Getting Started with Claude AI (Part 1) Beginner's Guide for Small Business Owners

Hey everybody. Okay, so Claude has just become my most used AI tool, and it's actually my coworker and strategic partner. And if you're not using it yet, or if you feel like maybe you've seen it and you're not using it right, you are in the right place. My name is Robyn Anderson. My friends call me Jam, and I'm an AI educator, and I've trained thousands of small business owners on how to use AI without getting overwhelmed. And so today I'm going to break down exactly how to get started with Claude so you can start using it in your business today. We're gonna talk about what makes Claude different, how to talk to it, and I'm gonna show you a mistake almost everyone makes their first week. So let's get moving. And real quick, this video is for you if you're a coach, consultant, business owner, or professional who knows AI is important. But has felt like Claude has been maybe intimidating, or maybe you've been in ChatGPT or Gemini and you're not sure how to move. So I've been there. I actually just moved myself from ChatGPT to Claude, and I wanna show you this because Claude is genuinely different in so many ways, and it's gonna change how you work. So here we are in the welcome screen here, and Claude is built by a company called Anthropic. And the URL to get it is right at Claude.ai. You can sign up for free, so it's really a great place to start. Number one, it's a great writer. Obviously, there's all these little buttons here showing you how you can use it, but it has a massive context window, which means you can paste long documents, a contract, full email thread, video transcripts, And Claude will process the whole thing in seconds. It really feels like you're talking to somebody who's already inside your brain mixed with like a consultant and strategic thinking partner. So there's a free version and a paid version called Claude Pro, but if you're using it for your business, I would suggest using Claude Pro cuz it's totally worth it. Okay, so here's the big thing people usually do that's a mistake. They'll say like, Help me rewrite an email. And then that's just what they think that it can do. And then they'll be upset because the email comes back and it's like not really that impressive or not in its voice. So I want you to learn how to actually talk to Claude. So first you need to tell it who you are and you have to personally brief Claude on what you do. And what it needs to know about you. So what I like to do is actually a prompt like this. You could say, I wanna work with you and you only. I want you to be my strategic partner in my business. Ask me questions so that you can understand who I am, what my business is, who I serve, what my products are, my systems, what my goals are, and how we can work together so that I can be the human in the loop while AI helps run my business. I use this, I use this thing called Whisperflow, which is what just popped up, and it allows me to kind of just talk and it types for me. So that's what that was. So if you start with that, that is a great place. It'll actually create a like 8-page survey for you and you'll have to answer questions. I did mine and it took an hour and a half to answer, so don't rush through it. This is something that's really, really important for it to understand you and who you are. Now, if you're coming from ChatGPT or Gemini or another large language model, some people are saying to export your conversations, and I'm gonna say don't do that for a few reasons. So me personally, I've been using ChatGPT for so long. If I were to upload my conversations, it would be so confused because I've it everything from what's the weather in Miami to, you know, building content for a business or a client that I don't work with anymore. So start fresh, have it understand you in this way. Okay. Another thing about prompting. Prompting isn't so much a thing anymore as, you know, act as a marketing professional and write a blog. That's not what we do. You need to be specific about what you need. Not so much the format of this prompt. So for instance, you could say maybe you want a LinkedIn post. You don't just say, write me a post. You'd say, write me a LinkedIn post in a casual and encouraging tone about the biggest mistake I see when clients are changing their careers. Keep it 200 words, end with a question. So something like that. It's brief. It'll get you results. And again, this is a great place to start. In my next video, I'm gonna talk about skills, which will kind of change how we prompt. But to get started, this is a great place. And also give it context or examples. If you have a big LinkedIn following and you've been doing this for a while, if you could paste in here by attaching files or take a screenshot of your current LinkedIn and it'll sh— it'll look at your LinkedIn and understand, okay, This is how you write. The more raw material you give Claude, the better results you get back. And then my next tip is to iterate. So never take one draft as the final answer. You can always say like, make this punchier. Let's add a story on top. And the cool part about Claude is it doesn't just write for you right away. It will ask questions. Let's see if it asks me questions after I do this. Oh, nope, it's going right into it, but it's because mine is so trained on me and I also have a LinkedIn skill, so it's checking that out right now. All right, and then I want to show you your secret weapon. This is something that I wish somebody showed me right away. It's called projects. So projects let you create a dedicated workspace for a very specific client or a specific role. Or a specific guide. This is one that I did for a client the other day. I was just showing an example. I had a room full of— they were mostly sales guys, and their company is very high touch, and they oftentimes will take their clients to baseball games or buy them tequila or whatever to try to get meetings or stay in touch. And they're kind of running out of ideas, so this is a project that is built specifically for them on what they should get their specific client. So if we click in, you could say, um, I work with a guy named Mike who likes to golf. So that's like not a great long prompt, but this is trained so well on who they are, it'll ask me a few questions and then it'll give some quick gift examples or ideas for them. So this is what I'm talking about where it'll ask you questions. So we'll say he's a customer, he's a loyal customer, he's laid back. All right, so now it's going to give me a little playbook for him and what he might like. So no more explaining yourselves. In this project, I uploaded a bunch of information on this company and their clients and how they already work to them, work with them. So yeah, every single time we don't have to explain ourselves. We can just do it a quick, you know, hey, I work with this guy, here's the thing. It asks you a few questions and then we're on to the next thing. So these are some great ideas. For Mike. The other thing that I want you to do is when you leave this video, I want you to try 3 things. So I want you to make 1 project based on 1 thing you do. And then here are the other things I want you to do. I want you to ask it to summarize a long document. So if you have to review maybe like a, I know in finance people have to review like illustrations or carrier proposals. Or even if you are just like in your daily life, I got new health insurance the other day and I put in my health insurance contract and it really helped me understand it in plain English. Like, what do I actually need to know? Next, I want you to draft a follow-up email, but I want you to give it context to the email. So who you met, what you talked about, what you want them to do next, and then show any sort of examples that you've done in the past. And then next, I want you to brainstorm content ideas with Claude. Tell it your niche, your audience, and the platform, and ask for 10 content ideas that you haven't posted about yet, but you'd like to start. So, okay, this is a quick way to get started. Let's do a quick recap. Claude is an AI assistant that works best when you brief it like a smart collaborator or partner. Tell it who you are, what you need, and give it context. Use projects to build permanent brains for your most important work. And iterate. Draft 1 is never the final answer. So if you want to go deeper on this, and if you want to learn how to use Claude plus a whole other stack of AI tools to actually run and grow your business, come hang out with us in Club Jam. It's my membership community. I'll show you it right here. We just did a whole week of content. This is my wrap-up for the week. We have over 280 people now in here and we are learning AI together. We meet at least 2 to 3 times a week, sometimes 5. This week was a fiver. And we're growing together and learning together. So if you haven't learned how to use AI yet or you're just starting, this is the great— this is a great place to be. So check my toolkit in my links and drop a comment. Tell me how you are using Claude, and I can't wait to see you on the next one.