The 7 Claude Prompts I'd Give Any Brand-New Business Owner

The hardest part of starting a business is not the work. It is the deciding.

What do I charge? What do I even call this thing I do? What should I post today? Did I ever follow up with that woman who said she was interested? And underneath all of it, the question nobody says out loud: am I doing this right?

When a brand-new business owner sits down with Claude for the first time, they almost always type something like "help me with my business." Which is a bit like walking into a hardware store and saying "help me with my house." True, but not useful.

So here are the seven prompts I would hand any brand-new owner on day one. They are not clever and they are not magic. They are just the seven questions that unstick people fastest, written so you can copy them, paste them, and get something real back in about ten minutes each. I have trained more than 7,500 people at this point, and these are the ones that come up over and over.

Start with prompt one. You can do the rest in any order.

1. The offer clarifier

Most new owners cannot explain what they sell in one sentence. Not because they do not know, but because they know too much. Everything feels important, so nothing gets said clearly.

This prompt fixes that in one pass.

I am starting a business doing [describe what you do in your own words, however rambly]. My customers are usually [who they are]. Ask me five short questions to sharpen this, one at a time, waiting for my answer before the next one. Then write my offer three ways: one sentence for my website, one sentence for when someone asks what I do at a party, and one short paragraph for a sales page. Use plain words. No buzzwords.

The five questions are the whole trick. Being interviewed pulls things out of you that staring at a blank page never will. And the party version is the one you will use most, because it is the one you actually say out loud.

2. The pricing sanity check

Nearly every new owner underprices. Not slightly. Dramatically. Usually because they are comparing their price to what they would be comfortable paying, which has nothing to do with what the work is worth.

Here is what I offer: [paste your offer from prompt 1]. I am thinking of charging [your number]. Walk me through this in four parts. One, what is the real value to the customer, in time saved, money made, or stress removed. Two, what would someone else with my experience typically charge for this. Three, what my price signals to a buyer, including whether it makes me look cheap. Four, give me three price options: a starting price, a fair price, and a stretch price, and tell me honestly which one you would pick and why. Be direct with me, not encouraging.

That last line matters. Ask for direct and you get a real opinion. Skip it and you get a supportive paragraph that leaves you exactly where you started.

3. The customer sketch

You cannot write good content, good emails, or a good sales page until you can picture one specific person. Not a demographic. A person.

Based on my business [paste your offer], write me a one-page sketch of my ideal customer as a real human being. Give them a name, an age, a job, and a normal Tuesday. Then tell me: what keeps them up at 11pm about this problem, what they have already tried that did not work, what they would type into Google at their most frustrated, and what would make them hesitate before buying from me. Write it like you are describing a friend, not like a marketing document.

The "what they would type into Google" answer is quietly the most valuable thing on the page. Those are your headlines. Those are your social hooks. Those are the exact words your customer already uses, handed to you.

4. The one-page content plan

New owners tend to post in bursts. Seven posts in one weekend, then nothing for a month, then guilt.

A plan you can maintain beats a plan that impresses you.

I run [your business] and my ideal customer is [paste the sketch from prompt 3]. I can realistically post [how many times] a week and I have about [how many minutes] per post. Build me a simple content plan with four recurring themes I can rotate through, so I never stare at a blank screen. For each theme, give me five post ideas with the first line already written. Keep everything in plain, warm language that sounds like a person, not a brand.

Twenty ideas with the opening line written is roughly a month of content. Not perfect content. Real content, which is the kind that actually gets published.

5. The follow-up rescue

This is where the money hides, and it is the thing new owners skip most.

Somebody said they were interested three weeks ago. You never wrote back because you did not want to be annoying, and now it feels too late. That is not a marketing problem. That is a sentence you have not written yet.

I had a conversation with a potential customer on [roughly when] about [what they wanted]. They seemed interested and I never followed up. Write me three short follow-up messages I could send today: one warm and casual, one that leads with something genuinely useful for them, and one that gently closes the loop and gives them an easy way out. Keep each under 80 words. No pressure, no fake urgency, and please do not make me sound like a salesperson.

Run this once for every lead you have gone quiet on. Most people have four or five sitting there. Sending those messages is usually the highest-paid hour of the week.

6. The ten-minute daily plan

You do not need a productivity system. You need to know what the three things are today.

Here is everything on my plate right now: [dump it all out, unsorted, however it comes]. Sort this for me. Tell me the three things that actually move my business forward today, the things that feel urgent but can wait until next week, and the things I should delete or hand off entirely. Then write my three in order, with a rough time estimate for each. If I am avoiding something important, say so.

Do this every morning for a week and you will notice something uncomfortable and useful: the same avoided task keeps showing up. That is usually the one that matters.

7. The "explain it like I'm brand new" prompt

Everyone starting a business hits a wall of jargon. LLC or sole proprietor. Sales tax. Contracts. Merchant fees. Whether you need a newsletter. The instinct is to nod along and hope it becomes clear later.

Explain [the thing you do not understand] to me like I am smart but brand new to business, with zero jargon. Tell me what it actually is, why it matters for someone at my stage, what happens if I ignore it for now, the three most common mistakes beginners make with it, and the one thing I should do about it this week. If I need a real professional for any part of this, say that clearly instead of guessing.

Use this one constantly. There is no shame in it, and the last line keeps you honest about when you need an actual accountant or lawyer instead of an AI.

How to use these without overwhelming yourself

Do not run all seven today. That is a great way to end up with forty pages of documents and nothing changed.

Run prompt one today and sit with the answer. Run prompt two tomorrow and let the pricing question be uncomfortable for a day, because it should be. Do the customer sketch this week. Then let prompts five and six become habits, because those two compound.

And save the ones that work. That is the difference between people who play with AI and people who run their business with it. A prompt you have to rewrite every time is a chore. A prompt saved in a Project, ready to go, is a system.

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to change the wording in the brackets exactly?

No. The brackets are placeholders, not a form. Type your answer in normal, messy language. "I make custom cakes for people, mostly weddings and birthdays, I have been doing it for four months" works perfectly well. Claude is good at understanding the way you actually talk, so you do not need to clean it up first.

What if the answer I get back does not sound like me?

Then tell it. Reply with something like "this is too formal, rewrite it the way I would say it to a friend" and paste an example of your own writing, even a text message. One round of correction usually fixes it. The mistake is accepting the first answer as final. It is a first draft, not a verdict.

Do these work if I have not launched yet?

Yes, and honestly they are most useful before you launch. Prompts one, two, and three exist specifically for the stage where nothing is decided. You will just be guessing at some of the inputs, which is fine, because the point is to get the guess out of your head and onto a page where you can look at it.

Is the free version of Claude enough for these?

To start, yes. All seven of these are normal conversations, so you can run them on a free account and get real value. You will notice the limits once you start doing longer work, uploading files, or saving Projects you use every day. Begin free, and upgrade when you genuinely feel the ceiling rather than because someone told you to.

Should I trust the pricing advice?

Trust it as a very well-read second opinion, not as a decision. It is genuinely good at spotting when you are undercharging, which is the most common problem. It does not know your local market, your confidence level, or your bills. Use it to widen your thinking, then pick the number yourself.

What do I do with all the answers?

Put them in one place. A single document, a Claude Project, a note on your phone, whatever you will actually open. Your offer, your pricing, and your customer sketch become the context you paste into everything else you do, which makes every future prompt better than the last one.

Start with one

You do not need a strategy today. You need one clear sentence about what you sell and one message sent to someone who went quiet. Prompts one and five. That is the whole assignment.

Starting a business is mostly a series of small decisions made without enough information, and the thing that helps most is having something to think out loud with at 10pm when nobody else is awake. That is what these prompts are for.

If you would rather learn this alongside people going through exactly the same thing, that is what happens every day inside Club Jam on Skool. It is $47 a month with a 7-day free trial, more than 220 on-demand modules, and a room full of everyday business owners who are not technical either. We share what is working, we help each other fix the messy version, and nobody gets told to just go read the documentation.

Come start your business with a little backup. 🧡