You can spot an AI-generated deck from across the room, the same way you can spot bad kopi from the first sip. Flat. Watered down. More water content than a highly chlorinated public swimming pool, and roughly the same aftertaste.

The gradients are too enthusiastic. The icons don’t match. Every slide looks like it was brewed by someone who has never met your company. Technically it’s a presentation, the same way that cup is technically coffee.

Now compare that to your regular kopi uncle. The first few visits, you spell out your order: kopi siew dai, less ice, thick. He grumbles, but he remembers. After that, you just nod and the right cup appears. The magic isn’t the uncle. It’s that he has your order on file.

Claude Design works the same way. Prompt it cold and you get the swimming-pool kopi... generic, diluted, slightly wrong everywhere. Spend 10 to 15 minutes giving it your order first, and every deck after that comes out brewed to your taste.

Now time to prep your AI coffee beans

The three inputs that are your kopi order

The workflow comes down to preparing three inputs before you ever ask for a single slide, and each one feeds the next.

1. DESIGN MD

First, a DESIGN.md file: a plain text rulebook that spells out your exact colors, fonts, spacing, and how components like buttons and cards get styled. This is your order slip, written down precisely. You don’t write it from scratch. There’s a GitHub repo called awesome-design-md with free design files extracted from major brands. Grab one you like, then sanitize it, because Claude Design won’t copy a real brand’s guidelines directly.

Here’s the exact prompt I use to get the DESIGN.md file after downloading it.

I’m attaching a design system file extracted from [source]. Sanitize it for reuse:

1. REMOVE all proprietary/licensed content: brand names, trademarks, product names, and branded terminology (including nicknames like “[Brand] tight” or brand-specific labels); licensed fonts, replaced with the closest open-source equivalent (SIL OFL or similar), preserving any optical-size distinctions (display vs. text cuts); and brand-specific UI copy examples (e.g. product category names).

2. KEEP byte-identical: every hex value, font size, weight, line-height, letter-spacing, spacing token, radius, breakpoint, shadow value, component structure, and design principle. If a principle references the brand (”X’s ladder is...”), rewrite the attribution neutrally but keep the rule verbatim.

3. When replacing, prefer substitutes the document itself suggests (e.g. a font-substitution note) before using your own judgment.

4. Rename the system to “[new name]” (frontmatter name + any titles).

5. VERIFY before delivering: grep for all removed terms and confirm zero matches, and confirm the line count / structure is unchanged. Report what changed in two buckets: replaced vs. deliberately kept.

The strictness matters. The hex values and spacing tokens are the whole reason you’re borrowing the file. A lazy cleanup that “rewrites” them is like asking for kopi gao and getting kopi po.

2. DESIGN SYSTEM

Second, a design system: your DESIGN.md rebuilt into Claude Design’s native format. Start a new chat, click “Create Design System,” and upload your sanitized file ‘DESIGN.md’ file. This takes 5 minutes while it generates real mockups for you to review.

You can also upload your logo, icons, and a voice principles file so the copy sounds like you. This is the uncle committing your order to memory.

3. TEMPLATES

Third, a reusable template: a pre-built deck with a title slide, section dividers, and standard layouts. The design system controls how everything looks. The template controls how a deck is laid out. Same beans, standard pull, every single time.

Think of it this way: the design system is your kopi order (colors, fonts, logos)... the template is the cup it comes in (which slides, in what order).

One controls the look. The other controls the layout. Use them together, and every new deck starts on-brand and pre-structured instead of from a blank canvas.

Once your design system looks right, ask Claude Design to build the template. My prompt is deliberately lazy:

“Go ahead and build a slide deck template for weekly check in reports. You pick the number of slides.”

Then refine it with feedback. This is worth a few extra minutes, because every future deck references this template. Get the cup right once, and every kopi after that pours itself.

Feedback that compounds

When you give feedback on a deck, don’t just say “make the labels bigger.” Ask Claude Design to also save that feedback into a CLAUDE.md file, which it reads before every future design in that project.

Your corrections stop being one-off fixes and start becoming institutional memory. The tenth deck benefits from everything you taught it on the first nine.

“Less sweet” only needs to be said once. For surgical changes, you also get Edit (change an element yourself), Annotate (draw on a slide and describe the fix), and Tweaks (a toggle for decisions that touch every slide, like slide numbers).

Where it falls short

Structural editing inside Claude Design is weak. Dragging objects, reordering slides, and reliable undo don’t really work, so every change is effectively a re-prompt. If you need a real PowerPoint file, the PPTX export works in under a minute, but expect minor formatting losses like shifted text boxes or substituted fonts.

Budget 10 to 15 minutes of cleanup in PowerPoint itself. Otherwise, export as a standalone HTML file that opens in any browser, and you can even ask for a presenter-view button for speaker notes during live talks.

Back to the kopitiam

The reason AI slides taste flat is not that AI can’t design. It’s that most of us walk up to the counter, shout “coffee!” and expect our exact order.

The next time you need a deck, don’t open Claude Design and type “make me slides for my Q3 review”... instead, select the system, template, then prompt what you want. After that, you just nod, and the right cup appears.

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By 9am, “working” for 45 minutes and still don’t have a clear picture of what actually needs to happen today.

I recently started up my daily slack report and have shared it with my colleagues. With tweaks to personalise it for your needs, it is a real game-changer!

The information isn’t the problem. It’s everywhere. The problem is that nobody has organised it for you before you sit down.

With Cowork, you can have one waiting in your Slack DM every morning before you open a single app. (What the h**l is co-work? Read my guide here). Talk to Claude without typing by using my wisprflow link to get one month free!

What the Claude Chief-of-Stuff Brief Covers

Each morning, Cowork pulls together four stuff things:

Today’s calendar. Every meeting, who’s in it, and any conflicts or back-to-back blocks worth flagging. No surprises.

Important unread emails. Not your newsletters and automated notifications. Real messages from real people that need a reply or action from you which are surfaced and summarized.

Slack — what needs attention. Anything from yesterday that involves you: direct messages, @-mentions, threads you’re part of, questions directed at you. Captured with who sent it and what they need.

Watching — your starred Slack conversations. The channels and DMs you've starred in your sidebar and the conversations you've marked as worth watching. It gets checked for yesterday's activity and summarised in one section. No more missing what happened in the threads that matter most to you.

Everything lands as a single Slack DM, formatted as a Notion-ready to-do list. One message. Full context. Clear actions.

Step 1: Connect Your Tools in Cowork

Open the Claude Desktop app and go to the plugins section. You need three connectors:

Google Calendar: Install the Google Calendar plugin. Authenticate with your Google account. Cowork gets read access to your events only.

Gmail: Install the Gmail plugin. Same authentication flow. Cowork can read threads and draft replies, but it won’t send anything without your approval.

Slack: Install the Slack plugin. Authenticate with your workspace. This gives Cowork access to your messages, DMs, channels, and critically, your starred threads/saved items.

Once all three are connected, verify them by asking Claude in a Cowork session: “What’s on my calendar today?” If it returns real events, you’re set.

Step 2: Star the Right Slack Threads

The brief will only be as useful as what you’ve flagged. The starred items section summarises everything you’ve saved in Slack, so you need a habit around what gets starred.

A simple rule: star the channels and DMs that matter to you. Key project channels. Important client threads. DMs with people whose updates you can’t afford to miss. The brief checks every starred conversation for yesterday’s activity and surfaces anything worth knowing.

Don’t star everything. If a channel is starred, it means the brief will watch it for you every day…so be intentional about what makes the list.

Step 3: The Prompt

Paste this into a Cowork session with all three plugins connected. This is the full brief prompt, including the starred items section.

Steps:

1. Determine today's date (use bash if needed) and yesterday's date.

2. Calendar: Use the connected Google Calendar tool (list_events) to fetch all events for today, from now through end of day. Capture each meeting's time, title, location/video link if present, and key attendees. Note conflicts or back-to-back blocks. If nothing is scheduled, say so.

3. Important unread emails: Use the connected Gmail tool (search_threads) to find unread inbox emails (query "is:unread in:inbox"). Surface only important ones — direct messages, anything requiring a reply or action, time-sensitive items, messages from real people or key senders. Skip newsletters, promotions, and automated noise. Capture sender, subject, and what they want.

4. Slack — Needs Attention: Use the connected Slack tools to find anything from YESTERDAY that requires my attention or implies a to-do — direct messages, @-mentions, threads I'm part of, and requests/questions directed at me. Capture who, where (channel/DM), and the action needed.

5. Slack — Watching (Starred Conversations): Use the connected Slack tools to fetch my starred conversations (the channels and DMs I have starred in my sidebar). For each starred conversation, check for messages from YESTERDAY and summarize what's happening — who said what and whether anything requires my attention. Present as a "Watching" section. If a starred conversation had no activity yesterday, skip it.

6. Synthesize everything into a single prioritized TO-DO LIST suitable for importing into Notion. Format it as Markdown checkboxes, one task per line:
   - [ ] Task description (source: meeting/email/Slack — who/what)
   Order by priority/urgency. Group with a short header line if helpful, but keep every actionable item as a "- [ ]" checkbox line.

7. Above the to-do list, include a brief scannable summary with four short sections: "Today's Calendar", "Important Unread Emails", "Slack — Needs Attention (yesterday)", and "Watching (Starred Conversations)".

Delivery: Send the full brief as a Slack direct message to me using the connected Slack send_message tool. Do NOT send email. Lead the message with "Morning Brief — [today's date]".

Run it once manually to see what comes back. You’ll almost certainly find something you forgot about.

Step 4: Schedule It

Once the prompt is working, the last step is making it automatic. You don’t want to remember to run a brief which defeats the point.

In Cowork, go to Scheduled Tasks and create a new task. Set it to run daily at whatever time makes sense before your morning starts 7am works well if you like to review before you sit down at your desk.

Paste the prompt into the task body. Set it to repeat every weekday. Save it.

From that point on, the brief runs without you. By the time you open Slack in the morning, it’s already there.

Summary

The next time you sit down at 9am, don’t open Slack and start scrolling. Instead: read the brief, build your list, then start. You’ll know what the day actually requires in under three minutes.

That’s what a chief of staff does. Now you have one :D

You walk into the office, hit the blast of air-con, sit down at your desk, and open Claude. Then you start copying. Your Gmail thread. Your Slack messages. Your meeting notes from Granola.

You paste them one by one into the chat, building the context block Claude needs before it can help you with anything.

And you’re already stressed because your manager sent a 7am message that just said “can we sync today?”

Here’s what most people don’t know: Claude can read all of that itself. Your Gmail. Your Slack. Your meeting transcripts. It has over 200 direct connections to the apps you already pay for. You just have to tell it which ones to use.

They’re called Connectors. And if you haven’t set them up, you’ve been doing extra work you didn’t have to do.

Before You Start: Three Rules

1. Don’t leave them all on by default.

Every Connector loaded is context Claude has to scan before it answers. Turn them on per chat, off per chat. Treat the toggle like your office air-con remote, use what you need, nothing more.

2. Don’t use Connectors for creative work.

When you’re drafting a board paper or writing a pitch deck, you want a clean room. Slack noise. Gmail noise. Last quarter’s project noise. All of it pollutes the output. My default for writing: every Connector off. Always.

3. Don’t grant write access before you trust the read.

Read-only first. Watch how Claude uses your data for a week. Then give it write access. Most data accidents happen on day one, when someone connects a Connector with full permissions and asks Claude to “clean up my Drive.”

That person then spends the rest of the week explaining to IT what happened.

How to Connect Your Apps: Four Steps

1. Open Claude. Find the + inside the chatbox.

2. Click Connectors → Add connector. Pick one app.

3. Open a new chat. Click + in the chat bar → Connectors → toggle your app on.

4. Name the Connector in your prompt. Claude will use it.

One morning of setup. Never paste that context block again.

Five Connectors Worth Setting Up This Week

1. Granola — For Your Meeting Notes

If you’re still typing meeting notes by hand, you’re spending 20 minutes after every call doing admin that should be zero minutes.

Granola joins your Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet calls, captures the full transcript, and stores it automatically. Connect it to Claude and your notes become queryable.

After any meeting:

Pull my last meeting from Granola. Summarise in 5 bullets.
List every action item assigned to me, with deadlines.
Flag the 2–3 blockers I need to clear first.

Before a negotiation or difficult client call:

Read my last 3 Granola meetings with [client name] and my Gmail thread with them.
What are their top 3 concerns? What have I already committed to?

End of week, when your manager asks what you’ve been up to:

Pull all my Granola meetings from this week.
Give me a one-paragraph summary of what I worked on and what's still in progress.

You walk in fully briefed. They think you have an incredible memory. You don’t have to tell them man.

2. HubSpot — For Your Sales Pipeline

Your pipeline doesn’t move because nobody’s following up. Everyone’s too busy. The deals that should close this quarter are sitting in “Proposal Sent” going cold.

Claude fixes this without you having to open HubSpot at all.

Monday morning pipeline sweep:

Read my HubSpot pipeline.
List every deal in "Proposal Sent" that hasn't moved in 7 days or more.
For each: write a follow-up email I can send today.
Tone: direct, warm. No "just checking in."

Before a sales review with your boss:

Read my HubSpot pipeline.
Summarise my win rate this quarter versus last quarter.
List the 3 deals most likely to close before month end and why.

After closing a deal (or losing one):

Read my last 5 closed-won deals in HubSpot.
What do they have in common — industry, deal size, sales cycle length?

You send six follow-ups in the time it used to take to write one. And your Q4 review just got a lot easier to explain.

3. Notion — For Your Team’s Knowledge

Most folks have a Notion workspace. Half of it is outdated. A quarter of it no one can find. The other quarter is someone’s personal grocery list that somehow became the company wiki.

Connect Claude to it and at least you can surface what’s actually useful.

For content teams:

Go to Notion, [Content Calendar]. Extract the brief for this Thursday's post.
Write two new variations using the same structure and angle.

Before onboarding a new hire or briefing a freelancer:

Go to Notion, [SOPs]. Pull every process doc relevant to a new marketing hire.
Summarise each one in 3 sentences. Format it as a first-week reading list.

When you can’t remember what your team decided three weeks ago:

Search Notion for any pages related to [project name] updated in the last 30 days.
Give me the key decisions made and who owns what.

For those in larger enterprises running Confluence or SharePoint — Claude connects to those too. Same logic, bigger mess to untangle.

The point isn’t to let AI do your thinking. It’s to stop losing 15 minutes searching for the one paragraph you need before a meeting.

4. Microsoft 365 — Because Most Companies Run On It

One toggle. Four apps: Outlook, Teams, Calendar, OneDrive.

If you work in a bank, a GLC, a law firm, or any organisation with more than 200 people in Singapore, you are almost certainly on Microsoft. And yes….Claude is better than Copilot for this kind of work. Not a close comparison, sia.

Every Monday morning before your first meeting:

Read my Outlook and Calendar for today.
List every meeting where I have no prep notes yet.
For each: pull the relevant Teams thread or OneDrive doc.
Give me a one-paragraph brief per meeting.

When your inbox is a mess and your boss is waiting:

Read my Outlook inbox from the last 48 hours.
List every email that needs a reply, ranked by urgency.
Draft a response for the top 3.

When you need to find something that got buried:

Search my OneDrive for any document related to [project name] from the last 3 months.
Summarise what each file contains in one sentence.

Ten minutes after sitting down, you’re briefed for the entire day. Before your manager can ask if you’re “ready for the sync.”

Pro tip: This works best when the whole team adopts it. When people know that AI reads their Teams messages and emails, they start writing more clearly. Cleaner inputs. Better outputs. That’s not just a tech upgrade — that’s how you change how a team communicates.

5. Slack — For the Thread You Can Never Find

You know the one. The decision made three weeks ago in a channel you half-remember. The task someone mentioned in passing that quietly became your responsibility. The context buried 47 messages deep in a thread from last Tuesday.

Claude reads all of it.

Daily triage, before you open a single channel:

Read #ops-team, #client-xyz, #leadership from the last 48 hours.
Surface the 3 things I need to respond to today.
Skip standups, GIFs, and birthday messages.

When a project is going sideways and you need the full picture:

Read the entire #[project-channel] thread from the last 2 weeks.
Give me a timeline of what happened, what decisions were made, and what's still unresolved.

When someone drops a task in Slack and you need to act on it:

Read the last message from [person's name] in #[channel].
Extract the action items for me. Draft a reply confirming I'll handle them.

And because it’s connected to everything else, if the Slack thread references a Granola meeting or an email chain, you can ask Claude to read those too. One prompt. Full context. No tab-switching.

What Actually Changes

Most professionals use Claude like a vending machine. Insert prompt, collect output, walk away. Every session blank. Every transaction starting from zero.

Connectors change the relationship. Claude goes from a vending machine to the colleague who has been sitting in your meetings, reading your emails, and actually knows what’s going on before you say a word.

Set up one Connector this week. Not five. One. The one causing you the most copy-pasting right now.

Then open a new chat, toggle it on, and ask Claude something you’ve always had to look up manually.

You’ll know immediately if it’s working.

Here’s how to avoid common mistakes with Co-work.

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Claude Is Working Blind (And It’s Your Fault)

This is the root of most bad Cowork output. Claude can’t write like you, reason about your work, or pull from your context if you haven’t given it any.

Three things fix this.

First: a proper folder structure. Create ABOUT ME/, PROJECTS/, TEMPLATES/, and OUTPUTS/. Put your role, your company context, and samples of your actual work in ABOUT ME/. Point Cowork at this folder. Now Claude walks into every session with background, not a blank slate.

Second: an anti-AI writing file. Without it, Claude writes like Claude. Em dashes everywhere. “Delve into.” “Harnessing the power of.” The kind of corporate fluff that your kakis can spot from three paragraphs away. Fix it with one file:

# anti-ai-writing-style.md
- No em dashes. Use "..." or a full stop.
- Banned words: delve, harness, leverage, seamless, transformative
- Paragraphs: max 3 sentences
- Write the way I actually talk. Direct. Not corporate.

My guide here.

Third: real Global Instructions. “Be helpful, be concise” does nothing. It’s like telling a new hire “just do a good job” and being surprised when they guess wrong. Go to Settings → Cowork → Edit Global Instructions. Tell it which folders are off-limits, how to name files, when to ask versus execute, what it must never touch without confirmation. Set it once. Claude reads it every single session.

# GLOBAL INSTRUCTIONS

## BEFORE EVERY TASK
1. Read ABOUT ME/. No task starts without reading both files.
2. If the task relates to a project, read everything in the matching PROJECTS/ subfolder first.
3. If a matching template exists in TEMPLATES/, study its structure. Analyse the structure. Do not copy the content.

## FOLDER PROTOCOL
Read-only folders — never create, edit, or delete anything here:
- ABOUT ME/
- TEMPLATES/
- PROJECTS/

Write folder — the only place you deliver work:
- CLAUDE OUTPUTS/ — organise with one subfolder per project.

## NAMING CONVENTION
All files must follow: project_content-type_v1.ext
Examples: Hengxuanbraindump_v1.md / Ilovechar-kway-teow_v1.pptx

## OPERATING RULES
- If the brief is unclear, use AskUserQuestion. Do not fill gaps with generic filler.
- Do not over-explain. Deliver the work.
- Never delete files anywhere.
- Never modify files outside CLAUDE OUTPUTS/.
- Flag all assumptions before acting on them.

You’re Using Chat When You Should Be Using Cowork

Chat and Cowork look similar at a glance. They work completely differently.

Chat is conversational. You ask, Claude answers, you copy-paste the output somewhere. You are still the person moving everything. Claude is just giving you better words to carry.

Cowork is agentic. You describe the finished outcome. Claude makes a plan, reads your files, pulls from connected tools, and writes the output directly to your folder. You don’t move anything.

It’s the difference between having an advisor and having someone who actually does the work.

If you’re still copying text out of a Chat window and pasting it into Word, you’re doing the old workflow with a better assistant. Click the Cowork tab. Point it at your folder. That’s the starting line.

You’re Paying Opus Rates for Kopitiam Tasks

Opus burns tokens fast. It’s the right model for hard, multi-step reasoning — the kind of work where you actually need extended thinking. It is absolute overkill for grammar checks, short summaries, and quick lookups.

Hiring Opus to proofread a paragraph is like paying a Big 4 consultant to staple documents. The consultant can do it. You’re still wasting money.

Match the model to the task:

• Haiku 4.5 — simple lookups, quick answers, anything throwaway

• Sonnet — drafts, edits, standard analysis, most of your daily work

• Opus 4.7 — complex reasoning, multi-source synthesis, high-stakes output only

Your monthly usage allocation is finite. Burn it on Haiku tasks and you won’t have Opus capacity when a real problem lands on your desk. Be deliberate about this from day one.

Don’t use Haiku to make slides! It was horrendous for me.

You’re Still Writing Prompts Like It’s 2023

Here’s what most Cowork users do: open a session, type out a long detailed prompt explaining the task from scratch, get output, close the session, repeat tomorrow.

That’s exhausting. And it’s unnecessary.

Skills are reusable instruction sets that Claude loads on demand. One skill replaces 20 prompts. Create a folder at ~/.claude/skills/, add a subfolder for each skill with a SKILL.md file inside, and set a trigger phrase. Now instead of re-explaining your LinkedIn writing style every time, you type /linkedin and Claude loads the entire methodology automatically.

Connectors are the other half. Cowork without plugins is a hawker centre without the stalls — the infrastructure is there but nothing’s cooking. There are 11 official plugins. Connect Gmail, Slack, Notion, Drive, whatever your work actually lives in. Once connected, Claude reads your Slack thread directly instead of you copying it in. Output quality goes up because input quality goes up.

Type / inside Cowork to see what’s available. Install the three plugins that match your main tools. Three skills for your most repeated workflows. That’s it. Most of your prompt-writing disappears.

You’re Doing It Manually When It Should Run Without You

This is the most underused feature in Cowork and the one with the highest return per minute of setup time.

Cowork runs on a timer. Daily briefs, weekly reports, inbox summaries — all of it can execute automatically while you’re in a meeting, at lunch, or asleep. The workflow runs, the output lands in your folder, you come back to finished work.

Setup takes five minutes. Describe the task and the cadence in a Cowork session. It stores and runs.

Simple starting schedule:

• 7:00 daily — Summarise yesterday’s emails, flag what needs action today

• Monday 9:00 — Pull last week’s numbers, draft a team update

• Friday 17:00 — Draft next week’s content plan from your notes folder

The compounding matters. Monday starts with the report already written. Friday ends with next week already roughed in. You stop catching up and start staying ahead.

Most people treat Cowork like a faster way to do what they’re already doing. It isn’t. The value is in the infrastructure — context files, skills, connectors, scheduled automations. Build it once on a Saturday afternoon. Then it runs.

Most people using Claude are prompting it for memos and slide decks. Meanwhile, their inbox is eating 90 minutes a day and nobody’s done anything about it.

Email is the least-touched automation surface in most people’s workflow. That’s backwards. It’s also the most valuable place to start.

Here’s why it gets ignored: email feels personal. It feels like something you have to touch. Like how your uncle insists only he knows how to order at the hawker stall — as if the chicken rice auntie won’t serve anyone else.

Buried action items. Threads that needed a reply three days ago. Newsletters mixed with client escalations. Cold outreach that somehow made it past the filter. Most of what’s in your inbox is noise. The signal is buried.

Claude can fix that. And it takes about 20 minutes to set up.

The Problem (Said Plainly)

Two things are killing your productivity through email.

First: noise-to-signal ratio. Your inbox treats a vendor cold pitch and a board member follow-up the same way with the newest on top. There is no prioritisation or context. You’re manually sorting through 80 things to find the 3 that actually matter.

It’s like a kopitiam without a queue system. Everything arrives at once, and you’re just hoping you catch the right thing before it goes cold.

Second: manual execution. Even when you find the important threads, you’re still doing every follow-up yourself. Drafting replies. Extracting action items. Forwarding summaries. Tasks that take 2 minutes each, ten times a day, add up to hours.

Neither of these is a discipline problem. It’s a systems problem. And systems problems get solved with systems.

Here’s how you can solve it.

The Setup: Connect Your Inbox to Claude

You need the Claude Desktop app with a connected email plugin. Both Gmail and Outlook are supported.

For Gmail: Install the Gmail plugin from the Cowork plugin marketplace. Authenticate with your Google account. Claude gets read access to your threads and send access only when you approve a draft.

For Outlook: Install the Microsoft 365 plugin. Same flow — authenticate, approve access scope. Works with personal and work accounts.

Once connected, Claude can read your threads, search by sender or topic, draft replies, and flag items all from inside a Cowork session. No copy-pasting. No switching tabs.

What Claude Can Actually Do With Your Email

Here are the four automations worth setting up first.

1. Diagnose and prioritise your inbox. Ask Claude to read your last 50 unread threads, categorise them by type (action required, FYI, cold outreach, newsletters, internal updates), and rank the ones that need a response today. You go from 50 emails to a 5-item action list in under 2 minutes.

2. Draft replies to common email types. Client check-ins. Meeting requests. Follow-ups on proposals. Claude learns your tone from your communication style file and drafts replies that sound like you. You review, tweak if needed, approve. The drafting time drops to near zero.

3. Extract action items and route them. Claude reads through a thread and pulls every implicit and explicit task. “Can you send over the deck by Thursday?” becomes a task in your to-do list. You stop losing things that were buried in paragraph three of a long email chain.

4. Unsubscribe and clean up. Yes, Claude can identify newsletters and marketing emails you haven’t opened in months and flag them for unsubscription. It can’t auto-unsubscribe on your behalf (that requires clicking links in emails, which involves security risks Claude won’t take without you), but it surfaces exactly what to cut and gives you the list to action in one sweep.

The Prompt

This is the prompt to run at the start of each workday. Paste it into a Cowork or Chat session with your email plugin connected.

<context>
You have access to my email inbox via the connected Gmail/Outlook plugin.
My communication style is direct and concise. I write short paragraphs and get to the point quickly.
I prefer action-oriented replies that close loops, not open new ones.
</context>

<task>
You have access to my Gmail inbox. Do the following in order:
1. Diagnose
Read my last 50 unread emails. For each, identify: sender, subject, category (Action Required / FYI / Cold Outreach / Newsletter / Internal), and whether it required my attention at all.
2. Summarise
Give me a crisp inbox health report:

How many emails actually needed me vs. noise
Which senders/domains are repeat offenders
Any threads that went cold or were never closed

3. Time Waste Analysis
Tell me exactly where I'm losing time:

Recurring email types I keep receiving but never act on
Threads I've opened but not replied to (or vice versa)
Senders I should unsubscribe from or filter out entirely

4. Automations
For each time sink identified, suggest a specific Gmail automation with exact steps:

Filter rules (who/what triggers it, what action to take)
Labels to create
Whether to archive, skip inbox, or auto-delete
Any weekly digest or scheduled summary I should set up instead

</task>

<constraints>
- Do not send any emails. Show me drafts only.
- Flag anything that looks like a client escalation, regardless of category.
- If you're unsure whether something is urgent, surface it. Don't filter it out.
</constraints>

Run this once. You’ll understand in about 90 seconds why your inbox has been a problem.

What You Get Out

The first time you run this, expect two things.

Clarity. You’ll see your inbox for what it actually is… mostly low-priority noise with a handful of things that genuinely matter. It’s like finally getting a proper haircut after months of your usual barber telling you “next time, next time.” The relief is immediate.

Time back. The average knowledge worker spends 28% of their workweek on email. Even cutting that in half is 5+ hours a week. That’s a full workday, returned to you.

Over time, Claude gets better at this. Your communication style file trains it. Your habits (which drafts you approve, which you edit) become patterns it learns from. After two weeks, the drafts need less editing. After a month, most replies are approved as-is.

Where to Go From Here

Once your inbox is under control, three natural next steps:

Schedule it. Set the email diagnosis prompt to run every morning at 8am. Claude sends you a summary before you open your inbox. You start the day with the action list already built.

Connect your task manager. Route extracted action items directly into Notion, Asana, or Linear. Email stops being a second task list.

Build reply templates. For the email types you answer the same way every time (meeting requests, invoice approvals, intro responses), give Claude the template. Drafts become one-click approvals.

Set up the connection. Run the prompt. Watch what comes back.

Then decide if you ever want to spend 90 minutes a day in your inbox again.

For the better part of three months, every time I opened Claude before a sales call, I typed roughly the same 200 words. The company’s LinkedIn, the founder’s background, what I wanted to find out, how I wanted the brief formatted.

I thought I was being efficient because I was using ‘the AI’. I was not. I was just a more digitally-enabled version of the same bottleneck I’d always been.

Then I found out about Skills.

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What a Skill actually is

Think about your regular barber. You don’t walk in and explain how you want it cut anymore. Three years of the same thing means you sit down, he picks up the clippers, and starts. No briefing required.

A Claude Skill is that barber.

It is a permanent instruction file you build once and save to your computer. The next time you make a request that matches it, Claude reads those instructions automatically and gets to work. No setup. No re-explaining yourself. You walk in, it starts. It is, in the favourite Singapore bureaucracy.. an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure).

The technical reality is simpler than it sounds. A Skill is just a folder on your computer with a text file inside it called SKILL.md. That file contains your instructions in plain English. The folder goes into ~/.claude/skills/ and Claude finds it automatically from that point forward.

That’s the whole thing.

There is one important distinction worth understanding before you build your first one. Claude Projects are a knowledge base. Upload your company deck or a product brief there, and you’re giving Claude reference material to read. A Skill is different. It is a process. You’re telling Claude not what to know, but exactly how to do something. The difference is instruction manual versus library.

How Skills work (without the technical jargon)

When you open a Claude session and type something, Claude scans the descriptions of every Skill you have installed. It picks the one that best matches what you’re asking. Then it loads the full instructions from that Skill and runs your request through them.

The smart part is that it only loads what it needs. If you have ten Skills installed, Claude does not cram all ten into memory at once. It reads the short description of each, picks the right one, then pulls in the full instructions only when they’re relevant. This keeps your sessions fast and Claude sharp.

Skills with vague descriptions only fire about 20% of the time. So the single most important thing you write is that first line: what the Skill does, and what you’d type to trigger it. Be specific. List the exact phrases you’d use. If you type “prep me for this client call,” your Skill description should say exactly that.

If you want to be certain a Skill fires, just name it directly. “Use the meeting-prep Skill for this.” Or type a slash command: /meeting-prep. That fires it close to 100% of the time.

You don’t have to write the instruction file yourself. Anthropic built a Skill called skill-creator that builds other Skills for you. You describe what you want in plain English, and it interviews you, asks about edge cases, and generates the full folder structure. Most people find it faster and more accurate than writing the instructions by hand.

How to build your first one

Start with the task you repeat most often. The one you could describe in a sentence because you’ve done it so many times.

Use the skill-creator to build it. In Claude Desktop, go to Customise, then Skills, then Browse Skills. Find skill-creator in the Anthropic & Partners section and install it. After that, open a new chat and type: “Use the skill creator to help me build a skill for [your task]. Use AskUserQuestions at least 10 times to get the right skill output”

The skill creator will ask you questions. What goes in, what comes out, what good looks like, what you want to avoid. Answer specifically. The more concrete your answers, the better the Skill it builds.

Once installed, test it. Give it a real input from your actual work. See where the output falls short. Go back and update the instruction file to fix the gap. Run it again.

The Skill you’re using three months from now will be materially better than the one you build on day one, because you’ll have found the edge cases and filled them in. That’s fine. Start rough and improve.

Three use cases worth building right now

1. Pre-meeting research briefs

Input: a name and a company URL.

Output: a two-page brief with background on the person, what the company actually does, recent news, three suggested talking points, and the two questions you want answered before the call ends.

The Skill file holds your definition of what a good brief looks like. Sections you always want. Preferred length. Whether you want direct quotes from their LinkedIn or just a summary. You write it once. Every brief after that follows the same standard without you having to think about it.

For GTM teams in Singapore where the market is small and everyone knows everyone, consistent pre-call prep compounds fast.

2. GTM sales workflow (with a real example)

This is the one worth going deep on, because it shows what a Skill file actually looks like in practice.

Consider discovery calls. Most GTM professionals leave a call, open a blank document, and spend 20 minutes reconstructing what happened from memory or a messy transcript. The output varies depending on how tired they are. Important signals get missed.

Here is a Skill that fixes that. You can copy this, save it as SKILL.md inside a folder called discovery-debrief, and drop the folder into ~/.claude/skills/.

---
name: discovery-debrief
description: Processes a discovery call transcript or rough notes into a 
  structured sales debrief. Use this skill when the user says "debrief this 
  call", "summarise my discovery call", "process these call notes", or 
  "what did we learn from this call". Do NOT use for internal team meetings, 
  investor calls, or onboarding calls.
---

## Overview

You are processing a discovery call for a GTM or sales professional. 
Your job is to extract the signal from a raw transcript or rough notes 
and return a structured debrief they can act on immediately.

## Workflow

1. Read the full input carefully before writing anything.
2. Identify the prospect's stated problem in their own words where possible.
3. Note what they have already tried or considered.
4. Extract any budget, timeline, or decision-maker signals, even indirect ones.
5. List objections raised, whether direct or implied.
6. Identify the agreed next step. If none was agreed, flag this explicitly.
7. Write the debrief using the output format below.

## Output format

**Prospect:** [Name, title, company]  
**Call date:** [Date]

**Their problem (in their words)**  
One to two sentences. Quote directly if the transcript allows.

**What they've already tried**  
Brief list. If nothing was mentioned, write "Not discussed."

**Budget and timeline signals**  
What was said or implied. If nothing was mentioned, write "Not raised."

**Decision-makers involved**  
Who else needs to sign off. If unclear, flag it.

**Objections**  
List each one. Note whether it was resolved in the call or still open.

**Agreed next step**  
What was committed to, by whom, and by when. If nothing was agreed, 
write "NO NEXT STEP AGREED — follow up required."

**Recommended action**  
One sentence on what the sales rep should do in the next 24 hours.

## Edge cases

- If the input is rough notes rather than a transcript, work with what's 
  there and note where information is missing rather than guessing.
- If the call ended without a clear next step, always flag this prominently. 
  Do not bury it.
- If the prospect's problem is unclear from the notes, write 
  "Problem unclear — clarify in follow-up" rather than inferring.

## Example

Input: "Call with Marcus, Head of Ops at a 60-person logistics firm. 
He's been using spreadsheets to track deliveries. Main pain is visibility 
across drivers. Budget not discussed. His CEO needs to approve anything 
above 5k. Worried about implementation time. Said he'd think about it."

Output should identify: visibility as the problem, spreadsheets as current 
state, CEO as decision-maker, implementation time as open objection, 
no agreed next step (flag required).

That is the full file. Plain English. No code. The folder structure looks like this:

discovery-debrief/
└── SKILL.md

Drop it in ~/.claude/skills/. The next time you paste in call notes and type “debrief this call,” the Skill fires and returns the structured output.

If you want to add a follow-up email drafter to the same workflow, build a second Skill called follow-up-draft that takes the debrief output as its input. Point it at your communication style. Now your discovery call process goes: raw notes in, structured debrief out, draft follow-up email out. Three steps collapsed into one.

3. Client onboarding workflows

Input: kickoff meeting notes and the contract scope.

Output: a welcome summary for the client, an internal kickoff document for your team, a 30-day milestone tracker, and a first check-in agenda.

The Skill holds your standard onboarding structure. What every client gets in week one. What the internal team needs to know. How you format milestones. You define it once based on your best onboarding ever, and every client after that gets that same standard regardless of how full your plate is when they sign.

The thing most people miss

Skills are not complicated software. They are written-down processes that Claude can follow without you having to explain yourself again.

If you’ve ever trained a new team member, you’ve already done the hard part. You described a task, explained what good looks like, and gave examples. A Skill is that conversation, captured once, reused indefinitely.

The people who get the most out of this are not the most technical. They’re the ones who have clear processes and can describe them plainly.

The next time you open Claude to do something you’ve done before, before you type the same instructions again, ask yourself: should this be a Skill?

The answer is probably yes.

You know the uncle at your favourite hawker centre who has been making the same plate of char kway teow for 30 years? He does not need you to explain what wok hei is. You sit down, he already knows — medium spice, extra cockles, less oil.

That is the version of AI most of us have not figured out how to build yet.

Right now, most treat AI like the kopitiam auntie who just started last week. You have to explain everything from scratch every single time. Burnt toast. Wrong order. Start again tomorrow.

Claude Cowork fixes that. You build the context once. After that, it already knows you.

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What Claude Cowork actually is

Cowork launched on 12 January 2026. Within four weeks, $285 billion in enterprise software market value had been wiped out. It was the market watching a $20/month subscription do 40% of what $150/month enterprise seats do.

Here is the precise difference between Cowork and what you have used before.

Claude Chat is a conversational AI. You type, it responds, you copy-paste the output somewhere useful. You are the operator. Claude is your adviser.

Claude Cowork is an agentic AI. You describe an outcome. Cowork makes a plan, shows it to you, and executes every step on its own — reading your files, creating documents, browsing the web, pulling live data from connected tools, and writing finished outputs directly to your computer. You are the director. Claude executes.

Most people who have tried Cowork are still using it like a chatbot with folder access. That captures maybe 10% of what it can do. The people getting 10x the value have made one mental change: they describe outcomes, hand off entire workflows, and come back to finished deliverables.

What it can actually do

Four capabilities make COO-level delegation possible.

File system access. Claude reads and writes to a folder on your computer. It can reference last month’s report to match your formatting, pull data from an old spreadsheet to build this month’s, and apply your brand guidelines mid-task without you mentioning them.

Sub-agents. When a task has independent parts, Claude spins up parallel workers. Instead of processing ten documents one by one in 50 minutes, it processes all ten at once in five minutes, then pulls the results together. You can request this for vendor comparisons, multi-source analysis, or large document sets.

Plugins. 21 pre-built specialist packs covering Productivity, Marketing, Sales, Finance, Legal, Data Analysis, HR, Engineering, and financial verticals including Investment Banking, Private Equity, and Wealth Management. Each one loads domain-specific methodology and workflows that make Claude’s output noticeably more informed than a generic prompt.

Connectors. Live integrations with Slack, Google Drive, Gmail, Notion, Asana, Jira, HubSpot, Figma, Snowflake, and 50+ other tools. Once connected, Claude pulls live data from these services mid-task — no copy-pasting, no screenshots.

How to set it up

Step 1: Build your folder

Create one parent folder called CLAUDE COWORK. Inside it, four subfolders:

• ABOUT ME — your identity and writing rules

• PROJECTS — live work, one subfolder per project

• TEMPLATES — finished structures worth reusing

• CLAUDE OUTPUTS — the only place Claude writes files to

Keep this structure tight. Cowork has real read/write access to whatever folder you share. If something goes wrong, you want the exposure contained.

Step 2: Create your three core files

The quality of Cowork’s output is directly proportional to the quality of context you put in these files, not your prompts. One well-written markdown file is worth more than 100 random uploads.

about-me.md
Who you are. What you do day to day. Your key stakeholders. What success looks like in your role. Your industry context. Include one or two examples of output you are proud of — a report, an email, an analysis. These give Claude a concrete reference for quality, not an abstract description of it.

# About Me

## Role & Responsibilities
- [Your name, title, company]
- [What you do day-to-day]
- [Key stakeholders you work with]
- [What success looks like in your role]

## Domain Context
- [Industry/sector specifics]
- [Key terminology or frameworks you use]
- [Tools and platforms in your workflow]

## Example Work
[Paste 1-2 examples of output you're proud of — reports, emails, analyses.
This gives Claude a concrete reference for quality and style.]

brand-voice.md
How you communicate. Your tone. Phrases you use naturally. Phrases that sound wrong to you. Two or three short writing samples from your actual work — emails, posts, documents. Real examples beat abstract style descriptions every time.

Use my guide here.

Use wispr flow to make your typing life easier

working-preferences.md
How you want Claude to behave. Do you want questions before execution? Short or long outputs? Which file formats? What should Claude never do without asking? What naming conventions do you use?

# How I Want Claude to Work

## Process
- Always ask clarifying questions before starting non-trivial tasks
- Show me your plan before executing
- Save outputs as [.docx / .xlsx / .md — your preference]

## Output Style
- [Short vs. detailed outputs]
- [Preferred formatting conventions]
- [File naming conventions]

## Guardrails
- Never delete files without explicit confirmation
- Never modify files outside the designated output folder
- Flag assumptions explicitly before acting on them

Every week you refine them, the output improves. After a month, the gap between output with context files and output without them is unrecognisable.

Step 3: Set your global instructions

Go to: Settings → Cowork → Edit Global Instructions.

This is a persistent prompt Cowork reads before every session.

Note that this affects all projects on Cowork.

Paste the following:

# GLOBAL INSTRUCTIONS

## BEFORE EVERY TASK
1. Read ABOUT ME/. No task starts without reading both files.
2. If the task relates to a project, read everything in the matching PROJECTS/ subfolder first.
3. If a matching template exists in TEMPLATES/, study its structure. Analyse the structure. Do not copy the content.

## FOLDER PROTOCOL
Read-only folders — never create, edit, or delete anything here:
- ABOUT ME/
- TEMPLATES/
- PROJECTS/

Write folder — the only place you deliver work:
- CLAUDE OUTPUTS/ — organise with one subfolder per project.

## NAMING CONVENTION
All files must follow: project_content-type_v1.ext
Examples: Hengxuanbraindump_v1.md / Ilovechar-kway-teow_v1.pptx

## OPERATING RULES
- If the brief is unclear, use AskUserQuestion. Do not fill gaps with generic filler.
- Do not over-explain. Deliver the work.
- Never delete files anywhere.
- Never modify files outside CLAUDE OUTPUTS/.
- Flag all assumptions before acting on them.

You set this once. It runs every time.

Step 4: Use AskUserQuestion as your default

This is the feature that changes how the tool feels. Add this line to the end of any non-trivial prompt (I actually do it for most of my tasks):

Start by using the AskUserQuestion tool before answering to gather enough context.

When you do this, Cowork generates an interactive form with clickable options, multi-select choices. Claude forces clarity before it starts. You answer in under a minute. Claude shows a plan. You approve. It executes.

The prompt template that covers 80% of sessions:

I want to [TASK] to [SUCCESS CRITERIA]. First, explore my CLAUDE COWORK folder. Then ask me questions using the AskUserQuestion tool. I want to refine the approach before you execute.

Step 5: Install these three plugins first

Of the 21 available plugins, three deliver immediate value regardless of your role.

Productivity — connects to Slack, Notion, Asana, Jira, Microsoft 365. Start every day with /productivity:start and Claude reviews your priorities and organises your task list. After a week of use paired with good context files, it feels like a chief of staff who already knows your schedule.

Data Analysis — drop a CSV into your folder, type /data:explore, and Claude reads the full dataset, summarises every column, flags anomalies, and suggests analyses before you have told it what to look for.

Sales, Marketing, Legal, or Finance — pick whichever matches your primary function. Each plugin loads domain-specific methodology and connectors that make Claude’s output noticeably more targeted than a generic prompt.

Where it falls short

Cowork makes mistakes (it hallucinated one whole youtube analytics report when the API failed, and I sent it to my team without checking cause it looked perfectly…fake)

No cross-session memory. Every new session starts completely fresh. Your context files are the workaround — they work well, but you will feel the gap on long-running projects. Document important decisions in files Claude can read next time. Enabling ‘Memory’ helps most of the time.

Tasks die if you close the app. Cowork runs as an active session inside Claude Desktop. Quit the app and the task stops mid-execution with no recovery. Sleep mode is fine. Quitting is not.

Usage burns fast. Complex tasks with file reading, document creation, and parallel sub-agents consume far more of your monthly allocation than standard chat. If you are on the Pro plan and doing heavy daily use, watch your usage in Settings.

Desktop only. No mobile. No browser version. No syncing between devices. If you work across machines, keep your workspace folder in a cloud-synced directory so your files stay consistent.

Browser automation is inconsistent. The Claude in Chrome extension works well for trusted sites. It struggles with dynamically loaded pages and sites that block automation. If Claude gets stuck, tell it to skip that step and move on.

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Change your prompt life (pun intended)

Stop thinking about writing better prompts. Start building better systems.

The hawker uncle does not need a detailed order every visit because you built the relationship over time. Cowork works the same way. The setup: the files, the instructions, the folder structure is the relationship. Once it exists, your prompts can be ten words long and still produce work that sounds exactly like you.

That is the version worth building.

Most people I meet are running a daily ritual they don’t even notice anymore.

Gmail. WhatsApp Web. Slack. LinkedIn. A spreadsheet. A CRM. Back to Gmail.

They click through the same sequence every single day. Copy a name here, paste a link there, read an email and type a response. The work feels productive because it looks like work.

Your browser knows how to scroll. It knows how to click. It knows how to read a page and extract information. Yet you’re still the one doing all three.

I only realised this when I started delegating my browser to Claude.

When your browser works while you have kopi

Claude in Chrome is straightforward: it can see your screen, scroll through pages, click buttons, and type responses. Think of it as hiring a junior colleague who never gets tired and never asks for a salary.

The practical difference is strange at first. You set up a task once. You walk away. You come back to a table of 50 LinkedIn prospects you haven’t manually clicked through. Or a sorted inbox. Or a conference hit list.

The hours you buy back aren’t flashy. It’s not like you suddenly have 10 more hours a week. The work your browser does is the work that blocks your better thinking.

Email triage. Data entry. Scrolling through search results. Hunting for information. These are the tasks that fill a morning and leave you too tired to do anything that actually requires you.

So you delegate them. And your morning is different.

The actual setup (one time, five minutes)

You don’t need to be technical. You just need Chrome.

1. Install the Claude extension from the Chrome Web Store and pin it.

2. Sign in with your Claude account (paid plan!).

3. In settings, enable Claude in Chrome and choose which sites it can access (Gmail, LinkedIn, your CRM, whatever).

4. Open your work tabs. Open Claude in the side panel. Start talking to it like a colleague: “I’m on my LinkedIn profile. Analyse my last 5 posts.”

That’s the setup. Everything else is just deciding what to hand over.

Five tasks worth delegating (copy-paste ready)

Pick whichever one hurts the most right now.

1. Gmail: inbox triage in one go

Open Gmail. Paste this into Claude:

“We’re in Gmail, Primary inbox. Scan the first 20 emails. Label each as ‘Reply’, ‘Read only’, ‘Newsletter’, or ‘Ignore’. Star anything from my manager, direct reports, or customers. Draft short replies (max 6 lines, clear next step) for every ‘Reply’ email in my tone. Don’t send them. Show me a summary with links to the drafts so I can review and send.”

You get back: a sorted inbox and pre-written responses. Cost: the time it takes to install the extension. Every morning after: read, tweak, send.

2. LinkedIn: 50 prospects in a table

Go to LinkedIn search results (filtered by role, company size, whatever). Paste this:

“We’re on LinkedIn search. Scroll until you have 50 relevant profiles. For each: open in a new tab, read the headline and About section. Build a table with Name, Role, Company, Profile URL, and one line on why they’re a fit for [your offer]. Prioritise decision-makers. When you hit 50, stop and show me the table.”

3. LinkedIn: find your actual working hooks

Open your LinkedIn profile, go to Posts. Paste this:

“We’re in my LinkedIn Posts section. Look at my last 5 posts only. For each: capture the URL, copy the first 2 lines (the hook), record impressions and comments. Build a table with URL, Date, Hook, Impressions, Reactions, Comments. Then tell me which 2 hooks performed best and why in 2–3 sentences. For the weaker 3 hooks, explain in 1–2 sentences each what I’d change. Finally, propose 5 new hook ideas for my next posts on [your topic], following the patterns that worked.”

4. Conference: vendor list to hit list

Open the conference sponsor / exhibitor page. Paste this:

“We’re on a conference page. Scroll through all sponsors. Extract into a table: Company name, Sponsorship tier, Website, 1-sentence description of what they sell, target customer, whether they’re a partner/competitor/prospect for my business [describe your business]. Open each vendor site and fill in the gaps. When done, star the 20 highest-priority companies and explain your reasoning in 1 sentence per company. Paste the full table here.”

5. Substack: find what your readers actually want

Open your Substack dashboard, go to Posts. Paste this:

“We’re in my Substack dashboard. Find my 5 highest-performing posts from the last 6 months by views/likes. For each: capture the title, date, views/likes, and the strongest hook line from the first 5 paragraphs. Build a table with Title, Date, Views/Likes, Hook Line, and a suggested repurpose format (LinkedIn post, X thread, carousel, podcast talking point). When done, show me the table.”

Conclusion

None of this is about working harder or faster.

It’s about reclaiming the hours your browser steals. The hours you spend reading the same email twice, typing the same response three times, clicking through 50 LinkedIn profiles one by one.

If you try nothing else, try one prompt this week. Pick the one that stings the most — the daily ritual you hate the most.

Tomorrow morning, use Prompt 1 on your inbox instead of opening emails one by one. Or use Prompt 3 before you write your next LinkedIn post.

The first time you watch Claude scroll your feed while you’re free to think, you’ll notice something: you can’t go back.

Which task are you handing over first?

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Claude’s token limits are tighter now. For anyone hitting the ceiling or just tired of watching their budget drain, the solution isn’t to switch models. It’s to stop working the way you were taught.

Most people treat their Claude conversation like a chat. They send a prompt, get an answer, realise it missed the mark, and send a follow-up. Then another. By message ten, they’ve burned through tokens on context that the AI has already read five times over. This is fixable.

Here are five specific moves that helps!

Edit your prompt, don’t send a follow-up.

Claude re-reads your entire conversation history every single time. When something misses, click edit on your original message and regenerate. The old response gets replaced — not added. Over ten rounds, this alone cuts token use by 80-90%. It feels weird the first time. It becomes automatic after that.

Start a new chat every 15-20 messages.

Your first message costs around 200 tokens. By message 30, that same question costs 50,000+. The math isn’t linear. Copy Claude’s summary, open a fresh chat, paste it in. One minute of work saves hours of model time.

Use the right model for the job.

This is the single highest-impact move. Haiku for quick answers, brainstorming, grammar, formatting. Sonnet for content writing, analysis, coding. Opus for deep research and hard logic. Haiku all day for simple tasks frees up 50-70% of your budget for work that actually needs the bigger models.

Set up Memory and User Preferences.

Every conversation you start without context burns 3-5 setup messages just re-explaining who you are and what you need. Go to Settings → Memory and store it once. Your role, your tone, your preferences. Claude carries it into every chat automatically. One-time setup. Infinite conversations cleaner.

Turn off features you’re not using.

Web search, Research mode, connectors: they all add tokens to every response, even when you don’t need them. Extended Thinking is the same. Leave it off by default. Only switch it on when your first attempt wasn’t good enough. Default off saves you every single time.

These aren’t tricks. They’re the way Claude was designed to be used.

The next time you start a chat, don’t open it the old way, edit instead of follow-up, switch models based on task, and turn off features until you need them. Small changes. Massive difference.

“Don’t use buzzwords or filler.”

I used to think inserting “please don’t” could help the AI sound less robotic. AI doesn’t care.

I would paste a topic in. Get something back that was technically fine. Correct sentences, decent structure, covered the main points.

But reading it felt like eating food someone else had meal-prepped without knowing your preferences. Edible. Not yours.

Too much veggies. Too little egg. You are readjusting it every time.

The model isn’t the problem. The brief is.

Most people prompt AI the way you’d brief a stranger you just met: “Write something professional, engaging, and concise.” The stranger obliges. Produces something professional, engaging, and concise. It reads exactly like every other professional, engaging, concise post on your feed.

That output is the average of the internet. Trained to please. Trained to hedge. Trained to use words like “delve,” “tapestry,” and “it is worth noting that.” Your voice sits outside that average. The only way to get AI to sound like you is to tell it precisely how you prep your meals.

Your voice is your refusals

Most people describe their writing style by listing what they like. “I’m conversational. I’m direct. I keep things warm.”

That tells AI nothing useful.

What actually narrows the output is describing what you’d never do. Taste is built from refusals, not preferences. Think about any writer you can spot instantly in your feed. What makes them recognisable is what they won’t touch, not what they do.

I have created two prompt for that below.

1. First prompt: Your voice profile (AI interviews you with 70 questions and is brutal if you don’t answer the question. It creates an MD file that your favourite LLM can refer to in the projects you do. )

2. Second prompt: Your Anti-AI Slop rules (A guardrail to prevent weird structures like the overuse rule of three)

But let’s first spot some AI Slop shall we? So that when AI hallucinates, you can ask for food meal upgrade.

The immediate fixes

There are changes you can make today that will close most of the gap before you even build a voice file.

Cut the vocabulary. “Delve,” “quiet shift,” “pivotal,” “underscore,” “transformative” appear in AI output far more than in good human writing. The moment one shows up, the reader clocks it. Make your own cringe list and call it out explicitly in every prompt.

Break the pacing. AI writes like a metronome. Every sentence, medium length. Every paragraph, three sentences. Real writing is uneven. Short. Or sometimes you need a longer one to build context before you land the point (see what I did there?). Let it be uneven. That unevenness is what makes writing feel like a person wrote it.

Take a stance. AI hedges because it is trained to avoid being wrong. “This may,” “it could be argued,” “many find.” That works for Wikipedia. Publish what you actually think. Point to something specific. Let readers push back if they disagree. Confidence without aggression is what earns trust.

Kill the announcements. “In this article, we will explore...” Delete it. Say the thing. Don’t narrate that you’re about to say the thing. Same rule at the end: if you’ve made your point, stop. A closing paragraph that restates what someone just read is an AI habit, not a closing thought.

Building the voice file

The fixes above clean up most of the output. What closes the rest of the gap is giving AI a proper picture of who you are before it writes a single word.

I spent one hour speaking to AI. I used Wisprflow so that I don’t need to type my answers. Press a button and speak.

You ask AI to extract how you think, write, and see the world through a series of targeted questions, then compile everything into a document you reuse every time you sit down to write. This prompt is for Claude but it works for any other LLMs too!

Here is the 70 question long prompt to start it. I remade this from the OG Ruben who’s prompt is 100 questions (I nearly went crazy answering) :

You are a Taste Journalist — a relentless journalist whose sole job is to extract the vibe and thinking of how I think, write, and see the world. Your goal is a document so precise that another Claude instance could write and think exactly like me.

<interview_philosophy>

You’re not here to be polite. You’re here to get to the truth. Most people can’t articulate their own taste — they give vague, socially acceptable answers. Your job is to break through that. Every answer should feel slightly uncomfortable to give. If I veer off track, call me out. be brutal.

</interview_philosophy>

<pre_interview>

Before question 1, ask me to share ONE piece of writing I’m proud of.

Paste it in or describe it. This is your anchor for everything that follows —

reference it whenever I give an abstract answer.

</pre_interview>

<interview_structure>

Conduct exactly 70 questions across these categories. Follow the thread when

something interesting emerges — you don’t have to go in order.

BELIEFS & CONTRARIAN TAKES (10 questions)

- What I believe that others in my field don’t

- Hot takes I’d defend publicly

- Conventional wisdom I think is lazy or wrong

- The thing I believe about writing that most people would find too extreme

WRITING MECHANICS (15 questions)

- How I actually write (not how I think I write)

- My default sentence structures and length preferences

- How I open pieces — and how I close them

- My relationship with punctuation, white space, line breaks

- Words I overuse / words I love / words I’d never use

- How I handle data, numbers, and evidence in prose

AESTHETIC CRIMES (10 questions)

- What makes me cringe in other people’s writing

- Specific phrases or patterns that feel like nails on a chalkboard. If possible ask for

samples.

- Types of content I find lazy, derivative, or intellectually dishonest

- The format or structure I’m most tired of seeing

VOICE & PERSONALITY (10 questions)

- How I use humor (if at all) — and where I draw the line

- My tone when serious vs. casual

- How I handle disagreement or controversy in writing

- What I sound like when excited vs. skeptical

- How much of “me” shows up vs. how much I stay neutral

STRUCTURAL PREFERENCES (10 questions)

- How I organize ideas before and during writing

- My relationship with lists, headers, and bullets

- How I handle transitions

- My default arc: how a piece moves from open to close

- How I handle complexity — do I simplify or preserve it?

HARD NOS & RED FLAGS (10 questions)

- Things I’d never write about, approaches I’d never take

- Lines I won’t cross, even under pressure

- What makes me immediately distrust a piece of content

- Signals that a writer doesn’t know what they’re talking about

- The one writing habit that instantly loses my respect

INFLUENCES & COMPARISONS (5 questions)

- Writers, thinkers, or creators whose style I admire (and why specifically)

- Who I sound like — and who I absolutely don’t want to sound like

- A piece of writing (by anyone) I wish I had written

- What I’ve consciously stolen from influences vs. rejected

</interview_structure>

<interview_rules>

1. ONE question at a time. Wait for my response before moving on.

2. Push back on vague answers. If I say “I like to keep things simple,” ask:

“Simple how? Give me an example of simple done right vs. simple done lazy.”

3. Always anchor to the sample piece I gave you. “Does that apply to the piece

you shared? Can you show me where?”

4. Ask for specific examples. “Write me a sentence that captures this.”

5. Call out contradictions explicitly. “Earlier you said X — now you’re saying Y.

Which is actually true?”

6. Don’t accept “I don’t know” easily. Reframe: “Okay — tell me the last time

you read something that made you feel that way.”

7. Follow interesting threads even if it means spending more questions in one

category. The 70-question total is firm; the distribution is flexible.

8. Keep your tone direct and slightly skeptical. You’re not a therapist.

You’re an editor who’s seen a lot of bad writing.

</interview_rules>

<output_requirements>

After exactly 70 questions (+the sample piece), compile everything into a

comprehensive markdown document. This is NOT a summary — it’s a complete reference

document preserving the full depth of every answer.

# VOICE PROFILE: [My Name]

## Core Identity

[2–3 sentences only. The essence. This is the only summary in the document.]

---

## SECTION 1: BELIEFS & CONTRARIAN TAKES

### Q1: [Question asked]

[Full answer, verbatim or lightly cleaned for clarity]

### Q2: [Question asked]

[Full answer]

[Continue for all questions in this category]

---

## SECTION 2: WRITING MECHANICS

[Same format — question, then full answer]

---

## SECTION 3: AESTHETIC CRIMES

[Same format]

---

## SECTION 4: VOICE & PERSONALITY

[Same format]

---

## SECTION 5: STRUCTURAL PREFERENCES

[Same format]

---

## SECTION 6: HARD NOS & RED FLAGS

[Same format]

---

## SECTION 7: INFLUENCES & COMPARISONS

[Same format]

---

## QUICK REFERENCE CARD

### Always:

[Specific patterns to follow, extracted verbatim from answers]

### Never:

[Specific things to avoid, extracted verbatim from answers]

### Signature Phrases & Structures:

[Actual sentences/examples I gave during the interview]

### Voice Calibration:

[3–5 key quotes from my answers that best capture tone]

### Sample Piece Analysis:

[3–4 observations about my voice drawn from the piece I shared at the start]

---

## HOW TO USE THIS DOCUMENT (ANTI-OVERFITTING GUIDE)

This document captures my taste. It is NOT a checklist to apply mechanically.

### Spirit Over Letter

A piece that uses 3 of my tendencies naturally will always beat one that forces

in 10 of them awkwardly. Internalize the sensibility — don’t perform it.

### Frequency Guidance

Each tendency is labeled:

- **HARD RULE** — Never violate (rare — mostly in the “Never” section)

- **STRONG TENDENCY** — Apply 70–80% of the time; occasional breaks are fine

- **LIGHT PREFERENCE** — Nice to have; context determines when it applies

When no label exists, assume LIGHT PREFERENCE.

### Context Matters

My voice adapts to format. A tweet ≠ a newsletter ≠ a LinkedIn post ≠ long-form.

Some tendencies are format-specific — I noted when this applies.

### Natural Variation

Real writers aren’t perfectly consistent. Don’t start every piece the same way

just because I have a “signature open.” Let content dictate structure.

### The Litmus Test

Before finalizing anything written “as me,” ask:

> “Does this sound like something I would actually write — or does it sound

> like an AI trying very hard to imitate me?”

If it feels forced, pull back. Less imitation, more inhabitation.

### What Matters Most

1. [To be filled: My single most important belief about writing]

2. [To be filled: The one pattern that makes my voice mine]

3. [To be filled: The #1 thing I never do]

Everything else is secondary.

---

## INSTRUCTIONS FOR CLAUDE

When writing as [My Name], reference this document. Pay specific attention to:

1. The sample piece — match its rhythm and energy first

2. The specific examples I gave during the interview — use similar structures

3. The words and phrases I hate — never use them

4. The beliefs I hold — let them shape the angle, not just the prose

5. The influences I named — understand what I borrowed and what I rejected

This document is a source of truth, not a suggestion. Apply it with judgment.

</output_requirements>

Begin by asking me to share a piece of writing I’m proud of before starting the formal questions.

Answer it honestly. When you give vague answers, AI will push back. That pushback is where the useful material surfaces.

Most people have never been asked “give me an example of that” about their own writing instincts. The interview forces exactly that. By the way, if you are not detailed in your answer, this Voice file will not be useful. Be descriptive.

My friend did it twice (140 questions) because her first round was too vague and short.

The Anti Ai Slop file

Use this prompt that digests this Wiki file on Signs of AI Writing

Prompt:

Visit this page and read the full content: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

Your job is to digest everything on that page and turn it into a personal writing constraint file in Markdown. The file is not a summary of the article — it is a set of hard rules I can give to an AI before every writing task to stop it from producing AI-sounding copy.

Structure the file into these sections:

1. Banned words — the full list of vocabulary words documented as AI overuse tells, pulled directly from the article

2. Banned sentence structures — constructions the article flags as AI patterns (e.g. “not just X, but Y,” rule of three, -ing clause analysis, elegant variation, avoidance of “is/are”)

3. Banned content patterns — recurring AI content behaviors (significance inflation, vague attribution, promotional tone, challenges-and-prospects boilerplate, etc.)

4. Banned format patterns — structural and visual habits (default bullet lists, bolded key takeaways, unnecessary tables, emoji, em dash overuse)

5. Banned phrases verbatim — a quick-reference list of exact phrases that appear in AI output

6. How to write instead — a short affirmative section that states the positive version of each constraint

How to use the two files

Once you have the document, every new prompt starts the same way:

Read [yourname].md & Anti AI slop Rules first. Then [whatever you need written].

That is it. The file does the work. AI stops defaulting to the statistical average and starts defaulting to your average instead.

If you don’t use Claude, upload the file to the workspace you’re using on Perplexity or ChatGPT as a reference file.

The difference between having the file and not having it is similar to the kopi auntie who already knows your order versus the stall where you repeat everything from scratch every visit. Same coffee. Completely different experience.

The test before you publish

Read what AI produced out loud. Imagine saying it to someone who knows your work well.

If you’d never say it in that conversation, rewrite it. If it hedges where you’d normally commit, rewrite it. If a word appears that would make you cringe in someone else’s writing, cut it.

AI will never sound like you by accident. You have to teach it who you are, what you hate, and where you draw the line.

Most people skip that step entirely. The ones who don’t are the ones whose AI content actually sounds like them.

The next time you paste a topic in and hate what comes back, don’t change the prompt. Write yourself down first.

If you use Claude Co-Work, ask it to update your voice file from your interactions with it over time. It is very smart.

You open Claude. You paste in your company background, your tone guide, your project brief. The same block of context you pasted last Tuesday, and the Tuesday before that.

Next Tuesday, you do it again.

If that sounds familiar, it’s not because AI is overhyped. It’s because you’ve been ordering from the same hawker stall every day and wondering why the uncle still doesn’t know your usual.

Claude has three modes. The difference between them isn’t technical. It’s relational. It’s about what kind of working relationship you want with the tool sitting on your computer. Once you see it that way, the right choice becomes obvious.

The Hawker Centre: Claude Chat

Chat is the hawker centre. You walk up, you order, they make it, you leave. Zero friction. Massive variety. Exactly what you need when you need it fast.

This is where most people start, and for good reason. It runs on your browser, your phone, your desktop app. No setup required. Open it and start typing. It handles everything from summarising a legal document before a board meeting to drafting a supplier email in thirty seconds.

But the hawker uncle doesn’t remember you. He doesn’t know you always want less chilli. He doesn’t know you order the same thing every morning. Every transaction starts from scratch.

Chat works the same way. Every session is blank. Your company background, your writing style, your project context... gone the moment you close the tab. You are, every single time, a stranger walking up to the stall.

For quick one-off tasks, that’s completely fine. You don’t need the hawker uncle to know your life story to make a good plate of chicken rice. But if you’re using Chat for the same recurring work week after week, you’re paying a hidden tax: the cost of re-explaining yourself, indefinitely.

The Kopitiam Regular: Claude Projects

You walk into your regular kopitiam. Auntie spots you from across the room. Before you’ve pulled out your chair, she’s already calling the order to the back.

“Kopi-O kosong, half-boiled egg, kaya toast. The usual ah?”

You didn’t ask. She just knew.

That’s Projects.

Projects is a saved workspace. You upload your files once: your SOPs, your brand voice guide, your past reports, your templates. Claude reads them, stores them, and carries them into every conversation inside that project. Permanently.

You never brief it again. You never paste your context block again. Open a new chat inside the project and it already knows who you are, how you write, and what you’re working on.

Managing RFPs or applications? Upload your previous submissions as style references. Claude will match your tone, structure, and formatting without being asked.

Producing weekly client decks? Upload your master template once and regenerate every Friday in minutes.

How to set up a Project in about five minutes:

1. Go to claude.ai (or open the desktop app) and click Projects in the left sidebar.

2. Click New Project and give it a clear name, e.g. “MAS Compliance Reports” or “Weekly Client Deck.”

3. Click Add content and upload your reference files: templates, past reports, brand guides, SOPs. Anything Claude should know before it starts.

4. Write a short custom instruction in the Project Settings. For example: “You are helping me produce weekly client reports. Always follow the structure and tone of the uploaded template. Use British English. Keep summaries under 200 words.”

5. Open a new chat inside the project. Claude carries everything. Start working immediately, no context block needed.

The kopitiam auntie doesn’t just save you time. She makes you feel like a regular, like the place was built around your habits. Projects does the same for your workflow. It stops feeling like a tool and starts feeling like a team member who has read every brief you’ve ever written.

The Meal Prep Delivery: Claude Cowork

A few years ago, meal prep delivery services like Grain and Nutrition Kitchen changed how a certain type of Singapore professional eats. The logic was simple: set your goals, your dietary preferences, your portion sizes once.

Every week, complete meals land at your door. You didn’t choose each dish. You didn’t cook anything. You just showed up and ate.

Claude Cowork runs on exactly the same principle.

You point it at a folder of files — your raw data, your reports, your source documents. You don’t instruct it line by line. Claude reads your context, processes everything, and delivers finished outputs directly into your desktop folder. Real Excel sheets with formulas and charts. Real Word documents formatted and ready to send. Summaries pulled from a stack of tender documents you’d otherwise spend half a day reading.

The relationship here is different from Chat. With Chat, you direct every move. With Cowork, you hand over the ingredients and walk away. What comes back is a finished meal.

Here’s what a Monday morning looks like for a Singapore ops manager using Cowork.

Before: download six reports manually, reformat in Excel for two hours, write the summary email from scratch, look up and realise it’s already 11am.

After: arrive at the office, open the folder, find the Excel sheet built with charts, the summary email drafted, and your Grain delivery sitting at your desk. It’s 9:15am. You haven’t broken a sweat.

How to set up Cowork in about ten minutes:

1. Download the Claude desktop app at claude.ai/download.

2. Open the app and click the Cowork tab in the left sidebar.

3. Select a folder on your computer. Drop your source files here: raw data, PDFs, reports, anything Claude needs to work from.

4. Tell Claude what you want built. Be specific: “Summarise these six reports into a one-page brief” or “Build an Excel tracker from this CSV with a summary chart by region.”

5. Let it run. Come back to find finished files waiting in your output folder.

One honest caveat: like meal prep delivery, what you put in determines what you get back. Messy files produce messy outputs. The service is only as good as the ingredients you give it.

Cowork requires Claude Pro at USD $20 per month (approximately SGD $27). Desktop only.

Which One Are You?

Most Singapore professionals need all three, depending on the day.

Quick question before a meeting? Open Chat, get your answer, close the tab. Building a weekly report from a folder of raw data? Set up Cowork, point it at your folder, come back to a finished file. Running the same workflow every week for the same client? Set up a Project once and let it run on institutional memory.

The mistake isn’t using Chat. The mistake is using Chat for everything, queuing at the hawker centre every Monday morning when your meal prep subscription could have been running for weeks.

One last thing: turn on Extended Thinking in whichever mode you use. You’ll find it in Settings, under the model options. It makes Claude reason through problems more carefully before answering — the difference between a reheated school canteen meal and a properly planned prep. It comes with Pro. Turn it on and leave it alone.

The next time you open Claude and reach for that context block you’ve pasted a dozen times before — don’t paste it. Set up a Project instead. Do it once. Let it remember everything from that point on.

There is a standard playbook for market research. You commission a report. You run a customer survey. You pay for analyst briefings. You sit in a quarterly business review and look at a deck someone spent two weeks building.

All of that is useful. But it shares a common flaw: people perform when they know they are being observed.

In a survey, customers tell you what they think you want to hear, or at minimum, a cleaned-up version of their frustration. In a focus group, the loudest person in the room shapes the narrative. In a QBR, the data has already been filtered through someone’s judgment about what matters.

Reddit removes all of that.

When someone posts at midnight in r/projectmanagement about how their entire team has stopped using the new software because the export function is broken, they are not filing a support ticket. They are not writing a formal review. They are just venting. And in that vent is more honest market intelligence than most GTM teams will find in a full quarter of structured research.

That is the asymmetry. Research captures what people think they should say. Reddit captures what they actually think.

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What a real pain point looks like

Most product feedback sounds like a feature request. “I wish it had X.” “Can you add Y.” Those are useful, but they are surface level.

Real pain points look different. They look like workarounds.

When someone builds a three-tool stack because your product stops at step two, that is a pain point. When 47 people upvote a comment that says “I export everything to Excel just to do basic filtering,” that is a pain point. When a thread titled “Am I the only one who hates how [category] tools handle [workflow]?” gets 200 comments of “no, same,” that is a pain point.

The workaround is the tell. It shows you exactly where the product breaks down in real use, not in ideal use. And that gap between how you designed it and how people actually use it... that is where your next positioning angle lives. Your next sprint. Your next sales conversation.

One team I know completely repositioned a product line because they discovered their users were using it for a purpose entirely different from its intended one. Not a niche edge case. The majority of their active users were doing something the roadmap had never accounted for.

They found it on Reddit.

No survey would have surfaced that. Because surveys ask what people expect from the product. Reddit shows you what they are actually doing with it.

Why Reddit specifically

Reddit is not the only place people talk candidly. But it has a few structural advantages for GTM work that other platforms do not.

First, it is searchable and permanent. A complaint posted two years ago is still findable. That means you can trace how a problem evolved over time, whether it got worse, and whether competitors have responded to it.

Second, it is organised by community. Subreddits cluster your buyers by job role, industry, tool stack, and problem type. r/sales, r/startups, r/devops, r/entrepreneurship — buyers are already segmented for you.

Third, the upvote system surfaces consensus. You do not have to guess which complaints are isolated. When a thread has 400 upvotes and 80 comments, the market has already told you this is a widespread problem.

Fourth, people answer each other. The thread that starts as a complaint often becomes a crowdsourced workaround session. That is your product roadmap being written in public.

How to actually do this with Claude

1. Go to reddit thread of your choice/ in your work area.

2. Go to the URL and type ‘./json’ at the end of the URL

3. Copy the JSON text

4. Paste it into your projects: “Reddit Master” (Custom Prompt Below)—> Create a project for this!

5. Sit back and read the insights & pain points

6. Using the same project space to chat with Claude on ways forward.

Prompt

Role You are an elite Reddit Research Analyst, Customer Insights Strategist, and Social Media Copywriter. Your job is to mine Reddit’s JSON data for high-signal, emotionally resonant content, identify unmet customer needs, surface solution gaps, and transform findings into viral hooks and platform-optimized captions. You never fabricate engagement metrics or post data. If data is missing or unclear, you disclaim it explicitly.

Context You analyze real Reddit JSON output (provided by the user or fetched via Reddit’s public JSON API by appending .json to any Reddit URL) to identify what topics, pain points, and narratives are genuinely resonating with people. You then produce a structured customer intelligence report, benchmark against known competitor approaches where relevant, and craft five viral social media hooks and one optimized caption — all grounded entirely in what the data reveals, not assumptions.

Instructions

Step 1 — Ask for the Topic First (Always) Before doing anything else, ask the user: “What specific topic, subreddit, or Reddit thread would you like me to research? Please share the Reddit URL, raw JSON, or a topic keyword and I’ll get started.” Do not generate any analysis, hooks, or captions until the user provides this. This step is mandatory on every run.

Step 2 — Analyze the Reddit JSON Once the user provides input, parse the JSON and extract:

• The top-voted posts and comments (sort by score or ups)

• Recurring pain points, desires, or questions appearing across multiple posts

• Exact language and phrases real users are using (preserve raw voice)

• Emotional triggers: frustration, hope, surprise, FOMO, identity, controversy

• Post formats that performed best (stories, questions, lists, confessions, hot takes)

If the JSON is incomplete, ambiguous, or missing key fields, state clearly: “The data provided is incomplete in [X area]. The following analysis is based on available signals only.”

Step 3 — Customer Pain Point Digest Before any hooks or captions, produce a structured pain point report in this format:

PAIN POINT DIGEST

For each distinct pain point identified (aim for 5–10), use this structure:

Pain Point [#]: [Short label, e.g. “Hidden fees on renewal”]

• What users are saying: 1–2 direct paraphrases or representative quotes from the data (preserve raw voice)

• Emotional charge: [e.g., Frustration / Betrayal / Resignation / Anxiety]

• Frequency signal: [e.g., Mentioned in 4 of top 10 posts / Recurring theme in comments]

• Who it affects most: [e.g., first-time buyers, long-term subscribers, SMB owners]

After listing all pain points, add a Pain Point Summary Table:

# Pain Point Emotional Charge Frequency Segment Most Affected 1 ... ... ... ...

Step 4 — Solution Gap Analysis This is the strategic layer. After digesting pain points, analyze what solutions are being missed, underdeveloped, or ignored. Structure it as follows:

SOLUTION GAP ANALYSIS

For each major pain point (or cluster of related ones):

Gap [#]: [Short label, e.g. “No proactive fee transparency before renewal”]

• The unmet need: What the customer actually wants or expects

• What the team is likely doing now: Infer the current approach based on how users frame their frustration (e.g., “they keep saying to check the FAQ” suggests a self-serve deflection strategy)

• What’s missing: The specific solution, feature, communication, or policy change that would address the root cause

• Elaboration: 2–4 sentences explaining why this gap persists (structural, cultural, incentive-based) and what closing it would unlock

• Competitor benchmark: If a known competitor, adjacent brand, or industry best practice addresses this gap, name it and describe how. If no benchmark is known, state: “No direct competitor benchmark identified — opportunity for differentiation.”

Close the Solution Gap Analysis with a Priority Matrix (effort vs. impact):

Gap Estimated Effort Estimated Impact Priority ... Low / Med / High Low / Med / High Quick Win / Strategic / Deprioritize

Step 5 — Five-Point Executive Summary Distill the entire analysis into 5 sharp, insight-driven bullet points covering: the dominant pain theme, the emotional state of the community, the biggest solution gap, a competitor angle worth noting, and the content opportunity this creates.

Then proceed to hooks.

Step 6 — Generate Five Viral Hooks Using only insights extracted from the JSON and the pain point analysis, write five distinct hooks following these rules:

• Each hook must target a different emotional trigger (e.g., curiosity, relatability, controversy, aspiration, shock)

• Hooks must feel native to social media — short, punchy, no fluff

• Use real language patterns observed in the Reddit data, not generic copy

• Each hook must be platform-agnostic (works for LinkedIn, Instagram Reels, TikTok, X/Twitter)

• Label each hook with its dominant trigger type

Format:

Hook 1 [Trigger: Curiosity] → [Hook text]

Hook 2 [Trigger: Relatability] → [Hook text]

Hook 3 [Trigger: Controversy] → [Hook text]

Hook 4 [Trigger: Aspiration] → [Hook text]

Hook 5 [Trigger: Shock/Surprise] → [Hook text]

Step 7 — Write the Optimized Caption After the five hooks, produce one caption optimized for both LinkedIn and Instagram:

• Line 1 and Line 2 must be the single most impactful lines — bold claims, pattern interrupts, or emotionally charged statements. These appear before the “see more” fold

• Lines 3 onward: expand with 3–5 sentences of value, insight, or story drawn from the Reddit data and solution gaps

• Use short paragraphs and line breaks for mobile readability

• Close with a clear, specific call to action

• Include 5–8 relevant hashtags at the end

Format:

--- CAPTION ---
[Line 1 — Maximum impact]
[Line 2 — Maximum impact]

[Supporting insight or story — 3 to 5 sentences]

[Call to Action]

[Hashtags]

Constraints

• Never invent Reddit data. If you don’t have access to the JSON, ask the user to paste it or provide the URL

• Never reuse the same emotional trigger across two hooks

• The first two caption lines must never be filler — they carry the full weight of the hook

• Keep each hook under 20 words

• The caption should be 150–300 words excluding hashtags

• Competitor benchmarks must be real and attributable — if uncertain, flag it rather than fabricate

• If uncertain about engagement metrics or post performance, add a disclaimer rather than guessing

• Ask only one clarifying question at a time

What to do with what you find

Insights without action are just reading. Here is how to make it useful:

Bring one finding to your next product meeting with the actual thread as evidence. Not “users want better export.” The thread. The 47 upvotes. The workarounds they built. That is a different conversation.

Match the exact language people use in Reddit threads to your landing page copy. If buyers are saying “I just want to see everything in one place without switching tools,” and your homepage says “unified workflow management,” you have a messaging gap.

Use the workarounds as competitive intelligence. Every three-tool stack someone built to replace one feature of your product is a feature conversation waiting to happen with your sales team.

And do this regularly, not once. Reddit threads are live. The complaints from six months ago and the ones from last week tell you different things. One tells you about the problem. The other tells you whether anyone has solved it yet.

The best GTM intelligence is already out there, in public, written by the people you are trying to reach.

Next time you are wondering why deals stall or churn is climbing, do not start with your CRM. Open Reddit, find the thread where your buyers are venting, and read it like a product brief.

Then bring evidence to your next meeting, not assumptions.

That is the difference between a GTM team that reacts and one that anticipates.

You Google the person. You skim their LinkedIn. You find a two-year-old article they were quoted in. Then the meeting starts and you are still saying things like: “So, tell me what your company does.”

There is a better way. It takes two minutes.

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Why This Matters More Than You Think

Let us talk Go-To-Market for a second.

One of the most common reasons early-stage GTM fails is not the product. It is the conversation. Specifically, failing to understand your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) deeply enough to ask the right questions, spot the right pain, and build genuine rapport quickly.

Most founders and sales professionals spend hours crafting decks and cold email sequences, then walk into the actual human meeting having done zero preparation on the person sitting across from them.

That is a GTM leak. A real one.

The person in front of you is not just a prospect or a connection. They are a window into your market. Their challenges, their language, their priorities…all live ICP research, if you know how to listen. But you can only listen well if you show up knowing enough to ask the right questions.

Preparation is not about impressing people. It is about respecting them and getting more from the conversation than small talk.

I Am Not Lazy. Just Time Starved.

The obvious answer to avoid such leak is: just research people before you meet them. And yes, you should but what is the reality?

• A proper LinkedIn deep-dive takes 15 to 20 minutes

• Cross-referencing company news, funding rounds, and recent posts takes another 10

• By the time you have a clear picture, you have spent 30 minutes you did not have

So most people skip it. Or they do a half-hearted three-minute skim that gives them just enough to fake familiarity which is somehow worse than going in cold.

The solution is not to work harder. It is to compress the research loop into something that actually fits your life.

Enter the Claude Project: Networking Maniac

A Claude Project is a persistent workspace inside Claude where you can store custom instructions, context about yourself, and a repeatable system prompt. Every conversation inside that project benefits from the same setup without you needing to re-explain anything.

I built one called “Networking Maniac.” Its one job: give me a sharp, structured brief on anyone I am about to meet, in under two minutes.

Here is how it worked in practice.

Before meeting Auston Quek, co-founder of Waffle Technologies (a CRM-focused POS system for F&B businesses in Singapore), I typed three words into my project: his name, surname and his company. Two minutes later, I had his origin story, what Waffle actually does for F&B businesses, recent company developments, and three smart questions tailored to his work.

I walked in prepared. The conversation went somewhere real.

Preparation compressed into two minutes is not a shortcut. It is a system.

The GTM Angle: Why This Is a Strategic Habit

Every person you meet who fits your ICP is a research opportunity. The better prepared you are, the better your questions.

The better your questions, the more they reveal. The more they reveal, the sharper your positioning, your messaging, and your product intuition become.

This is not just networking. It is a GTM feedback loop…one that most people leave completely untapped because they show up underprepared.

Systematic pre-meeting research, done consistently, compounds. You start to spot patterns in how your ICP talks about their problems. You learn which questions unlock the most honest answers. You stop pitching and start listening.

Two minutes of preparation is not courtesy. It is a competitive advantage.

The Prompt: Full System Instructions

Below is the exact prompt I use inside my Claude “Networking Maniac” project. Copy it directly into your own Claude Project’s custom instructions.

Once it is set up, all you need to type before any meeting is a person’s name, their company, and their country. Claude does the rest.

— PROMPT STARTS —

Role Definition

You are a master networker and elite relationship strategist who researches people before meetings. Your job is to build a concise yet insightful briefing that helps me connect quickly, find common ground, and ask thoughtful, non-generic questions.

Context

I am preparing to meet the following person:

Full name: [FULL NAME]

Country/location: [COUNTRY]

Current company: [COMPANY NAME]

Company website (if known): [COMPANY URL OR “unknown”]

LinkedIn profile (optional): [LINKEDIN URL OR “not provided”]

My role/context for this meeting (1–2 sentences): [E.g., “I’m a founder exploring partnerships in fintech”]. If the user doesn’t state it, refer to the files in this project or the user’s linkedin url.

Use only publicly available, verifiable information and clearly mark anything that is inferred or uncertain as such.

Instructions

Person background (short brief) and paired it with their profile picture

Provide a 3-5 bullet points overview of their professional background, career trajectory, and current role.

Highlight key roles, industries, and any notable shifts in their career (e.g., switching sectors, founding a company, moving countries).

Notable work and contributions

List 3 of their most relevant works or contributions (e.g., projects, products, deals, papers, talks, open-source work, key responsibilities).

For each, include: title/short label, their role, approximate date if available, and why it matters in their field.

Note any awards, recognitions, press mentions, or speaking engagements you can reliably confirm.

Company overview

Give a 5 point overview of their current company: what it does, target customers, main products/services, and business model, industry at a high level.

Add 3 recent company developments if available (e.g., funding, product launches, partnerships, leadership changes, market expansions).

Briefly explain the company’s position or reputation in its industry in simple, non-hyped language.

Person-in-company context

Explain in point form how this person fits into the company: seniority, team/function, decision-making influence, and likely priorities based on their role.

Suggest 3 bullet points likely current focus areas or challenges they might care about, explicitly labeled as “inferred” if they are not directly stated in sources.

Mention any overlaps between their work and my context (from the “my role/context” section).

Conversation angles and rapport

Identify 3–5 natural conversation starters based on their background, interests, or public activity (e.g., posts, talks, projects, side interests).

Include at least 1 angle connected to their current company or market, and 1 angle connected to their personal journey or career decisions.

Flag anything sensitive or potentially controversial so I know to handle it with extra care or avoid it.

Three strong questions for the meeting

Create 3 tailored, high-quality questions that:

Are open-ended and specific to this person’s role, company, or visible work.

Avoid generic networking questions like “What do you do?” or “Tell me about your company.”

Are designed to (a) show I’ve done my homework, (b) draw out their expertise, and (c) open the door to future collaboration.

Format them as:

Question 1 – Focus: [e.g., their current role/challenge]

Question 2 – Focus: [e.g., company direction/industry trend]

Question 3 – Focus: [e.g., their personal journey/lessons learned]

Actionable prep summary (90-second read)

Finish with a short, bullet-point prep sheet that I can scan right before the meeting:

3 key facts about them

3 key facts about their company

3 tailored talking points I can open with

The 3 strong questions from above, in condensed form

Constraints

If information is missing or unclear, do not guess. Clearly state: “No reliable public information found on X.”

Keep the whole output concise enough to read in under 5 minutes.

Use clear headings and bullet points.

Prioritize accuracy and clarity over volume of details.

When something is inferred from patterns rather than explicitly stated, preface it with “Likely” or “Inferred from [reason].”

Output Format

Use this structure exactly:

Person Overview

Notable Work & Contributions

Company Overview

Their Role & Likely Priorities

Conversation Starters & Rapport Angles

Three Strong Questions to Ask

Quick Pre-Meeting Prep Sheet (Bullets Only)

— PROMPT ENDS —

Step-by-Step: How to Set This Up in Claude

Here is exactly how to build your own Networking Maniac project. Five minutes to set up once. Works every time after that.

Step 1: Create a Claude Project

1. Go to claude.ai and sign in.

2. In the left sidebar, click “Projects” then “New Project”.

3. Name it something memorable — I use “Networking Maniac”.

4. Add a short description so you remember what it is for.

Step 2: Add Your Custom Instructions

5. Inside your new project, click “Project Instructions” or the settings icon.

6. Paste the full prompt from the section above into the custom instructions field.

7. In the “My role/context” section of the prompt, fill in your own background once — this stays fixed. For example: “I am a GTM consultant based in Singapore, exploring partnerships across Southeast Asia.” . For me I added my CV under ‘files’

8. Save the instructions.

Step 3: Use It Before Every Meeting

9. Open your Networking Maniac project.

10. Start a new conversation inside it.

11. Type the person’s full name, their company, and their country. That is it.

12. Read the brief. Focus on the “Quick Pre-Meeting Prep Sheet” at the bottom — your 90-second scan before you walk in.

What to Do With the Brief

The brief is not a script. Do not memorise it and recite it back to the person.

Use it to:

• Arrive with enough context to skip the small talk and go deeper faster

• Ask one or two of the tailored questions to show you have done your homework

• Listen for where their answers diverge from what the brief predicted. That gap is always the most interesting part

• After the meeting, update your notes on what you learned about their market, their language, and their pain points

Over time, you are not just networking better. You are building a live, human ICP database one conversation at a time.

The Bigger Picture

Auston told me something during our meeting that stuck with me: you cannot apply Silicon Valley principles to Southeast Asia, because the wallet sizes, the culture, and the way people perceive technology are fundamentally different.

He is right. And the reason he could say that so clearly is because he has spent years sitting with his customers not just selling to them, but being present with them.

That is the real lesson here. AI can compress your research. But the curiosity, the attentiveness, the willingness to show up prepared and genuinely interested that is still yours to bring.

Two minutes of prep before a meeting is a signal. It says: I valued this conversation enough to think about it before I arrived.

In a world where most people do not bother, that is already a differentiator.

Ten years later, the same product (now given away for free ) sits at the centre of a $3.6 billion company with hundreds of millions in recurring revenue and some of the most obsessive users in fitness.

This is WHOOP.

And this is the story of how a screenless wristband rewrote the rules of go‑to‑market in one of the most crowded categories on earth.

👋 Hi, it’s Heng Xuan and welcome to Brain Dump, my weekly newsletter exploring the hidden playbooks behind the fastest-growing companies and other tech trends.

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The Problem Nobody Was Solving

Before WHOOP, the wearables story was simple.

Steps. Notifications. Maybe a heart‑rate graph if you tapped the right menu.

It made you feel busy, not better.

Will Ahmed, then a Harvard squash captain, looked at this landscape and saw a gap big enough to build a company through. He wasn’t interested in designing yet another wrist computer. He wanted an instrument panel for the human body.

The questions he obsessed over were not “How many steps did I take?” but:

• Am I actually recovered from yesterday?

• How much strain can I safely take on today?

• What is my sleep really doing for my performance?

To answer them, he sat in the library and read hundreds of academic papers on physiology, heart‑rate variability, and recovery.

The conclusion was blunt: the science and sensors existed — but nobody had turned them into a product that serious athletes could trust and regular people could actually use.

The Choice That Moved The Needle

WHOOP didn’t launch like a consumer product.

There was no big retail rollout, no “coming soon” splash in an Apple keynote. For years, it lived on the wrists and chests of professional athletes, collegiate teams, and special‑forces units.

That was deliberate.

Most companies in fitness start at the bottom of the pyramid: a broad, general audience that has to be educated from scratch. WHOOP started at the top. It went to people for whom performance wasn’t a hobby, but a job.

Pro golfers trying to shave one stroke. NBA players tracking minute‑to‑minute readiness through a long season. Teams looking for any legal edge over their rivals.

If WHOOP could win them, the thinking went, everyone else would follow.

And it worked.

When cameras caught top athletes wearing an unfamiliar band court‑side or on the course, curiosity did the marketing. Partnerships followed. A major US sports league approved WHOOP for in‑game use. National teams started negotiating data deals, not just sponsorships.

WHOOP wasn’t buying credibility with big cheques and glossy campaigns.

It was borrowing it from the most demanding users in the world and letting results do the talking.

That’s the first important lesson in this story:

Credibility trickles down, not up.

The Moment the Business Model Inverted

For all the elite adoption, WHOOP still had a problem.

The early consumer version cost around $500. The hardware itself wasn’t cheap to produce. Margins were thin. Volumes were modest.

From a traditional P&L perspective, it looked like a familiar hardware story: expensive devices, slow replacement cycles, lumpy revenue. The kind of business investors had learned to be wary of after watching once‑hot gadgets end up in clearance bins.

But buried inside WHOOP’s early numbers was something very different.

The people who did buy it weren’t leaving.

They were checking their recovery scores in the morning, adjusting training loads, going to bed earlier because the data told them yesterday’s Netflix binge had wrecked their sleep. They were not treating WHOOP as a gadget to be upgraded, but as a habit to be maintained.

You can build a business on that.

In 2018, WHOOP made the decision that defines its story: it stopped selling the device.

The hardware became free.

Access to the data and coaching became the product.

Monthly membership, not a one‑off purchase.

From the outside, this looked like a pricing tweak. From the inside, it was a total inversion of incentives.

Instead of obsessing over how many devices it could ship each quarter, WHOOP had to focus on one thing:

Are we valuable enough that people will keep paying every month?

That question reshaped everything from the product roadmap, support experience, even the language. Customers became “members.” The company’s job wasn’t to win the sale once, it was to re‑earn it every day.

In a world where most hardware companies are one bad product cycle away from disaster, WHOOP became something else:

A subscription business wrapped in a band.

Saying “No” to the Screen

There’s a second decision that seems almost perverse on its face.

At the exact moment Apple, Samsung, and Garmin were cramming more and more capabilities into watches, WHOOP stripped its device down to almost nothing.

No screen. No notifications. No apps. No payments.

Just sensors, fabric, and an algorithm.

Why?

Because WHOOP realised it wasn’t competing on the wrist.

It was competing in your head.

The company didn’t want you flicking through messages or getting distracted by another glowing rectangle. It wanted you to glance at one thing each morning: a score that told you how ready your body was to take on strain and what to do about it.

No screen meant longer battery life, smaller form factor, more comfortable 24/7 wear. And critically, it made a clear promise:

This is not a watch. It’s a coach.

In a crowded market, that restraint was the real differentiation. Everyone else chased feature parity. WHOOP chased behavioural change.

How WHOOP Turned Data into a Moat

Every subscription business lives and dies on a simple equation: does the value a member gets over time grow faster than the cost of serving them?

WHOOP’s answer is found in its data.

The longer you wear it, the more the system learns your baselines. From your typical heart‑rate variability, to resting heart rate, to sleep duration, to recovery patterns. Deviations from those baselines become meaningful. The insights get sharper. The coaching feels more “you.”

If you switch to another device, you don’t just lose a gadget. You lose years of calibrated history that made your daily scores truly personal.

An honest moat.

The Media Company Hiding Inside a Wearable

If the story ended here, WHOOP would already be an interesting case study: elite‑first adoption, subscription pivot, intentional product focus.

But there’s one more layer: the way it talks to the world.

WHOOP doesn’t behave like a gadget brand. It behaves like a hybrid of a research lab and a media company.

Long‑form conversations with athletes and scientists. Deep‑dive explainers on sleep, recovery, and strain. “Year in review” data stories that let members see how their behaviours changed over time not as vanity metrics, but as prompts for reflection.

The company’s marketing isn’t “we’re cool, buy this band.”

It’s “here’s what we’re learning about human performance, and here’s how you can apply it…. by the way, our product is the easiest way to do that.”

There’s an important pattern here for anyone building in a complex space:

If you make something that changes behaviour, your content isn’t an add‑on. It’s part of the product.

WHOOP understood that early.

So, What Can You Steal from WHOOP?

Most of us are not building multi‑billion‑dollar wearables.

But the underlying moves WHOOP made are surprisingly transferable.

A few worth sitting with:

1. Start where the stakes are highest.
   WHOOP went to people who had to care such as pro athletes, special‑forces units, serious competitors. If your product works there, everyone else is easy mode.

2. Align your revenue with ongoing value, not one‑off hype.
   The subscription pivot forced WHOOP to think in years, not quarters. If you can structure your model so you only win when your customers keep winning, you’ll make better choices.

3. Differentiate by subtraction, not addition.
   While the market shouted “more features,” WHOOP said “no screen.” In your world, what could you remove that would sharpen your promise?

4. Turn your data into stories.
   Raw numbers are the norm. Interpretation is value. Helping people see themselves differently through your product is where loyalty lives.

5. Build for behaviour, not eyeballs.
   WHOOP is designed to be worn, forgotten, and checked with intention. The question it asks each morning, “what should today look like?”, is far more powerful than any vanity metric. They rewrote the rules of go‑to‑market in one of the most crowded categories on earth.

That is the story of Mixue.

While premium bubble tea brands fought for affluent city centres, Mixue turned a shaved ice stall in Henan into a 45,000‑store network that has now overtaken McDonald’s and Starbucks by outlet count, selling roughly seven billion drinks in nine months and going public in Hong Kong.

On the surface it looks like cheap soft serve and bubble tea. Underneath, it is one of the clearest examples of low‑cost, high‑volume go‑to‑market execution in the world.

This is how it happened.

From failed stalls to one yuan ice cream

Mixue began in 1997 as a tiny shaved ice stall in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province. Founder Zhang Hongchao was a college student from a farming family. He borrowed money from his grandmother to buy a basic shaved ice machine and set up shop. The idea was simple: sell cold desserts to students for a bit of extra income.

It did not work.

The first iteration struggled with low brand recognition and brutal competition. Zhang eventually had to close the shop. He took odd jobs, tried raising quails and rabbits, and failed again. None of those experiments scaled. What he did gain was pattern recognition. He could see where margin lived and where it died in small, fragile businesses.

The turning point came in 2005–2006 when he launched a one yuan soft serve cone. At a time when ice cream prices were rising, he reformulated the recipe and simplified the offer so he could sell cones at roughly twenty per cent below competitors and still make money.

The product was not aspirational. It was accessible. Students and low‑income workers who could not justify an expensive treat could justify one yuan.

The cone took off. The following year he opened a proper ice cream shop and started attracting franchise interest. It was the first clear signal that there was massive demand sitting under the premium bubble tea and dessert brands, as long as someone could serve it profitably.​

The lesson is simple. Breakthroughs do not always come from building the most impressive product. Sometimes they come from building the most believable product at the most believable price.

Low price as a system, not a gimmick

From the outside, it is easy to explain Mixue’s rise as “they are cheap”. The reality is more precise. Low price is an output of a system that touches almost every part of the business.

First, the menu is deliberately constrained. The brand focuses on a tight range of ice cream, lemonades, fruit teas and basic coffee drinks rather than an overwhelming catalogue. Fewer SKUs mean simpler operations, faster training, and lower risk of ingredient waste.

Second, Mixue has built deep vertical integration. It owns or controls large parts of its supply chain, including production facilities, warehousing and logistics. Ingredients and packaging move through company‑run networks rather than being sourced piecemeal from third parties. This reduces costs per unit and gives much tighter control over quality and availability.

Third, the company leans into high‑volume economics. Instead of aiming for large margins per cup, it designs its model around selling vast numbers of low‑priced drinks and cones. Most items are priced between 2 and 8 yuan, often half the price of competitors such as Heytea or KOI.

That pricing pulls in students, low‑income workers and customers in lower‑tier cities, segments many premium chains do not properly serve.

The result is that low pricing is not a discount strategy but a structural advantage. Mixue’s ability to sell cheap is a side effect of decisions about integration, menu design and scale.

A go‑to‑market engine built on franchising and density

Once the one yuan cone had proved demand existed, Zhang moved from running shops to building a system. In 2008, Mixue began to franchise. By 2014 it had around 1,000 stores, mostly in central and lower‑tier cities. By 2020 it had exceeded 10,000 stores. Today there are more than 45,000 outlets in China and 11 overseas markets, including Southeast Asia, Australia, Japan and South Korea.

The go‑to‑market model has three key elements.

First, extremely accessible franchising. The initial investment to open a shop is relatively low for the food and beverage sector, in the region of 210,000 yuan according to some reports.

Franchise fees and ongoing operating costs are set so that small entrepreneurs can realistically participate. You do not need deep industry expertise to qualify. Mixue provides the brand, the system, and the supply chain.​

Second, near total reliance on franchisees. More than 99 per cent of Mixue stores are franchised rather than company‑owned. That means expansion is largely funded with other people’s capital. The company focuses its resources on product development, marketing, manufacturing and logistics, while franchise partners handle local retail execution.

Third, geographic and demographic focus. Early growth concentrated on lower‑tier cities that global brands tended to ignore. These markets had lower rents, lower labour costs and high price sensitivity. The company’s low‑price, high‑volume model fit them perfectly. As the brand strengthened, it moved into higher‑tier cities and then overseas but kept the same core proposition: consistent, cheap, cheerful drinks and desserts.

Branding that feels memorable

For a company that lives on price and volume, Mixue has built surprisingly sticky brand assets.

In 2018 it introduced the Snow King mascot and a bright, cartoonish visual identity. The look is unmistakable. Stores are filled with white and red visuals. Cups and packaging carry the snowman figure. It is not subtle, it is memorable.

The company also leans into viral, almost absurdly catchy marketing. Its jingle, endlessly repeated in shops and online, became a meme in its own right across Chinese social platforms.

This kind of audio branding embeds the brand into daily life in a way that polished, “sophisticated” campaigns often fail to do.

Internationally, Mixue adapts menus with local flavours such as coconut drinks in Thailand and mango milk tea in the Philippines while keeping its prices aggressively low. Stores reflect some local cultural features but still carry the core Snow King identity. The result is a brand that can feel both familiar and local at the same time.

Underneath, the story they are selling is simple. In a period of economic pressure, Mixue offers a tiny, reliable indulgence that does not require you to check your bank account.

What founders can learn from Mixue

The easy move is to dismiss Mixue as “just selling cheap ice cream”. That misses the point. The real insight is that almost everything in the company’s history flows from a few hard constraints and a few clear choices.

First, Mixue picked a customer and stuck with them. It optimised for students, young workers and lower‑income consumers who wanted small, frequent treats that did not feel like a financial decision.

It did not chase the prestige market. It chased the volume market and designed everything else around that.

Second, it treated low price as a design brief, not a promotion. Vertical integration, menu simplicity, logistics centres and R&D hubs are all in service of making one yuan feel sustainable, not suicidal. When a founder says they want to be “affordable”, the next question should be: “What would you have to own and standardise to make that true in ten years?”

Third, it treated distribution and leverage as part of GTM, not an afterthought. Franchising allowed Mixue to expand into tens of thousands of locations without raising enormous sums of capital early on. Every franchisee funded another node in the network. Every node increased the brand’s bargaining power with suppliers and landlords.

Fourth, it understood that in crowded categories, distinctiveness beats sophistication. Snow King, the jingle, the bright store designs, the ridiculous density of outlets: all of these make Mixue hard to ignore even if you never step inside. Too many brands try to look refined and end up invisible.

For anyone thinking about go‑to‑market strategy, Mixue is a reminder that scale is not just a fund‑raising story. It is a design problem. You can build from the bottom up, break your product into something people can actually afford daily, and then construct the supply chain, franchise model and brand assets that allow you to keep that promise at industrial volume.

A one yuan ice cream is not just a cheap cone. In Mixue’s case, it is a doorway into an entire operating system.

Chagee is one of the clearest examples of how tight alignment across strategy, operations, and GTM can turn a commodity product into a multi‑billion dollar business. On the surface, it is just another milk tea chain in an unforgiving, discount‑driven category. In reality, it is a tightly engineered machine of positioning, process, and incentives.

From orphanage to tea empire

Chagee’s founder, Zhang Junjie, did not follow a traditional track into business. He grew up in an orphanage in Yunnan, a region known as the land of tea. He never attended a day of formal school and spent years in deep hardship. He later worked his way up in a milk tea chain, learning the business from the inside. Those years of operational exposure and survival sharpened his eye for systems over credentials.

In 2017, Zhang launched Chagee. Less than a decade later, the brand operates more than six thousand stores globally and is valued in the billions. The story is compelling, but what really matters for founders is what sits beneath the narrative: a set of deliberate choices about product, positioning, operations, and expansion.

A clear lane: tea for yourself, not for your boss

Zhang’s philosophy can be summed up in one line he repeats often: “Drinking coffee is for your boss. Drinking tea is for yourself.” Coffee is framed as fuel for productivity, a symbol of work. Tea is framed as restoration, culture, and self.

This line is not just marketing copy. It defines Chagee’s lane in a crowded market.

Where many competitors chase novelty with sugary toppings, endless flavours, and visually loud drinks, Chagee doubles down on traditional tea brews. Customers choose the tea leaf and the sugar level. There are no toppings. The drink is almost minimalist by category standards and that is intentional.

The target customer is closer to someone who drinks a latte at Starbucks or a kopi at Ya Kun every day, not a teenager chasing the latest fruit tea trend.

Simplicity becomes a filter. If you want pearls and jelly, Chagee is not for you. If you want something closer to a daily ritual than a dessert, it is.

This is the first lesson for founders. A strong positioning does not try to be everything for everyone. It is specific enough that some people will walk away.

Simplicity as an operating strategy

Most beverage chains try to increase ticket size by offering more customisation and add‑ons. That can work, but it also increases labour intensity, error rates, and inventory complexity. Every new topping or variation multiplies the number of possible combinations. The more permutations, the more chances for mistakes and slow service.

Customers make a few decisions: tea type and sweetness. This simplicity leads to three advantages.

First, customer replicability. The experience is predictable. You know what you will get, just like a daily coffee. That makes it easier to become a habit.

Second, production replicability. Orders are executed through specialised machines. Tea is brewed using “teaspresso” technology, with each cup prepared in seconds to a standardised profile. Ingredients are pre‑portioned and labelled. Staff press a button, assemble, and bag. The error rate drops dramatically and the system can be run by people with varied backgrounds, including staff with hearing or speech impairments.

Third, store replicability. Because the menu is narrow and the process is standardised, stores are much easier to clone. Franchisees do not need to manage complex topping inventories, train baristas to artisanal standards, or improvise on the floor. Chagee supplies the machines, the tea, the milk, the cups, and the packaging. The store is a distribution node for a predefined system.

The broader lesson here is that every degree of simplicity at the product level compounds through operations.

Founders often add features for perceived value, then pay for that decision repeatedly in complexity costs. Chagee does the opposite: it subtracts options to multiply speed, quality, and consistency.

A franchise model that compounds incentives

Chagee’s business model amplifies these operational choices.

Most of its stores are franchised. Franchisees pay an upfront fee, share a percentage of their sales, and buy core ingredients from Chagee. Because the operating model is simple and efficient, new stores can reach breakeven quickly. Franchise partners see a path to recovery of their investment in a relatively short time frame.

From Chagee’s perspective, this model generates revenue at several layers. There is the initial franchise fee. There are recurring royalties. There is margin on the sale of tea, milk, cups, and other supplies. Every new store is funded largely by external capital, but plugs into the same centralised system.

Crucially, this structure only works because the underlying unit economics are sound and predictable. A complicated, labour‑heavy concept would be much harder to push through this model. Simplicity and standardisation make the franchise engine feasible.

This is the second lesson. A clever business model cannot rescue weak unit economics or an undisciplined operation. The model and the machine must fit each other.

Control, then scale: the Singapore example

Chagee’s path into Singapore is a useful case study in strategic iteration.

The brand first entered the market through a franchise arrangement. That attempt ended with stores closing and a pause in operations.

Many companies would either abandon the market or double down on the same approach. Chagee did neither.

Instead, it re‑entered under direct ownership. The company set up its Southeast Asia headquarters in Singapore and resumed expansion with tighter control over operations, branding, and execution. Only after proving the model locally did it start to move again toward broader scale.

In parallel, Chagee opened concept stores such as family‑friendly formats and more elaborate flagships, using them as laboratories to refine the experience, not as an excuse for uncontrolled expansion. It then used the same underlying system of teaspresso, menu simplicity, and supply chain control to support new locations.

This “control before scale” mindset is something many high‑growth companies neglect. They race for store count, users, or logos without first locking in a repeatable playbook. Chagee’s approach is slower on the surface but more robust over time.

Execution under pressure: nine thousand cups in a day

A system can look good on paper but fall apart when demand spikes. Chagee’s operations during major store openings tell a different story.

At one Singapore opening, the store reportedly served over nine thousand cups in a single day. That translated into hundreds of cups an hour and a drink leaving the bar every few seconds. To sustain that pace, multiple things must be true at once.

Forecasting and prep must be accurate enough that stores do not run out of ingredients. The physical layout must support a smooth flow of staff and customers. The production line must be able to repeat the same actions rapidly without generating a pile‑up of errors. The digital ordering system must stay stable and responsive. The staff must be trained to operate at that tempo without collapsing.

You cannot fake that level of throughput. You can only achieve it if you have designed for it, tested it, and refined it. It is what happens when business model, process design, and human execution are all aligned.

A different kind of aspiration

Chagee is often compared to brands like Starbucks, Luckin, or Mixue. Each of those chains represents a different answer to the same set of questions: what is the role of the drink, what is the role of the store, and what identity does the customer buy.

Starbucks built the third place: a space between home and office. Luckin pushed coffee as pure fuel: fast, cheap, and ordered through an app. Mixue made price the story: bubble tea and ice cream for the mass market.

Chagee’s answer is rituals. It does not sell status through complex customisation or a social environment. It sells a ritualised, consistent tea experience that feels more like a daily habit than a treat. The aspiration is not to be seen with the drink but to feel a certain way while drinking it.

For founders, this is a reminder that identity can be built around subtle shifts. You do not need to declare an entirely new category. You can reframe how an existing product fits into people’s lives and then design your model to support that reframing.

What founders can take from Chagee

Several practical ideas travel well from Chagee’s world into software, B2B services, and other domains.

First, choose a lane with discipline. Decide who you are for and who you are not for. Chagee is not afraid to be “too plain” for people who want toppings. In the same way, a product can be unapologetically opinionated about its use cases, instead of trying to accommodate every request.

Second, design your operating system around your promise. If you promise speed, build for speed at every layer. If you promise depth, build for depth. Chagee’s promise of daily, high‑quality tea is supported by every detail: equipment, ingredient packaging, training, and store layout.

Third, align incentives in your growth model. Franchisees succeed because the concept is simple and the economics work. Partners are not expected to conjure performance from a broken system. In a software or services context, this might mean designing partner programs, pricing, and implementation models that are genuinely attractive to those delivering value on your behalf.

Fourth, treat new markets as experiments, not trophies. Chagee’s willingness to leave, rethink, and re‑enter Singapore with a different structure shows respect for local reality. It suggests a mindset of learning rather than one of entitlement.

Finally, remember that scale magnifies everything. If your product, process, or economics do not work at ten units, they will hurt more at a thousand. Chagee’s story is impressive not because it scaled chaos but because it scaled a system that was deliberately constrained, tested, and tuned.

For founders and hiring managers in go‑to‑market, strategy, and operations roles, Chagee is a useful mental model. It is a reminder that the real advantage often lies not in shouting louder but in making sure every part of your business tells the same story, from the first line of copy to the last cup served at closing time.

I am back with more braindumps! For a quick summary of this article, I have a carousel here.

Why smart investors walk away

Early-stage investing is a game of probabilities, not vibes. A single concern is fine, but when an investor sees the same patterns over and over, they learn to walk away early.

From my time in VC, we meet all sorts of founders from the overly confident to the overly passive. Personalities aside, these are red flags we look out for when looking at the many startups that we come across daily.

The good news: most of these red flags are fixable, if founders are honest enough to see them.

Red flag 1: “Everyone is our customer”

If your customer is “everyone,” your customer is no one. Smart investors want to hear about specific humans using your product, not just a massive TAM slide.

Tell-tale signs:

• Can’t describe a good vs bad customer.

• Talks about market size, not real users.

• No clear boundaries around who they won’t serve.

The quick test: ask “What does your ideal customer look like?” If the answer is “anyone with this problem,” the homework isn’t done yet.

“Everyone is going to be my customer, Heng Xuan” said a founder during my pitch call. When pressed on why that is so, he just said ‘look at facebook, we will get there’. Sadly, they got to the end of the cash runway faster than they got to be a facebook.

Red flag 2: In love with the solution, not the problem

Great founders are problem-obsessed. Their product is just today’s hypothesis. Weak founders fall in love with their own features and pitch how cool the tech is, instead of the painful, urgent problem it solves.

Watch for:

• Feature tours instead of customer pain.

• Defensiveness when you ask about demand.

• No evidence they’ve sat with users and heard uncomfortable feedback.

A founder I met was pitching his app. He said that he was solving the problem that Tinder and Bumble did not-which was community. While he made many cool features, he was not able to share why it is a painpoint. He was just building cool add-on features to the incumbent.

Red flag 3: “We need funding first to find customers”

If the story is “once we raise, then we’ll talk to customers,” investors get nervous. The best founders find ways to create traction with almost nothing.

Signals that worry investors:

• No early customer conversations.

• No beta users, waitlist, or pilots.

• No scrappy experiments to test demand.

What this really says is: “I haven’t yet proven I can sell.” Inability to attract anyone before funding is often a sales and initiative problem, not a money problem.

Red flag 4: Team and equity dysfunction

Early-stage investors mostly invest in people. So when the team looks fragile, everything else becomes noise.

Common team red flags:

• Equity split doesn’t match contributions.

• “We’ll decide equity later.”

• Founder with zero domain insight

• Can’t articulate their own weaknesses

If a team can’t have hard conversations about equity now, how will they handle pivots, layoffs, or down rounds later?

A founder doing his Series A fundraise insisted on having his CV for one full page on the pitch deck while his team and co-founders were relegated to an appendix slide. It was clear that his team would not last long with such a heavy centre of founder’s gravity. Why would any co-founder stay on if they are always in the appendix?

Red flag 5: Blind to their own weaknesses

Investors are not looking for superheroes; they’re looking for self-awareness. A founder who cannot name what they’re bad at is far riskier than one who can.

Danger signs:

• Every setback is someone else’s fault.

• They insist they can do everything themselves.

• They cannot clearly state, “Here’s where I need help.”

The best founders take responsibility for outcomes and actively build around their gaps.

Red flag 6: No learning velocity

At pre-seed and seed, the product will change, the deck will change, the roadmap will change. What cannot be missing is learning velocity.

Red flags here:

• They can’t answer “What have you learned this month?”

• They’re still operating on the same assumptions from six months ago.

Strong founders run experiments, invalidate their own ideas, and adapt quickly. Stagnant hypotheses signal stagnant thinking.

Red flag 7: Magical unit economics

Investors don’t need founders to be profitable on day one. They do need a credible path where the math eventually works.

Magical thinking sounds like:

• “We’ll figure out unit economics at scale.”

• No clear understanding of how customer acquisition, pricing, and margins connect.

• Hand-wavy “we’ll make it up on volume” logic.

Even a rough but coherent model beats a perfect but imaginary one.

A growing crypto company had negative gross margins. The deal team saw that while the name was a hot one in the industry, there was almost no way they could get out of negative GM territory if the market turned. The market turned and they went bankrupt. o.O

Turning red flags into green ones

Most investors don’t expect perfection. They expect clarity, honesty, and progress. Many of these red flags disappear when founders:

• Narrow their target customer.

• Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

• Show scrappy traction and fast learning loops.

• Build teams and cap tables that can survive hard conversations.

If you’re a founder, treat this as a self-audit before your next investor meeting. If you’re an operator or aspiring investor, these are the patterns worth training your eye on early.

A carousel summary on my LinkedIn here:

These are the growth-stage choke points where many promising startups stumble and stall.

You may have heard of these pitfalls before: creating a product but failing to market it, generating demand but not closing sales, delivering but not renewing, renewing but not expanding.

Sadly, you do not graduate from each valley permanently.

Every quarter, the question “Which valley are we in right now?” should be at the top of leadership’s minds.

Why? Because your startup’s weaknesses evolve as it grows and scales. Fixing one valley last year doesn’t mean you won’t fall into another next year.

Presenting to you: 6 GTM Valleys of Death

1. Built Product, No Market Demand

This is the classic “build it and they will come” trap.

• Example: A Southeast Asian fintech startup launched a complex financial platform but didn’t confirm enough user interest. Marketing struggled to gain traction.

• Action Tip: Validate demand early with MVP users and market tests before heavy investment.

• Warning Signs: Low engagement with marketing efforts, limited organic interest or word of mouth.

2. Generating Interest Without Closing Sales

Marketing efforts drive interest, but sales conversions lag behind.

• Example: A SaaS firm attracted many leads but had inconsistent sales due to unclear customer targeting. Everyone was their customer.

• Action Tip: Tighten your ideal customer profile, audit and optimise the sales funnel frequently.

• Warning Signs: High lead volume with low qualified pipeline and poor sales team feedback.

3. Closing Deals, Failing in Delivery

You win customers but struggle to deliver or onboard effectively.

• Example: A B2B startup secured contracts but underinvested in customer success, leading to churn. Sadly, the churn came in quarter after quarter but the founder was focus on increasing the new volume of customers.

• Action Tip: Invest early in customer success teams and clear onboarding processes.

• Warning Signs: High customer complaints, frequent scope resets, and churn during early lifecycle.

4. Value Delivered, But Renewals Lag

Customers use your product but fail to renew due to unclear ROI.

• Example: Edtech startup with solid usage metrics but customers didn’t see enough business impact to continue. Their product was sadly a vitamin and not a painkiller

• Action Tip: Measure and communicate clear value metrics, gather renewal feedback regularly.

• Warning Signs: Declining renewal rates, neutral or negative customer satisfaction scores.

5. Renewals Without Expansion

Renewals succeed, but upselling or cross-selling opportunities are missed.

• Example: Health tech company had good renewal rates but stagnant revenue growth from existing accounts.

• Action Tip: Develop account management and expansion playbooks, bundle complementary offerings.

• Warning Signs: Flat or declining average revenue per account (ARPA), few new product adoptions.

6. Expansion Without Localisation or Scale

Growth beyond your home market stalls due to cultural, regulatory, or operational barriers.

• Example: A regional e-commerce platform expanded aggressively abroad but failed to adapt to local payment methods and user behaviours. They launch lending products in a market that had a high savings rate and a high risk aversion to debt.

• Action Tip: Customise go-to-market and product strategies for each new geography or vertical. Build local partnerships and hire in-market experts.

• Warning Signs: Slow traction despite marketing spend, regulatory hurdles, and high customer support queries on local issues.

Why Regularly Revisiting the Valleys Matters

It’s tempting for leadership teams to declare, “We fixed that problem.” And while that’s a good sign, the reality is that the startup journey means cycling through these valleys repeatedly.

1. A company that plugged its marketing leak recently might soon face challenges in delivering to a growing customer base.

2. Smooth renewal rates don’t guarantee growth, especially if the product lacks fresh offerings to drive expansion.

3. Scaling teams often overcome one hurdle only to encounter new difficulties as the company structure becomes more complex.

By making a habit of asking “Which valley are we in right now?” every quarter, leaders avoid false confidence and identify issues early before they compound.

This means sharper prioritisation, more proactive resource allocation, and better chances of crossing valleys smoothly.

Wishing you all the best on your GTM journeys!

Every founder knows the feeling. You're bootstrapping your way to success, watching every penny, yet you know content marketing is essential. Traditional marketing agencies want $5,000+ monthly retainers. Premium AI tools stack up to hundreds per month.

Every customer call contains insights that would make a market researcher weep with joy. Your prospects are literally telling you their pain points, their language, their objections, and their desires. Yet most founders treat these calls as one-off conversations, missing the content treasure trove sitting right in front of them.

Your customers' questions + your internal expertise = months of authentic, high-converting content that speaks directly to your market's needs.

The 4-Step Content Creation System

Step 1: Extract and Analyse Customer Questions

What to do: Use free tools like Zoom AI or Fathom to automatically transcribe your customer calls, then feed these transcripts into ChatGPT for analysis.

The exact prompt to use:

"Act like an expert data analyst. From these attached transcript calls, identify the common questions and issues that are faced by customers. Develop the outputs into a table with the categories and frequency that these questions appear amongst my customers."

Pro tips for this step:

• Collect at least 10-15 call transcripts for meaningful patterns

• Include both sales calls and customer success calls for broader insights

• Save the output table and it becomes your content roadmap for months

• Look for emotional language and urgency indicators in the questions

What you'll get: A clear hierarchy of your customers' most pressing concerns, organised by frequency and category. This becomes your content strategy foundation.

Step 2: Develop Strategic Interview Questions

What to do: Take your top customer question categories and transform them into interview guides for your internal subject matter experts.

The exact prompt to use:

"Act like an expert B2B content strategist. I want to develop [Topic X] into content because it represents a pain customers feel deeply and urgently. Can you draft a 4-question interview guide I can use with my internal subject matter expert to flesh this out as extremely helpful content that drives leads?"

Pro tips for this step:

• Focus on one category at a time for deeper, more valuable content

• Include questions that reveal the "why" behind problems, not just the "what"

• Ask ChatGPT to create follow-up questions for each main question

• Tailor questions to extract specific examples and case studies

What you'll get: Professional-grade interview questions that will extract the exact insights your customers need to hear.

Step 3: Record Expert Interviews

What to do: Schedule focused 30-45 minute sessions with your internal experts ( product managers, customer success leads) using your prepared questions.

Pro tips for this step:

• Use Fathom or Zoom AI to automatically record and transcribe

• Encourage storytelling and ask for specific customer examples

• Don't stick rigidly to questions; follow interesting tangents

• Record multiple experts on the same topic for varied perspectives

• Keep sessions focused with one topic per interview works best

What you'll get: Rich, authentic conversations that contain the raw material for multiple pieces of content.

Step 4: Transform Transcripts into Content

What to do: Feed your interview transcripts back into ChatGPT with specific formatting requests for blogs, social posts, email sequences, or video scripts.

Sample prompts for content creation:

"Turn this interview transcript into a 1,200-word SEO-optimised blog post about [topic]. Include actionable tips, real examples, and a compelling call-to-action."

"Create 10 LinkedIn posts from this transcript, each highlighting a different insight. Make them engaging and include relevant hashtags."

"Transform this into a 5-email sequence for prospects struggling with [specific problem]."

Pro tips for this step:

• Always specify your target audience in the prompt

• Request multiple content formats from single interviews

• Ask for SEO-optimised or GEO-optimized headlines and meta descriptions

• Include calls-to-action that align with your sales process

Why This System Works So Well

Authenticity at scale: Your content addresses real customer problems using your team's actual expertise, not generic advice.

Cost efficiency: Beyond your time, the only costs are free transcription tools and ChatGPT access.

Continuous improvement: Each new customer call adds to your question database, making your content more relevant over time.

Sales alignment: Content created this way naturally leads prospects toward your solution because it's based on real customer conversations.

Four HYROX races in, including one where I literally packed my bags and flew to Hong Kong just to suffer through 8 stations of pure hell, and I'm convinced this thing is genius. Business genius hiding behind all the sweat and tears.

I'm intrigued with how companies scale, and watching HYROX go from this underground fitness challenge to a €140M+ global machine has been fascinating.

But here's what really gets me: they're not just selling you a race. They're selling you an entire ecosystem, and somehow making you feel grateful to pay for every piece of it.

The Entry Fee That Makes You Commit

Let's talk about that price tag first. I've dropped anywhere from $150 to $200 just to earn my spot at the start line. And you know what? It never felt like highway robbery.

There's something about that price point that makes you actually train for the damn thing instead of just showing up and hoping for the best.

Compare that to a $30 fun run where half the people are taking selfies and wearing jeans or holding bags to run. HYROX's pricing forces commitment. Globally, they're pulling in around $84 million annually just from entries, and they're smart about it too. Higher prices in the US where people expect premium experiences, lower in Eastern Europe and India where the markets demand it.

Your Family Becomes Their Customers Too

Most fitness events treat spectators like afterthoughts. "Oh, you want to watch? Stand over there, I guess." Not HYROX. They've turned watching into an experience. I've had friends pay $7 to $20 just to watch me struggle through burpee broad jumps, and somehow they left thinking it looked fun.

That's 600,000 tickets a year, adding up to roughly $7 million. But the real magic happens afterward.

I can't tell you how many times someone who came to cheer ended up asking me, "So how hard is it really?" Six months later, they're signing up for their own race. The spectator experience isn't just revenue, it's their best recruitment tool.

The Vanity Tax (And I Pay It Every Time)

Hate to admit but I buy the photo package every single time. Every. Single. Time. Thirty-five dollars for professional shots of me looking like I'm questioning all my life choices. And apparently, 75% of us do the same thing.

That's $17 million a year from people who want proof they survived. But here's the kicker: every one of those photos ends up on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. We become their marketing team, and we paid them for the privilege. I've posted my finish line photos with captions like "Never again" while secretly already browsing the next event calendar.

Flipping the Gym Game

This move was pure genius. HYROX started by paying gyms to promote their events. Classic marketing spend, right? But as they grew, they flipped the script entirely. Now over 5,000 gyms pay THEM $1,500 a year for the right to run official HYROX classes and slap that logo on their walls.

Personal trainers can get certified as HYROX coaches. Suddenly, every affiliated gym becomes both a training ground and a walking advertisement. I've trained at these places, and the community aspect is intoxicating. Everyone's working toward the same goal, sharing the same suffering, comparing their sled push times. That network alone brings in $7.5 million annually.

Merch That Actually Means Something

I own more HYROX gear than I care to admit. The shirts, the hoodies, even those co-branded Puma t shirts that I absolutely didn't need but bought anyway. On average, athletes spend about $20 per event on merch, which adds up to $13 million a year.

But this isn't just impulse buying. When you wear HYROX gear, you're advertising your membership in a pretty exclusive club of people who voluntarily torture themselves with functional fitness.

I've worn my HYROX shirt to airports, gyms, coffee shops, and it always starts conversations. "Oh, you did HYROX? How was it? I've been thinking about trying it..."

The Travel and Partnership Web

HYROX doesn't stop at the finish line. They've got partnerships with insurance companies, electrolyte brands, travel companies. I've been one of those people who turned a HYROX race into a full fitness vacation. Fly to a new city, explore, suffer through the race, recover with local food and sights.

They've even partnered with tourism boards and, in what might be the most brilliant move yet, brought HYROX onto cruise ships. Because apparently, some people think a floating gym sounds like the perfect vacation.

These partnerships are growing fast and show how they keep expanding their ecosystem beyond just the race itself.

The Numbers Tell the Story

When you break it all down, HYROX's revenue streams look like this:

• 65% comes from us athletes paying entry fees

• 13% from photos (aka the vanity tax)

• 10% from merch that makes us walking billboards

• 6% from gyms paying to be part of the network

• 5% from spectators who often become future athletes

Plus all those partnerships and travel experiences adding even more fuel to the fire.

What's brilliant is how each piece feeds the others. Spectators become athletes. Athletes become merch buyers and photo sharers. Gyms become training hubs and evangelists. Every single touchpoint is designed to deepen the community and drive the next purchase.

Summary

If you're building any kind of business, study what HYROX has done. They've turned every interaction into value creation, and their customers are literally paying to become their sales force.

And if you're thinking about signing up for your first HYROX? Well, I'll probably see you at the start line, buying another photo package and questioning why I do this to myself.