Five prompts beat fifty
By now you have seen a couple of dozen prompts across this course. You are not going to remember them, and you should not try.
What actually happens in a working business is this: you use five or six prompts over and over, and everything else you improvise. The plumber uses the quote one and the chaser one every week. The photographer uses the enquiry reply and the description one. Nobody uses all of them.
So this lesson is about building your own short list, keeping it somewhere you will actually find it, and making it sound like you.
In plain English
- Prompt pack:
- Your personal collection of prompts that work, saved somewhere you can copy them from in five seconds.
- Voice sample:
- Two or three things you wrote yourself, pasted into a prompt so the AI matches how you sound.
- Placeholder:
- The square-bracket bit of a prompt you swap out each time, like the client's name or the job.
Build it outside this site
LearnAI has no accounts and stores nothing about you. Nothing you type here is saved, and nothing follows you to the next lesson. That is deliberate, and it means your toolkit has to live somewhere you own.
Anywhere you can copy and paste from quickly will do. A single note in your phone's notes app. A pinned document. A text file on the desktop. The medium matters far less than the rule: one place, and you can reach it in five seconds while standing in a customer's kitchen.
Put the file where your hands already go. If you live in your email, make it a draft email to yourself. If you live in your phone, make it a pinned note. A perfectly organised system in an app you never open is worth nothing.
The pack
Copy the whole thing into your note. Delete the ones you will never use, because a short list you trust beats a long one you skim.
Below is a proposal I wrote that won the work. Write a new one in the same
structure and voice for this job.
CLIENT AND WHAT THEY WANT: [ ]
WHAT I WILL DO: [ ]
NOT INCLUDED: [ ]
TIMELINE: [ ]
PRICE: [ ] (reproduce these figures exactly, do not calculate anything)
RISKS: [ ]
If anything important is missing, ask me instead of guessing.
MY WINNING PROPOSAL:
[paste]
Reply to this customer message.
WHAT THEY SAID: [paste, with names and personal details removed]
MY ANSWER IN ROUGH WORDS: [ ]
THE THING THEY HAVE NOT THOUGHT OF: [ ]
NEXT STEP: [ ]
Warm and human, under 100 words, one clear next step.
Match the voice in the examples below.
TWO OF MY OWN MESSAGES:
[paste]
Write a short payment reminder.
Invoice [ ] for [ ], due [ ], now [ ] days late. Chaser number [ ].
The work was [ ] and they were happy with it. I want to keep working with them.
Polite, not apologetic. Do not say sorry to chase. State the amount and the due
date. One clear way to pay and a date I expect it by. Under 90 words.
Assume they forgot rather than that they are avoiding me.
I run [ ] in [ ]. I am looking into [pricing / a supplier / a decision].
Do not estimate any prices, rates or market figures. If you do not have a source
I have given you, say so instead of producing a number.
Give me: what to check, where to find each item, the questions my decision needs
to answer, and an empty table for me to fill in with real figures.
Below is me rambling about [a process / a job / a plan]. It is out of order
and repeats itself.
Turn it into a clear numbered document someone else could follow.
Keep every specific detail I mentioned. Keep my reasons where I gave them.
Where I was vague or contradicted myself, do not guess: list it under
Open questions at the end.
TRANSCRIPT OR NOTES:
[paste]
Checkpoint
Your toolkit lives in your own note, not on this site. One place, reachable in five seconds, with the prompts you actually use.
The two lines that go on everything
Add these to the top of your note, because they fix more bad output than any clever prompt ever will.
The first is your voice sample instruction: match the voice in the examples below, including sentence length and how formal I am. Then paste two things you genuinely wrote. This is the single biggest improvement available for one minute of setup.
The second is the no-guessing instruction: if you do not have the information, ask me instead of inventing it. Without it, every gap in your brief gets filled with something confident and possibly wrong.
โ Weak prompt
Prompt
Write a follow up to a customer who has not replied about the quote I sent.
Output
Dear valued customer, I hope this message finds you well. I wanted to follow up regarding the quotation we provided for your consideration. Please let me know if you require any further information.
No voice, no specifics, no reason to reply. It reads like it came from a company rather than from the person who stood in their kitchen last week.
โ Good prompt
Prompt
Write a follow up to a customer who has not replied to the quote I sent 8 days ago, for a kitchen tap replacement. I have a free slot on the 14th which I can hold for a few days. If you need any detail I have not given you, ask rather than inventing it. Match the voice in the two messages below. [paste two of your own messages]
Output
Hi Tom, just checking in about the tap. No rush, but I have got the 14th free and can hold it until Friday if that is any use to you. If the price was the sticking point, say so and I will tell you what I can do.
It sounds like a person with a diary, it gives one specific reason to reply, and it is roughly what you would have written if you had had the time.
Where the toolkit stops
Three limits to keep pinned in your head alongside the prompts.
Every number, date and promise in anything you send is yours, not the AI's. Check it before it leaves.
Customer details, credentials and confidential terms stay out of the chat box. Redact first, paste second.
And anything touching contracts, tax, employment or your legal structure is a starting point for a conversation with a professional, never a substitute for one. AI is genuinely useful for turning up to that meeting with clear questions and organised figures. That is where its job ends.
The failure mode to watch for is not bad writing. It is a business that gradually sounds like nobody. Keep the odd blunt sentence, the local reference, the way you actually talk. That is what people are buying, and it is the one thing the machine cannot supply.
Finish the course
That is the lot: proposals, pricing research, customer messages, descriptions, and getting the business out of your head onto paper. Pass the quiz below and the Shop Runner badge is yours.
Then go and do the fifteen minute version of one of these. Build the note. Paste in two things you wrote. The rest is just using it.
A good first week: save the pack, add your voice samples, and use exactly one prompt on one real job. The habit is worth more than the collection.
๐ Quiz
Question 1 of 4Why does your prompt pack need to live outside this site?