture capital which means my job (before I went on sabbatical) was Dragon’s Den in real life and I saw behind the scenes of hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses every year. So when OpenAI released their LLM (large-language model) ChatGPT to the masses in November 2022, I knew it was going to be BIG.

And I was right. Since then, ChatGPT has largely dominated the mainstream narrative and mass adoption by non-technical people until now. Because whilst OpenAI have been releasing newer models and foraying into the world of image and video with tools like Sora (which they just canned last week), Anthropic have been quietly getting smarter and smarter with Claude.

And whilst I still use the fundamental LLM behind ChatGPT — OpenAI’s code using APIs —(more on that another time), Claude is now my predominant go-to for any AI work that isn’t done by AI Agents in Notion, and it’s very, very good.

So with that in mind, I thought it was about time I shared a detailed beginners guide to using Claude.

In this piece I’m going to walk you through what Claude actually is, why it is different from ChatGPT, what every feature does and why it matters, what you get for free versus what is worth paying for, how to set up custom instructions so Claude actually sounds like you, the specific use cases that will make the biggest difference to your business, how to prompt it properly with real examples, and a simple workflow you can implement today.

No jargon. No developer nonsense. Just practical, real world guidance for someone running a business who wants to work smarter and use AI.

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What is Claude, and why should you care?

Claude is an AI assistant. Like ChatGPT, you type something in and it responds. But the similarities are more surface level than you would think.

Claude is built by Anthropic, a company founded by former senior team members at OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT). Their whole thing is building AI that is genuinely safe and useful, and honestly, I think you can feel it in how the tool works. Claude does not try to impress you with flashy tricks, it doesn’t hallucinate as much and it doesn’t give you that over-eager, slightly manic energy that ChatGPT sometimes has where it agrees with everything you say and adds seventeen exclamation marks.

Claude thinks. It reasons. It pushes back when your idea has a hole in it. And when it writes, it sounds like an actual human being wrote it, not a LinkedIn influencer…

The thing that makes Anthropic genuinely different is something called Constitutional AI. Rather than just training the model on human preferences, they gave Claude a set of principles and taught it to reason about its own behaviour against those principles. That constitution has grown from 2,700 words in 2023 to over 23,000 words today. What is actually means is that Claude is less likely to confidently tell you something wrong, and more likely to say “I am not sure about that”, which means it is significantly better at nuanced, thoughtful work than tools that are trained purely to be agreeable.

For business owners, the difference is night and day once you start using it for real work.

Claude vs ChatGPT: The breakdown

I use both. I am not dogmatic about this. But here is where they genuinely differ and why it matters for you.

Writing quality. Claude writes better prose. Full stop. If you are creating content for your business, writing emails to clients, drafting sales pages, putting together proposals, or writing anything that needs to sound like you and not like a robot, Claude is significantly better. ChatGPT tends to default to a particular cadence, a sort of peppy, over-structured, bullet-pointed style that immediately screams “AI wrote this”. Claude can match your voice if you give it the right context, uses varied sentence lengths and it understands nuance.

Thinking depth. When you ask Claude to help you think through a business problem, it doesn’t just give you the first answer that comes to mind. It considers trade-offs and will tell you when something is a bad idea. The biggest difference I see is that it asks clarifying questions that actually move the conversation forward rather than just padding out a response. If you are working on pricing strategy, repositioning your brand, or figuring out whether to hire or outsource, this depth of reasoning makes a genuine difference. ChatGPT will give you an answer quickly but Claude (in my opinion) will give you a better answer, even if it takes a moment longer and even if that answer is “actually, I think you are approaching this from the wrong angle.”

Context window. This is a technical term but an important one. The context window is how much information the AI can hold in its ‘head’ at once during a conversation. Claude can handle up to a million tokens, which is roughly 750,000 words. That is several books. That means you can upload your full client programme materials, your brand guidelines, a competitor analysis, six months of sales data, and your business plan, and Claude will hold all of it in working memory while helping you. No other tool matches this for long, complex work and a bigger memory means better, more coherent work.

Where ChatGPT wins. Image generation, if you need that. It also has a bigger ecosystem of third-party integrations which is why I still use OpenAI APIs every day for embedded AI workflows. And if you are already deeply embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem, Copilot (which runs on GPT) might be more convenient for certain tasks. But for the core work of running and growing a business (thinking, planning, analysing, building, and systemising), Claude is now my top pick.

Everything Claude can do

Most people use Claude (and all AI for that matter) like a search engine. They type a question, get an answer, and close the tab. That is like buying a sports car and only driving it to Tesco. Let me walk you through every feature that matters and why.

Projects. This is, in my opinion, the single most important feature for business owners. A Project in Claude is a dedicated workspace where you can upload documents, set custom instructions, and have ongoing conversations that all share the same context. Think of it as giving Claude a brain that is specifically trained on your business in a similar way to CustomGPTs in ChatGPT.

You could create a Project called “Client Delivery” and upload your programme materials, your onboarding process, your pricing structure, examples of great client communications, and a description of your ideal client. Then every conversation you start within that Project automatically knows all of that. No more re-explaining who you are and what your business does every single time. You could have a Project for client proposals, one for financial planning, one for product development, one for operations and SOPs. Each one carries its own context, its own instructions, and its own separate memory. This is the feature that takes Claude from “useful chatbot” to “indispensable business tool”. Caveat here is that at the moment, these cannot be connected into external workflow tools. So if you are happy working inside Claude, great, but right now, these can’t be pulled into another tool like Notion or Asana (which is what I do).

Memory. As of March 2026, Claude remembers you across conversations, and this is now available on the free plan too. I love this feature because it’s now not just within a Project but across your entire account. It learns your preferences, your business context, your communication style, and carries that forward. You can view, edit, and delete what it remembers in Settings under Capabilities. The memory updates roughly every 24 hours based on your conversations. This means the more you use Claude, the less you have to explain, and the better it gets at helping you (because, you know, AI). You can also import your memory from other AI tools if you are switching over, which is very useful.

Research mode. This is where I started with Claude, because aside from Perplexity, I do think the Research capability is excellent. This is when you need Claude to actually go deep on something, Research mode is extraordinary. It searches the web, reads multiple sources, synthesises everything, and presents you with a thorough analysis rather than a surface level summary. This is not the same as Googling something and getting ten blue links. Claude does the reading for you, cross-references the information, and tells you what actually matters. Genuinely useful for competitor research, market analysis, understanding industry trends, pricing research, or preparing for a big decision.

Artifacts. This is a feature that most people walk straight past, and it is one of the most powerful things Claude does. When you ask Claude to create something substantial (a document, a chart, an interactive tool, a calculator, a flowchart, a website mockup), it does not just dump text into the chat window. It creates what is called an Artifact: a live, interactive piece of content that appears in a dedicated panel next to your conversation.

Let’s say you ask Claude to create a client onboarding checklist or an SOP. It builds that as an Artifact, which you can then edit specific sections of without Claude rewriting the whole thing. You can iterate on it, version it (Claude keeps every version so you can compare or roll back), and when you are happy, you can publish it with a shareable link or download it.

But checklists barely scratch the surface. Ask Claude to build you an interactive pricing calculator for your website and it will create a working one, right there in the panel, that you can test, tweak, and share. Ask it to create a flowchart of your client journey and it will build an interactive diagram you can click through (I use this for customer journeys). Ask it to visualise your revenue data and it will create actual charts with proper formatting. Ask it to build you a quiz for your audience that recommends a product based on their answers. Ask it to create a meal plan generator for your nutrition clients. These are not mockups. They are working, interactive tools you can publish and share with a link. All from a conversation. No code. No developer. Just describe what you want and iterate until it is right. There is even a public catalogue of Artifacts other people have built that you can browse and remix for your own use.

The mental shift here is significant because Claude is not just answering your questions, it is building things for you.

File creation. Separate from Artifacts, Claude can create actual downloadable files. Word documents with proper formatting, spreadsheets with formulas, presentations with slide layouts, PDFs. Need a client proposal in a Word doc? A cash flow projection in a proper spreadsheet with tabs and formulas? Claude builds the actual file and you download it. This is not “here is some text you could paste into Word.” It is a formatted, professional document ready to use.

Cowork. This is the newest and, frankly, most exciting feature for non-technical business owners. Cowork is available through the Claude desktop app (Mac and Windows) and it turns Claude from a chat assistant into something closer to an actual team member. You give it access to a folder on your computer, describe what you need done, and it handles multi-step tasks autonomously. It plans the work, breaks it into steps, executes them, and delivers the finished result.

The kinds of things Cowork handles: organising a chaotic file system into properly labelled folders. Turning scattered notes and transcripts into a formatted report. Pulling data from screenshots or PDFs into a structured spreadsheet. Processing a batch of invoices. Creating a weekly report from your analytics dashboard. Drafting follow-up emails from meeting transcripts. Anthropic calls this “vibe working”, the non-developer equivalent of vibe coding — you describe the outcome you want, and Claude does the work.

The difference from normal Claude chat is significant: instead of asking one question at a time and getting one answer, you describe a complete deliverable and walk away while it works. You can even start a task on your desktop and check progress from your phone. You can set up recurring scheduled tasks, too: have Claude pull your metrics every Friday and compile them into a report, or process new files in a folder every morning.

If you have been saying “I need to hire someone to just sort all of this out”, Cowork is worth trying first. It uses more of your usage allocation than regular chat because the tasks are more complex, but for the right jobs it is transformative.

Connectors. Claude connects to Google Workspace, Slack, and a rapidly growing list of other tools through something called the Model Context Protocol. This means Claude can read your Google Docs, check your calendar, search your emails, pull data from your Notion, and use that information in its responses. Instead of copying and pasting context from six different apps, you just ask Claude and it pulls what it needs. You set up connectors in Settings and approve access the first time each one is used.

Claude Code (yes, even for non-developers). I know the name sounds like it is not for you. Stay with me. Claude Code started as a tool for software developers, and it is still primarily that. But it is increasingly being used by non-technical people to vibe-code, which essentially means describing what you want in plain English and letting AI write the code for you.

Why does this matter if you are a nutritionist, or a coach, or running a product business? Because the things you used to need to hire a developer for (a custom client portal, a booking tool, an internal dashboard, a simple app for your clients, a bespoke calculator, an inventory tracker) are now things you can prototype yourself by describing what you want. I built my own AI-powered analytics tool, Frankly Social, using this approach. People with no coding background at all are building and launching real tools. The barrier between “I have an idea for a tool” and “I have a working tool” has collapsed.

Personally, I use specialist vibe-coding tools to do this but I am playing around with Claude Code at the moment and I’ll write a more detailed breakdown of how this works soon.

You do not need to learn to code. You need to learn to describe what you want clearly, which is a skill you already have (or you can learn much more easily).

If this interests you, the easiest entry point is Artifacts in the regular Claude chat. Ask Claude to build you an interactive tool and see what happens. If you find yourself wanting to build something more complex, Cowork handles more sophisticated file and multi-step work. Claude Code itself (the terminal-based tool) is the most powerful option but requires a bit more comfort with technology. The important thing to know is that this spectrum exists and that you are not locked out of building things for your business just because you are not technical.

Web search and visualisations. Claude can search the web in real time and, as of March 2026, automatically generates charts, diagrams, and interactive visualisations directly inside your conversations (not just in Artifacts). If you are discussing your quarterly revenue, Claude might generate a bar chart. If you are working through a process, it might create a flowchart. These are not static images; they are interactive and you can ask Claude to modify them as you go.

Free vs Paid: what you actually get

Let me be straight about this because the pricing page does not make it obvious.

The free plan gives you access to Claude’s Sonnet model (which is honestly excellent for most tasks), web search, memory across conversations, Artifacts, basic file creation, and visualisations. You get a limited number of messages that resets every few hours, roughly enough for light daily use. During peak hours you may hit a queue or face slower responses. You cannot create Projects on the free plan, which is the main limitation. You also cannot use Research mode, Cowork, Claude Code, or connect to Google Workspace and other external tools. Your conversations may be used for model training unless you opt out. There is no access to Opus, the most powerful model.

If you are just curious about Claude and want to see what it can do, the free plan is a great starting point. You can use memory, create Artifacts, get files built, and have substantive conversations. You will feel the limits once you start using it for real work, which is the point.

Pro at £20 per month is where it gets serious and where most business owners should land. You get roughly five times the usage of the free plan (around 50 to 100 messages per five-hour window depending on complexity and length), access to all models including Opus (the most intelligent model, significantly better for complex strategy, nuanced writing, and deep analysis), Projects with custom instructions and document uploads (unlimited Projects), Research mode for deep multi-source analysis, Claude Code in the terminal and via web, Cowork for autonomous desktop tasks, file creation and code execution, Google Workspace and other connectors via the Model Context Protocol, extended thinking (where Claude shows its reasoning step by step on complex problems), and the ability to opt out of your data being used for training. This is the same price as ChatGPT Plus and the plan I use.

Max at £100 or £200 per month is for power users who hit Pro limits regularly. You get five or twenty times the Pro usage respectively, higher task output limits in Cowork, persistent memory across longer sessions, early access to new features, and priority access during peak times. If you are using Claude as your primary work tool for several hours a day and consistently hitting the Pro usage caps, Max makes sense. For most people, Pro is more than enough.

Teams at £25 to £30 per seat per month (minimum five seats) adds shared Projects where your whole team works from the same context, admin controls, Slack and Microsoft 365 integrations, single sign-on, centralised billing, and organisation-wide search. Premium seats at £150 per seat add Claude Code access and early collaboration features. This is for when you have a team and want everyone working with the same brand context and standards.

Honestly start on free. You will know within a week whether you need Pro. Most business owners who use Claude for real workflows upgrade within days, not because the free plan is bad but because once you see what Projects, Research mode, and Opus can do, you will not want to work without them.

How to set up custom instructions (step by step)

This is where most people leave enormous amounts of value on the table. Custom instructions tell Claude how to behave every time you talk to it, either globally across your account or within a specific Project. Here is exactly how to set both up.

Global custom instructions (applies to every conversation):

Go to claude.ai and click your name or initials in the bottom left corner. Select Settings. Look for “User preferences” under the profile section. This is where you write instructions that apply to every single conversation you have with Claude, regardless of which Project you are in or whether you are in a Project at all.

Write something like this (and adapt it to your actual business):

“I am [your name]. I run a [type of business] in the UK. My audience is [describe them specifically]. I write in British English. I never use bullet points unless specifically asked, or any of the following phrases: unlock, level up, dive in, game-changer, at the end of the day, it is worth noting that, in today’s fast-paced world. My tone is direct, warm, occasionally irreverent, and never preachy or condescending. I prefer prose over lists. I value varied sentence length. When I ask for help with strategy, push back on my assumptions and tell me what I am missing rather than just agreeing. When I ask for help with writing, match the tone and rhythm of the examples I have provided rather than defaulting to generic AI voice. I work [X] hours a week and value leverage over hustle.”

That takes two minutes to write (in fact you don’t need to even write because you can now just copy the above) and will transform every single interaction you have with Claude from that point forward. It stops suggesting things in American English. It stops using the words you hate. It knows your constraints and it knows your audience. This is the single highest return-on-time-investment action you can take with Claude and takes seconds.

Project-level custom instructions (applies within a specific Project):

Click “Projects” in the left sidebar (Pro plan and above). Click “Create project” and give it a name, something like “Client Experience” or “Business Strategy” or “Q2 Planning”. Once inside the Project, you will see options to add custom instructions and upload knowledge files. The custom instructions here are specific to this Project and layer on top of your global instructions, so you do not need to repeat yourself.

For a Client Experience project, you might write:

“This project is for everything related to client onboarding, delivery, and retention in my nutrition coaching business. My services are: one-to-one coaching (£250 per month, 12-week minimum), a group programme called [name] (£97 per month, rolling), and a supplement line. My ideal client is [name]: [age], [job], [life situation], [what she is struggling with], [what she wants]. She is [personality traits] and responds to [what works] not [what does not work]. When drafting any client-facing communication, the tone should be warm, professional, and reassuring without being condescending. Never use clinical language. Never sound like a generic corporate email. Every touchpoint should feel like it comes from a real person who genuinely cares about their progress. When I ask you to build processes or systems, optimise for my time constraint of 15 hours per week and always suggest what can be automated or templatised.”

Then upload your files. Your service descriptions and pricing, your current onboarding documents, your programme curriculum or structure. Client testimonials and case studies, any client feedback or survey results and your terms of service. All of this context is now available in every conversation within this Project, and Claude will reference it automatically without you needing to remind it.

For a Business Strategy project, you would write different instructions emphasising your revenue goals, time constraints, and decision-making preferences, and upload your financial data, business plan, and quarterly targets. For a Product Development project, instructions about your product line, compliance requirements, and supplier details.

The result is that when you open a conversation in your Client Experience project and type “build me a better onboarding sequence for new one-to-one clients”, Claude already knows your services, your client, your tone, your time constraints, and your existing process. The output is specific to your business — not generic and not something you have to rework from scratch. Specific and usable.

The use cases that will save you the most time

Right, let me get specific. Because features are nice but what you actually want to know is how this makes your Monday morning easier. I am going to use the example of someone running a women’s health nutrition coaching and product business, but every single one of these applies to any service, product, or content business.

Client experience and delivery. This is where most business owners are leaving the most time on the table, and it is the use case I would start with. Set up a Client Experience project as I described above. Then use Claude to completely overhaul how you onboard, communicate with, and retain clients.

Start by uploading your current onboarding process (even if it is just a rough sequence in your head) and ask Claude to map it, identify gaps, and redesign it. Have it build a full onboarding email sequence, from welcome email through to the first session prep, the post-first-session follow up, and the check-ins at week two, four, and eight. Ask it to create a client welcome pack as a downloadable PDF or Word document with everything a new client needs to know. Have it draft personalised progress review templates that you can adapt for each client in under two minutes. Ask it to build an interactive FAQ as an Artifact that you can share with every new client via a link and update as new questions come in. Get it to analyse your client feedback or survey responses and identify the patterns in what people love, where they drop off, and what they wish was different.

The result is that your client experience starts to feel like a much bigger, more polished operation than a one-person or small-team business, because the systems behind it are doing the heavy lifting. You still bring the expertise and the human connection. Claude handles the process, the documentation, and the consistency.

Research and competitor intelligence. This is one of those tasks that everyone knows they should be doing and almost nobody has time for. With Research mode, Claude becomes your analyst. Ask it to research what your top five competitors are charging for similar services and present the findings in a comparison table. Have it analyse the reviews and testimonials on their websites and identify the promises they are making versus the gaps clients are complaining about. Ask it to research trends in your industry, pull recent data on market size or consumer behaviour, and summarise what it means for your positioning. Get it to investigate a potential supplier, partnership, or platform before you commit. All of this used to mean hours of Googling, reading, and synthesising and now you describe what you need to know and Claude does the legwork, presenting you with a structured analysis you can actually act on.

Product development. Talk through a new product idea with Claude as a thinking partner. Have it draft product descriptions, label copy, and compliance disclaimers. Get it to analyse customer reviews of competitor products on Amazon and create a gap analysis as an Artifact with charts showing where the opportunities are. Use it to build a launch plan with quarterly milestones, marketing angles, and a timeline as a downloadable spreadsheet with actual dates and dependencies.

Business strategy and financial modelling. This is where I become slightly obsessed with using AI... Upload your revenue data, your customer feedback, your current offers, and your goals for the next quarter. Ask it to identify your most profitable revenue streams and calculate your effective hourly rate across each one. Ask it to model what happens if you raise prices by 15%, or if you shift 20% of your one-to-one clients into a group programme. Ask it to project cash flow for the next six months based on your current trajectory versus your growth plan. Ask it to create the financial model as a proper Excel file with formulas, not just text. Ask it to challenge your assumptions and tell you which numbers look unrealistic. It is like having a very smart, very well-read advisor who never gets tired and never charges you by the hour.

Building tools for your business. This is the one that sounds futuristic but is happening right now. Ask Claude to build you an interactive pricing calculator for your coaching packages that you can share with prospective clients. Ask it to create a client intake questionnaire that auto-generates a personalised summary. Ask it to build a meal plan generator that takes macros and dietary preferences and produces a weekly plan. Ask it to create an ROI calculator that shows potential clients what working with you is worth. These start as Artifacts, working prototypes you can test and share with a link. If they work well and you want to take them further, Cowork or Claude Code is the next step. The barrier to building custom tools for your business has effectively disappeared.

How to prompt Claude properly

The quality of what you get from Claude is directly proportional to the quality of what you put in. A vague prompt gets a vague answer. A specific, context-rich prompt gets something you can actually use. Prompting is not about magic formulas or secret techniques. It is about communicating clearly. The same skills that make you good at briefing a freelancer or managing a team make you good at prompting Claude.

Here is my framework. I call it the CRISP method because I like a good acronym and also because it works.

C - Context. Tell Claude who you are, what your business does, and what the situation is. Even if you have this in a Project, adding relevant context to your specific request helps enormously. “I am preparing for a price increase in my group programme and I need to communicate this to 40 existing members, most of whom have been with me for three to six months.”

R - Role. Tell Claude what role you want it to play. “Act as a brand strategist” produces very different output from “act as a direct response copywriter” or “act as a CFO reviewing my numbers”. Be specific about the expertise you want it to bring.

I - Intent. What is the actual goal? Not “write me an email” but “write me an email that re-engages lapsed clients and encourages them to rebook a consultation without sounding desperate or discounting my services.”

S - Specifics. Length, tone, format, things to include, things to avoid, examples of what good looks like, examples of what bad looks like. The more specific you are, the less editing you do afterwards. Specifics also include structural preferences: do you want prose or a table? A narrative or a framework? One option or three to choose from?

P - Perspective. Who is reading, watching, or receiving this? What do they care about? What objections might they have? What are they feeling right now? Giving Claude the reader’s perspective transforms the output from generic to targeted.

Let me show you the difference with real examples.

Weak prompt: “Help me with my client onboarding.”

Strong prompt: “I run a women’s health nutrition coaching business. I take on new one-to-one clients at £250 per month on a 12-week minimum. My current onboarding is inconsistent: I send a welcome email, a questionnaire, and then we have a first call, but there is no proper sequence and clients often arrive at the first call without completing the questionnaire. I need a structured onboarding sequence that covers everything from payment confirmation to the end of week two. The tone of all communications should be warm, professional, and reassuring, not clinical or corporate. Think of it as making someone feel like they have made the best decision of their year, while also efficiently collecting the information I need to do my job well. Include what to send, when to send it, and what each touchpoint should accomplish. Flag any gaps in my current process.”

The second prompt gives you a complete, actionable onboarding system. The first gives you generic advice you could have found on Google.

For strategy work, an example of how to use Claude as a genuine thinking partner:

“I run a nutrition coaching business with three revenue streams: one-to-one coaching at £250 per month (12 clients), a group programme at £97 per month (40 members), and a supplement line averaging £35 per order (approximately 200 orders per month). I work 15 hours a week during term time and I am not willing to increase this. I want to grow revenue by 40% in the next 12 months. My gut feeling is that I should launch a new digital product, but I am not sure if that is right or if I should focus on what I have. Analyse my current revenue breakdown, calculate my effective hourly rate across each stream, identify which revenue stream has the most leverage given my time constraint, and tell me honestly whether a new product launch or optimising existing streams is the better use of my limited time. Present this as a proper analysis with numbers, not just opinions. Push back if any of my assumptions seem unrealistic. Then give me a specific quarterly plan with milestones I can actually execute in 15 hours a week.”

That is the kind of prompt that gets you genuine strategic value. You are not asking Claude to guess. You are giving it real data, real constraints, and permission to disagree with you. The response you get back will likely be more rigorous than what you would get from most paid consultants, because Claude will actually do the maths rather than giving you platitudes.

For building a client-facing tool (using Artifacts):

“I want to build an interactive supplement recommendation tool for my website. A potential client answers five to seven simple questions about their health goals, current symptoms, diet, and lifestyle. Based on their answers, the tool recommends one of my three supplement bundles (Essentials at £35, Complete at £55, or Premium at £79) with a brief explanation of why that bundle suits them. The tone should be warm, evidence-informed, and non-pushy. It should feel helpful, not salesy. Include a clear call to action to purchase or book a free 15-minute call if they want personalised advice. Build this as a working interactive tool I can test and share.”

See the pattern? Context. Role. Intent. Specifics. Perspective. Every single time.

One more thing on prompting that is more important than any framework: do not be afraid to have a conversation. The best results I get from Claude, or any AI for that matter, are never from a single prompt. They come from a back-and-forth. I give it a brief, it gives me a first attempt, I tell it what works and what does not, it refines. Three or four rounds of this and you have something genuinely excellent. Think of it less like giving an order to a machine and more like working with a very fast, very capable colleague who needs direction but brings their own intelligence to the table.

Your simple workflow: start here today

You do not need to overhaul your entire business to start getting value from Claude. Here is a simple workflow you can implement this week.

Step one: Sign up. Go to claude.ai. The free plan is genuinely useful and includes memory, web search, Artifacts, and file creation. If you decide you love it (you will), Pro is £20 a month and unlocks Projects, Research mode, Cowork, Claude Code, and connectors. I recommend starting free and upgrading once you hit the usage limits, which for most business owners happens within the first few days.

Step two: Set your global custom instructions. Go to Settings and write your preferences as I described in the custom instructions section above. Name, business, audience, tone, language, things you never want Claude to do, how you want it to behave. This takes five minutes and improves every conversation going forward. It is the single highest return-on-time-investment action in this entire guide.

Step three: Check and curate your memory. Go to Settings and look at Memory under Capabilities. If you have used Claude before, review what it has stored. Edit anything wrong. Add things it should know. If you are switching from ChatGPT, you can export your memory from there and import it into Claude (Anthropic provides a prompt for this and instructions on their support site).

Step four: Create your first Project (Pro plan). Call it something that reflects its purpose, “Client Experience” or “Business Strategy” or whatever matches your biggest time sink. Upload your service descriptions, your ideal client profile, any existing process documents, and a brief on your business. Write custom instructions that tell Claude exactly how to behave within this Project, as detailed above.

Step five: Start with one task. Pick the thing that eats the most time in your week. For many business owners, this is client onboarding or admin. Open a conversation in your Project and ask Claude to help you map your current client journey from first enquiry to three months in. Ask it to identify where the gaps are, where clients might feel uncertain or unsupported, and what could be systematised. Then ask it to build the missing pieces: an onboarding sequence, a welcome document, a progress review template. Time how long this takes compared to doing it from scratch. The difference will be significant enough that you will not need me to convince you to keep going.

Step six: Build from there. Once you are comfortable, add Projects for different areas of your business. Start using Claude for strategy sessions, product development, financial modelling, and research. Try creating an Artifact: ask Claude to build you an interactive tool or a visual dashboard. If you are on Pro, experiment with Cowork by pointing it at a messy folder and asking it to organise everything. Each new use case builds on the last because Claude already knows your business, your standards, and your constraints.

Important notes:

I would not be doing my job properly if I did not mention these.

Claude is not a replacement for expertise. It is an amplifier of yours. If you do not know whether a supplement claim is compliant, Claude might not either. It is very good at reasoning, but it does not have professional qualifications and it cannot guarantee accuracy on regulatory or legal matters. Always have a human expert review anything that has legal, medical, or financial implications.

It can get things wrong. The model can be confidently incorrect, particularly about very specific or niche factual claims. Treat everything Claude produces as a starting point that needs your eyes, your judgement, and your expertise before it goes anywhere client-facing or public. The Research mode helps significantly with factual accuracy because it is pulling live data, but even then, verify anything critical.

Your data is your responsibility. You have to read the privacy settings. Understand what you are uploading. On the free plan, your conversations may be used for training. Pro and above gives you the option to opt out entirely. If you are handling client information, be sensible about what you share with any AI tool. Do not upload client medical records, financial details, or anything personally identifiable.

Cowork is still in research preview. It is impressive and genuinely useful, but it is new. Double-check its work, especially with anything involving numbers or file management. It will ask for your approval before taking significant actions, which is the right approach, but you still need to review what it produces before sending it anywhere.

And finally, AI is a tool. It is not a business strategy. The business owners I see getting the most value from Claude are the ones who already know what they are building and use AI to build it faster. If you do not have clarity on your offers, your audience, and your positioning, no amount of AI prompting will fix that. (But Claude can absolutely help you think through those things too, if you give it the right context, the right questions, and permission to tell you what you might not want to hear.)

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This is one of those tools that, once you start using it properly, you genuinely cannot imagine going back. I know that sounds hyperbolic but honestly, using AI effectively has transformed my life and my businesses.

If you found this useful, you are going to love what is coming in the paid Thursday deep dive guides. You may have noticed that Really Rich is getting a wee glow-up at the moment so a lot more AI content is coming for paid subscribers soon as I consolidate my work and aim to provide you with the best resources on how to practically use AI in your business and life.

You can upgrade to paid for less than a large coffee and a tiny cake each month and get access to everything as soon as it lands as well as my full archive.

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