Setup

Stop introducing yourself to AI every single time

6 min read · By Natalia Shevchenko

Set up one Project, feed it your business once, and every chat after that already knows your voice, your customer, and your competitors. About fifteen minutes, no code, free.

Here's why the answers come back so generic. You open a brand-new chat, ask for help with an email or an offer, and what you get back is fine — fine for anyone. It reads like advice from someone who's never met your business.

Because it hasn't. Every fresh chat starts from zero. So you spend the first ten minutes re-explaining who you are, who you sell to, and how you sound — and you do it again the next time, and the time after that. It's like onboarding a new intern every morning who forgot everything by lunch. At some point you think: I should've just done this myself.

The fix is a Project. You build it once. You hand it your business — the files, the voice, the customer, the competitors. Then it stops being an intern who forgets and starts being one who already knows. Let's build the first one: a marketing brain for your business.

What a Project actually is

A normal chat is a blank room. A Project is a room you've furnished. It holds two things a plain chat doesn't: a knowledge base (files you upload — your brand docs, customer notes, anything) and a set of instructions (a standing brief Claude reads at the start of every chat inside that Project).

Put those two together and every conversation you start in that Project opens already knowing your business. You stop pasting the same background. You just ask the question.

It's free. Projects are on every Claude plan, including the free one — you can keep up to five. You'll find them in the left sidebar at claude.ai, and in the phone app too. A paid plan adds room for huge knowledge bases, but a marketing brain is small. Free covers it.

Build it, four steps

You're the marketing lead for my business — not a generic assistant, but someone who knows my company as well as I do and answers every marketing question through that lens.

I've put my business into this project's knowledge: brand voice notes, my ideal customer, my competitors and how I'm different, and a few pieces of marketing that actually worked. Read all of it before you answer anything.

Your job right now is to write me a set of project instructions I can save — so every future chat in this project already knows my business without me re-explaining it.

Before you write them, interview me. Ask one question at a time about anything the files leave unclear: exactly who we sell to, what we genuinely do better than the competition, the words we use and the words we'd never use, what "good" marketing looks like to me, and where I keep second-guessing myself. Keep going until you could brief a new hire on my business in five minutes.

Then write the instructions as if you're documenting all of it for the version of you that starts fresh tomorrow. Plain language. Specific to my business, not marketing in general. Cover: who we are and what we sell, who we're for (and who we're not), how we sound, what we stand for, who we're up against and how we're different, and the rules for anything you draft for me.

When they're ready, give me the instructions on their own so I can copy them straight into the project.

Now open a fresh chat inside the Project and ask it something real — "draft a launch email for the new product" or "what's the angle for this week's posts." No setup, no background. It already knows. That's the difference between an intern who forgot and one who's been here a year.

Do this now

Build the marketing brain first — it's the one you'll use every week. Block fifteen minutes, open a Project, and dump in whatever you have about your business, even if it's rough. Run the prompt. Save the instructions.

Then build the next brain the same way: one for customer support, one for your numbers, one for hiring. Each one is a part of your business that AI now holds for you instead of you holding it in your head. That's the move from operator to owner — you stop being the only place the context lives.