# STEP 5: THE INTERVIEW **Goal:** Learn the things no connection can tell you, and gather the raw material Step 6 needs. The output is a single document about them. **Time:** 20 minutes. --- ## THE RULE THAT MAKES THIS GOOD **Never ask a question you can already answer.** You have read their calendar and their inbox. You are about to look up their business. So do not interview them like a stranger. Show them what you worked out and let them correct it. That flip is the difference between a form and someone paying attention. --- ## PART ONE: WHAT YOU ALREADY WORKED OUT Give them four to six specific statements about themselves, drawn from what you actually saw in their calendar and inbox. Be brave and be specific. Getting one wrong is useful. > Here is what I think I know about you. Correct anything that is off. > > - You run a small team and most of your week is client facing. > - Tuesday and Wednesday are your heavy days and Friday afternoons are quiet. > - Most of your inbound comes from referrals rather than anything cold. > - You write short emails and you skip greetings. > - The thing eating your time right now is scheduling and rescheduling. Then wait. Their corrections are worth more than any question you could invent. **If their connections are off:** skip to the research below, then ask them to describe the business in two or three sentences and reflect it back. --- ## PART TWO: GO AND LOOK THEM UP Do this before you ask a single question. It is the difference between generic questions and ones that make them sit up. **Find the company.** You usually already have it, from an email signature, a meeting invite, or the domain on their address. If you do not, ask for the company name or website in one line and move on. **Then actually look.** Search the web for the business. Read their site if they have one. Look at how they describe themselves, what they sell, who they say it is for, how they price, how big they are, anything recent. **Guardrails, and these matter:** - **Confirm it is them before you use anything.** Company names collide. Say what you found and ask "is this you?" before building on it. - **Never state something you found as fact.** Say where it came from. "Your site says you work mostly with independent brokerages, is that still true?" - **Do not be strange about it.** Their business, their public site, their public profile. Nothing personal, nothing dug up, nothing about their family. If you would not say it in a first meeting, do not say it here. - **If you find nothing, say so and move on.** Two sentences, no apology. Plenty of good businesses have no web presence. **Then use it.** Every question below should be sharpened by what you read. Generic: "who are your customers?" Sharpened: "your site talks to independent brokerages but three of your last five meetings were with teams inside big franchises. Which one is the business you actually want?" That question is only possible because you looked. That is the whole point. --- ## PART THREE: THE QUESTIONS Ask **one at a time.** Wait for each. React to each. Never send the list. Anthropic's guidance says instructions should cover four things: the approaches and methods someone prefers, the terms and concepts they use, the scenarios they run into, and how they want to be communicated with. These questions exist to get all four, plus the context Step 6 needs to explain why each instruction exists. 1. **What are you actually trying to make happen in the next ninety days?** Push for something specific. "Grow" is not an answer, ask once more. 2. **What part of your week do you dread?** The highest value question here. Whatever they say becomes the lead section of the daily brief in Step 7. Note it exactly. 3. **What do you find yourself asking for over and over?** Their recurring scenarios. Emails, proposals, summaries, first drafts, research, pricing. This is the bucket most people never think to fill and it is the one that makes instructions actually bite. 4. **What words do you use that an outsider would get wrong?** Their vocabulary. What they call their customers, their offers, their stages, their internal shorthand, acronyms, the words they refuse to use. Ask for the ones they hate too. 5. **When someone does work for you, what makes it good?** Their preferred method. Do they want options or a recommendation. Do they want the reasoning or the answer. Do they want it finished or eighty percent. 6. **How do you want me to talk to you?** Push past adjectives. "Direct" is not usable. Ask what direct looks like. Length, greetings, hedging, whether they want to be challenged. 7. **What have I done in this conversation that you did not like?** Almost everyone has something and almost nobody volunteers it. This produces better instructions than asking what they hate in the abstract, because it is about something that actually happened. If an answer is thin, one follow up, then move on. Do not interrogate. --- ## PART FOUR: GET A WRITING SAMPLE Do not skip this. Anthropic's own prompting guidance calls examples one of the most reliable ways to steer tone and structure, more reliable than describing the tone in words. Someone saying "I write casually" gives you almost nothing. Three things they actually wrote gives you everything. Ask for it plainly: > Paste me two or three things you have written that sound like you. Emails are > perfect. Boring ones are better than good ones. **If their email is connected, offer to fetch instead.** Search their sent mail, pull three real messages, and show them what you picked. Faster and more honest, because people hand over their best writing rather than their normal writing. Then read the samples back for pattern, out loud, in three or four lines. Sentence length. Greetings or none. Sign off. Do they hedge. Do they use lists. Do they open with the ask or bury it. Get them to confirm or correct. Keep these samples. Step 6 uses them directly. --- ## PART FIVE: THE DOCUMENT Write it. One page, plain language, sections along these lines: - Who they are and what the business does, including what you verified from their site and what they corrected - What they are chasing in the next ninety days - Who they serve - What they ask for most often - Their vocabulary, the words they use and the words they avoid - How they work and what makes work good to them - How they want to be spoken to - Two or three of their real writing samples, kept verbatim Show it in full. Ask one question: "What did I get wrong?" Fix it. Do not defend anything. Then have them add it to the Project knowledge next to the file from Step 3. Tell them what it is: the reason they never have to explain themselves again. --- ## PROOF GATE The document exists, it contains real writing samples, they have read it, they have corrected at least one thing, and it is in the Project. All five. --- ## NEXT Show the progress line, then open `https://claudefoundersguide.com/setup/05-instructions.md`.