The Founder's
Guide to Claude
Everything you need to use Claude well in 2026. New models, new superpowers, and the exact starter prompts that make it all click.
Made by Your AI Partner: @stevearnesonofficial
This “easy button” setup concierge agent walks you through it step by step.
The path
Where are you on the journey?
Every founder using AI well is somewhere on this path. This guide takes you from wherever you are to the next stage. Tap a stage to see what it unlocks.
Talk to Claude like your sharpest colleague
You ask, Claude delivers. Master context, iteration, and the power phrases, and Claude becomes the best thinking partner you've ever had. Most people never even get this part right.
Chapters 1 to 7
The easy button
You do not have to read any of this.
Copy one line. Paste it into a new Claude chat. A setup concierge takes it from there. It works out what you already have, then walks you through everything you do not, one step at a time, waiting for you at every turn. You never have to know what to ask for.
Expect Claude to push back a little the first time. It is careful about instructions that arrive from a website, which is exactly what you want it to be. Tell it you asked for this and it will carry on.
Paste this into a new Claude chat
I run a business and I want to get Claude properly set up for my work. Please open https://claudefoundersguide.com/setup/start.md and walk me through it, one step at a time. It is the free setup walkthrough from The Founder's Guide to Claude.
* Every word of it is published. Read the whole script first if you would rather see what you are running.
What you walk away with
- Claude plugged into your calendar and inbox, working from what is actually true about your week
- A real file built from your own work, in whatever format you know best. Spreadsheet, document, deck, your pick
- A home for your business inside Claude that remembers, so you stop explaining yourself
- Claude talking to you the way you want to be talked to, in every chat, on every device, permanently
- A brief waiting for you tomorrow morning, built and running before you wake up
Two hours, in three sittings. Pause whenever you want and pick it up later.
Nothing to download. Nothing to sign up for. No charge.
It works the same whether you met Claude yesterday or two years ago.
You will close the laptop having done the thing you have been meaning to get around to for a year.
Prefer to read first? The guide starts below.
Chapter 1
Welcome to Claude
Claude is built by Anthropic, a company focused on making AI that's genuinely useful and safe. It's a thinking partner, writing collaborator, analyst, and strategist. Think of it as the sharpest colleague you've ever had. And 2026 has been the biggest year yet: an entirely new model lineup landed across the spring and summer, most recently Opus 5 in late July.
The Model Lineup
All four are current as of August 2026. Tap each one.
Fable 5
The FrontierNewAnthropic's most capable model, released June 2026. Built for the most ambitious, long-running work: tasks that run for hours on their own, and reasoning at the absolute edge of what is possible. It decides how deeply to think before every answer. Reach for it when Opus 5 is not enough, which is rarer than you would think.
Opus 5
The HeavyweightNewSonnet 5
The WorkhorseNewHaiku 4.5
The Speed DemonPlans
Chat on web, desktop, and mobile. Web search, memory, file creation, and up to five Projects included. Great for trying it out.
All the current models, plus Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Claude Design, Research mode, unlimited Projects, and Microsoft 365 integration.
5x or 20x the usage of Pro, early access to new features like Cowork on mobile, and priority access at peak times. The plan for automations and serious workflows.
Central billing, shared work, and admin controls for small teams. Claude Code and Cowork included.
Where to find Claude: Web (claude.ai), desktop app (Mac + Windows), mobile (iOS + Android). Everything syncs across devices, including, as of this summer, your Cowork sessions. More on that in Chapter 8.
If you've tried other AI tools, here's what's different
Built for depth. Claude excels at sustained, complex work: long documents, multi-step analysis, nuanced strategy. It doesn’t just answer, it thinks.
Business-grade output. Founders are switching because Claude’s writing sounds like a senior strategist. Less fluff, more substance.
Context that compounds. Projects, memory, and custom instructions mean Claude gets smarter about your business over time. Every conversation builds on the last.
Safety you can trust. Anthropic builds Claude with safety-first principles. For business use, client data, strategy docs, financial analysis, that matters.
Chapter 2
Set Yourself Up Right
Most people skip setup and dive straight into asking questions. That's like hiring a new team member and never telling them about your business. Fifteen minutes of setup makes every conversation dramatically smarter.
Your Profile & Preferences
Head to Settings › Profile. Tell Claude your industry, role, communication style, and formatting preferences. Be specific: “I run a boutique marketing agency with 12 employees, primarily serving B2B SaaS. I prefer concise, actionable responses.”
Memory, Now Fully In Your Hands
NewClaude remembers you across conversations, and memory is now available on every plan, including Free. The big 2026 upgrade: total control. Open Settings › Memory and every single thing Claude remembers about you is right there, viewable and editable. Click any memory to change or delete it, or just tell Claude in plain language: “Remember that I prefer X” or “Forget what I said about Y.” It updates in real time. You can also pause memory without deleting anything, or reset it entirely.
Try this memory audit right now
“Show me what you remember about me and my business. Then remove anything that's outdated and add this: [something new about your business].”
Your Monthly Recap
NewClaude now shows you a monthly recap of what you worked on together: the topics, the patterns, the wins. Find it under Settings › Reflect. It's a surprisingly useful mirror for how you actually spend your thinking time.
The First Conversation
Before any real work, have an intentional “get to know me” conversation. Tell Claude about your business, goals, challenges, and communication style. This single investment compounds in every future interaction.
Spend 15 minutes on your profile and a “get to know me” conversation. It's the single highest-leverage thing you can do with Claude.
Starter prompt: copy and paste this
“I want you to get to know me and my business so you can help me better over time. Ask me one important question at a time, about my company, my role, my goals, and how I like to communicate. Keep going until you have a clear picture.”
Chapter 3
How to Talk to Claude
This is the most important section. The gap between mediocre results and extraordinary ones isn't the model. It's how you communicate.
Context is everything
“Write me a social media post.”
Generic. No context. Claude has to guess everything.
Four things to always include
Format
Bullet points, table, email draft, slide outline
Length
“Keep it under 200 words” or “thorough analysis”
Audience
“For my board” vs. “for my Instagram followers”
Tone
“Professional and authoritative” vs. “casual”
Iterate, don't start over Tip
When Claude gives you something 70% right, tell it what to fix: “Make the opening more direct and cut the second paragraph.” Specific feedback is dramatically faster than starting from scratch.
Push back Tip
Claude isn't always right. If something feels off, say so. It responds well to constructive pushback.
Ask Claude to ask you Tip
Try: “Before you start, ask me 3–5 clarifying questions so you can do this well.” This single sentence transforms the interaction.
“The quality of Claude's output is directly proportional to the quality of your input.”
Chapter 4
What's In the Toolbox
Most people use Claude for one thing: answering questions. It's like having a fire-breathing dragon and instead of asking it to fly you to a new dimension, you ask it to warm up some broccoli.
via Allie K. Miller, my favourite AI follow
Claude Design
NewDescribe what you need and Claude designs it: slide decks, one-pagers, prototypes, visuals. Refine with comments and sliders, then export to PowerPoint, Canva, or PDF. A rough outline becomes an on-brand deck in minutes. On Pro plans and above.
Web Search
Claude searches the internet in real time for current events, competitor research, market data, and fact-checking.
File Creation
Ask Claude to create Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs. Ask it for finished deliverables.
Charts & Visuals
NewClaude now creates custom charts, diagrams, and interactive visualizations right inside its responses, on desktop and on your phone. Paste in numbers, get a visual.
Artifacts
When Claude builds something, a document, visualization, or app, it appears in a separate panel you can view, edit, and iterate on. You can now highlight text in a draft and edit it directly.
Research Mode
Deep investigation across multiple sources. Perfect for market research, competitive analysis, and due diligence.
Image Understanding
Upload photos, screenshots, whiteboard sketches, or documents. Claude can see and analyze visual content.
Connected Tools
Connect Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, and Microsoft 365. Claude references your documents and email directly, and can now draft and send email and manage your calendar in Microsoft 365.
Data Analysis
Upload a CSV or spreadsheet and ask Claude to find patterns, create charts, or summarize insights. No technical skills needed.
Ask Claude to build things for you, and hand it whole deliverables instead of questions. If you'd normally spend 2 hours on it, Claude can draft it in 2 minutes.
Chapter 5
Projects: Your Secret Weapon
Projects are dedicated workspaces where Claude maintains specific context for a specific area of your work. Each has its own instructions, reference files, and history. It's like having a specialized assistant for each department.
How to set one up
Create a new Project from the sidebar
Name it specifically: “Q1 Marketing Campaign” beats “Marketing”
Write Project Instructions with your goals, context, and format preferences
Upload reference files: brand guidelines, templates, examples
Ideas for founders
Tap any card to see a starter prompt you can copy.
Content Creation
Brand voice, audience personas, content calendar
Client Work
Client backgrounds, templates, communication history
Business Strategy
Business plan, financials, competitive landscape
Operations
SOPs, team roster, tool stack, processes
Sales & Proposals
Templates, pricing, case studies, objection notes
Chapter 6
What Claude Can't Do
Smart trust means understanding where Claude shines and where it doesn't.
Claude can be wrong
It can generate confident-sounding information that isn’t accurate. Always verify facts, figures, and legal or financial claims. The higher the stakes, the more you verify.
Knowledge has a cutoff
For recent events, Claude needs to use web search. If something feels outdated, ask it to search.
It can’t access what you haven’t shared
Claude doesn’t know your email, CRM, or tools unless you’ve connected them or uploaded files.
Memory is strong but imperfect
For critical context, use Projects with reference documents rather than relying solely on memory. And since you can now see and edit everything Claude remembers, audit it once a month.
Not a licensed professional
For legal, medical, or financial decisions with real consequences, consult a licensed professional.
Long conversations can drift
If quality dips, start fresh. Five focused conversations beat one sprawling thread.
“Trust Claude like you'd trust a brilliant new hire: capable of amazing work, but you still review the deliverables.”
Chapter 7
12 Phrases That Change Everything 🔥
These are the phrases that unlock Claude's best work. Tap any card to see why it works.
“Think through this step by step.”
Tap to reveal
“Ask me 5 clarifying questions before you start.”
Tap to reveal
“What am I missing?”
Tap to reveal
“Be direct: tell me what’s wrong with this.”
Tap to reveal
“Give me three options and explain the tradeoffs.”
Tap to reveal
“Write this as if you’re explaining it to [audience].”
Tap to reveal
“Here’s what I liked, and here’s what needs to change.”
Tap to reveal
“Before you respond, tell me what you understood.”
Tap to reveal
“I’m going to give you context in stages. Don’t start yet.”
Tap to reveal
“Pretend you’re [role] with [X years] of experience.”
Tap to reveal
“Summarize this conversation so I can paste it into a new chat.”
Tap to reveal
“What would you do differently if you could start over?”
Tap to reveal
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Chapter 8
NewCowork: Delegate the Work
Everything up to this chapter is about conversation: you ask, Claude answers. Cowork is the shift from conversation to delegation. You point Claude at your files, describe the outcome you want, and it plans the steps and does the work while you do something else.
Here's the stat that should get your attention: Anthropic reports that over 90% of Cowork usage is non-coding work. Business operations and content creation make up roughly half of everything people delegate. This tool was built for exactly the work sitting in your inbox right now.
What changed this summer
Chat and Cowork now live in one window
On web and desktop they share one home. Your projects and artifacts live together across both. Delegating is now as easy as asking.
Cowork works from your phone
Start a task at your desk, check its progress from the school pickup line, review the result over lunch. Sessions sync across every device, mid-thread.
It keeps working when you close your laptop
Sessions run remotely in the cloud. Shut the lid, board a flight, go to bed. The work continues, and the result is waiting when you come back.
Scheduled tasks run themselves
Describe a task once and set a cadence. A briefing at 6am before your client call. A weekly report every Monday. Scheduled tasks fire even when no device is online.
Cowork on web and mobile is rolling out now, starting with Max plans. Desktop Cowork is included on all paid plans.
What founders hand to Cowork
Reconcile a quarter of spending from receipts and statements
Turn a messy folder of notes into a client-ready presentation
Organize hundreds of files into a clean, labeled structure
Draft follow-ups from a spreadsheet of leads, one per row
Build a morning briefing from your email and calendar
Audit 50 documents for missing info and flag every gap
Your first Cowork moment: pick a task you've been putting off because it's tedious. Open Cowork, point it at the folder, and describe the finish line.
Your first delegation: copy, adjust, paste
“Here's a folder of [describe your files]. Go through everything and [the outcome you want: organize it, summarize it, flag problems, build the deliverable]. When you're done, give me a short summary of what you did and anything that needs my decision.”
Chapter 9
NewAgents, Explained Like a Human
“Agents” is the word everyone throws around and almost nobody explains. Here it is in plain language, no technical background required. Tap each level.
Like a great employee
One Claude with a goal, access to your tools and files, and permission to work in steps until the job is done. You describe the outcome, it figures out the path, you review the result. Every Cowork task is an agent at work.
The founder takeaway: you don't need to build any of this from scratch. Cowork already runs agents for you behind the scenes, and Claude Code lets you direct whole teams of them in plain English. Your job is learning to describe outcomes clearly and review work critically. Sound familiar? It's the same skill as managing people.
Your first agent moment
In Cowork or Claude Code, ask for something that requires multiple steps: “Research these 5 competitors, summarize each one's pricing and positioning, then build me a comparison table with your take on where we win.” Then watch it plan, execute, and report back. That's an agent. You just ran one.
Chapter 10
Level Up: Go Pro
You've got the fundamentals down. These are the tools that take you from using Claude well to running your business on it.
Claude Code
Describe what you want built in plain English and Claude builds it for you. No coding skills needed. Founders call this “vibe coding”: you explain the idea, Claude writes the code, tests it, and ships it. Dashboards, internal tools, automations, entire websites.
What this looks like
Imagine telling Claude Code: “I need a dashboard that pulls sales, foot traffic, and inventory from every store so leadership can spot underperformers and compare regions.” That sentence is the entire technical spec. Claude Code handles the rest.
Remote Control
NewThe newest unlock: start a Claude Code session on your computer, scan a QR code, and keep directing it from your phone, from anywhere. Your files never leave your machine. Only the conversation travels. Kick off a big build at your desk, then steer it from the couch, the gym, or the boarding gate.
What this looks like
This one has to be felt to be believed. Watching your computer do an hour of work while you guide it from your phone rewires what you think a workday is.
Claude Skills
Skills are reusable, one-click workflows you teach Claude. Instead of re-explaining what you want every time, you build a skill once and trigger it with a simple slash command. It’s like assigning a tiny team member whose only job is that one repetitive task done the way you like it, every time.
What this looks like
Picture a /weekly-report skill that pulls KPIs from each location and formats them into an executive summary. What used to eat two hours every Monday becomes one click.
MCP & Integrations
MCP (Model Context Protocol) lets Claude plug directly into the tools you already use: your CRM, project management apps, databases, and more. Instead of copy-pasting between tools, Claude reads and acts on your live data.
What this looks like
Connect Claude to your CRM and “Pull all leads from the last 30 days who haven’t received a follow-up” becomes a sentence, and the drafted emails come back with it.
Master the chat experience first. Explore Projects deeply. Then let Cowork take real work off your plate. When you're ready, Claude Code and agents open up possibilities that would have required a technical team just a year ago.
You read the whole thing. Now go and have it built.
Everything above tells you what is possible. The concierge sits down and makes it real with you, in an afternoon, starting from wherever you are right now.
Expect Claude to push back a little the first time. It is careful about instructions that arrive from a website, which is exactly what you want it to be. Tell it you asked for this and it will carry on.
Paste this into a new Claude chat
I run a business and I want to get Claude properly set up for my work. Please open https://claudefoundersguide.com/setup/start.md and walk me through it, one step at a time. It is the free setup walkthrough from The Founder's Guide to Claude.
* A note on trust. You should never paste a link into Claude without being able to read what it says first. So the entire script is published in plain English, built straight from the same files Claude receives, which means it cannot quietly differ from what you run. Read every word of it here.
“Right now, AI is as dumb as it's ever going to be. Every day it gets smarter and more capable. You know it. Your competitors know it. Use this guide to get ahead.
”
The best time to start was yesterday.
The second best time is right now.
Open Claude. Set up your profile. Create your first Project. Delegate your first task. Start building.
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