Claude for Small Business: How to Set It Up With No Coding

By Mark Mason. November 3, 2026. With the video (16:16), chapters, and the full transcript below.

If you want to set up Claude for your small business, the very first thing you need to do is tell Claude about your small business. Everything else comes after that: what it writes, what it checks, and what it can run for you. And you don’t write any code. Claude writes the code.

I lead engineering teams, including AI development teams, at a Fortune 500 company, and I run two small businesses, one of them with my wife. Claude does all kinds of work across those businesses, and I generally don’t write a single line of code. Below: where a beginner should start, what to tell Claude first, the 20 questions I’d have it ask you, and three real jobs, each bigger than the last. If you use ChatGPT or Gemini, the same first step applies.

Watch the video

How to Set Up Claude for Your Small Business (No Coding) (16:16)

0:00 How to set up Claude for your small business
0:57 Claude for beginners: where to start
2:00 Claude for small business: start with the need, not the tech
3:10 How to tell Claude about your business
6:06 How to use Claude: describe the result, check the work
8:27 Claude for business: write like you, check your work
10:23 How Claude watches your business while you’re away
13:32 Run a whole process with Claude: track it, check it, do it
14:49 Claude’s Small Business plugin: what’s in it (not tested yet)
15:26 Your first hour with Claude: 20 questions

Price checked October 30, 2026: Claude Pro is $20 a month billed monthly, and it’s the lowest paid plan. Check the current price before you buy.

Where should a Claude beginner start?

In the video: 0:57

I think most people should start with the desktop app for Claude Code. I’m talking about Claude Code because that’s what I use, but if you use Gemini or ChatGPT or some other AI, that’s just fine.

Don’t let the name scare you. There’s no terminal. You download a beautiful app, sign in and open a folder. That’s it. And when I say no code, I mean you don’t write any code. Claude Code is going to write all kinds of code that makes your business hum.

One caveat: you’re going to need a small paid plan for this, and the lowest right now is Pro, which is $20 a month from Anthropic.

Should you start with Claude’s features or your business problem?

In the video: 2:00

Start with the problem. There’s a temptation to see all of this technology and look for the problems you can solve with it. In engineering we call that a solution looking for a problem. I always flip that. I start with my biggest problems or opportunities, and then I look at what AI, and in my case specifically Claude, can do about them.

Claude has all kinds of fancy tools for making artifacts and doing design. If that’s not your current problem, that’s certainly not where I’d spend my time. The technology works in service of the business. Ignore features until you need them.

What should you tell Claude about your business first?

In the video: 3:10

Tell Claude everything about your business:

Your marketing material and your website. Feed them to Claude.
Your writing style. Give it some clue of what your voice or your company’s voice is like, so what it creates sounds like you.
Your objectives and your values.
Your customers, most importantly. Everything you do in business has to be in service of your customers, so Claude needs to know who they are, what they care about, what their problems are and how you can help them.

Have Claude interview you: the 20 questions

Once you’ve given Claude everything you think you have, have Claude interview you. Have it ask you 20 open-ended questions about your business: your business goals, your customers, your biggest business problems, your competition, the challenges, anything that informs the decisions you make.

Do this in the Claude app on your phone in voice mode, and talk for at least two to three minutes on every question. Tell Claude to ask you one question at a time, and then just blather on about all the things that come to mind, without editing. When you’re all done, and probably exhausted from talking in your car, ask Claude to write a summary document that describes your business, and save it in a business folder on your hard drive.

Here’s that interview as a prompt you can paste:

I run [what kind of business]. I want you to really understand it. Interview me: ask me 20 open-ended questions about my business, one at a time, and wait for my answer before you ask the next one. Cover my business goals, my customers, my biggest business problems, my competition, and my challenges. I’m answering out loud, so expect long, messy answers. When we’re done, write a detailed summary document that describes my business.

All of this should take you about an hour, and you can do it during your commute. Don’t do too much other work inside of Claude until this is done. It’s the most important first step, because once Claude understands you and can sound like you, that opens up a huge range of possibilities. If your big job is accounting or processing orders, the voice work might not matter so much. Start where your need is.

Do you need to be technical to use Claude?

In the video: 6:06

You might be saying, “Hey, Mark, all of that’s easy for you because you’re an engineer.” I think that’s a common misconception about where we are with AI agents. In the beginning that was kind of true: we had to tell AI agents exactly what to do to get the outcome we wanted.

Now agents have gotten so smart that if you tell the agent how to do the job, a lot of times you’ll get a worse solution. It’s like managing experts. If you try to tell a graphic designer how to do their job, you’re not going to get as good an outcome. It’s the same with agents. Describe the outcome you want and let Claude find the solution. If Claude needs help, Claude will ask you for help.

In an earlier video I said to treat AI like an intern, and that still holds. We don’t tell Claude how to do things. We tell Claude what we want. But just like with an intern, we always check the results carefully. You’re the manager, and you’re the one who’s ultimately responsible for the result.

How do you use Claude for writing without lowering the quality?

In the video: 8:27

The first of three jobs is writing, and I don’t mean something straightforward like a blog post. Take my YouTube video descriptions. They’re specific, they’re important to viewers, and honestly I don’t like doing them. I always left details out. I’d promise a link in a video that wouldn’t be in the description, and that frustrated my viewers.

So I taught Claude to write like me, and that helped. But Claude can also check my work. Claude can read the transcript and make sure that what’s in the description agrees with what I actually said. That’s not just Claude creating content. That’s Claude editing, double-checking and creating a higher-quality product.

A lot of times you can do stuff faster with AI, but in all of my businesses I never employ AI unless I can do it faster and better. Any time you hand something over to AI, your goal should be to raise the bar.

How can Claude watch your business while you’re away?

In the video: 10:23

The broken link on my wife’s website

My wife Paula is busy all the time taking pictures, so she doesn’t have a lot of time to check up on our website. Even when you pay a lot to build a website, it’s like a house: paint starts to peel, faucets start to leak. It just deteriorates.

So I asked Claude to launch an audit of the site, right before we went to dinner. The audit ran while I was at dinner, and it found a very important broken link that pointed to the contact form, of all places. We had changed the landing page for contacting Paula and broken some links we forgot about, and customers were having a harder time getting in touch with her.

That’s link rot, and every site I’ve ever had has had this problem. Without AI, we would have had to pay someone to audit the hundreds or thousands of links on the site. Instead we just asked Claude to do it while we were at dinner.

The Facebook ads routine, and who’s watching the watchers

One of my big failings in business over the last 15 years has been starting Facebook ads, especially for Paula’s business, and then getting busy and not paying attention to them. Sometimes they go off the rails, and you end up spending money that isn’t resulting in conversions.

So I asked Claude to build a routine that gets the day’s ad performance from Facebook every day, does an analysis and tells me whether everything is okay. Most of the time it gives me the stats and says, I recommend you do nothing. Occasionally it tells me a creative is underperforming and needs replacing.

Here’s the honest part. The login for that routine expired. I didn’t tell it to check for that, and the routine stopped emailing me for about three weeks, and I didn’t even notice. So even the thing that checks the thing needs some checking. That kind of fault tolerance is something to think about whenever you build AI automation. Who’s watching the watchers?

How do you run a whole business process with Claude?

In the video: 13:32

The third job is the big one. The video you’re watching was edited and managed, from idea to production to syndication, in an app called Showrunner. Don’t Google it: it’s an app I built for me. Actually, Claude built it, and I didn’t write a single line of code.

It’s an example of how you can take a super complicated multi-step business process and look at each step. For each step you decide what outcome you want and what success looks like. So take a process in your business, maybe one you don’t like doing very much, go step by step and ask one question: can Claude track this, can Claude double-check this, or can Claude just do this?

What about Anthropic’s Small Business plugin?

In the video: 14:49

A lot of my business work inside of Claude predates these tools, so I haven’t tested them yet. I’m excited about them for owners like you, and I’ll be testing them over the next few weeks and bringing you real use cases in future videos.

What’s the one thing to do first?

In the video: 15:26

If you’re brand new to Claude, here’s the one thing to do. Have Claude ask you 20 open-ended questions about your business, answer them out loud in voice mode on your phone, and then ask it to write a detailed summary document that describes your business. In the next video, I’ll show you exactly what to do with that document.

Sources

Claude plans and pricing, Anthropic, checked October 30, 2026.
Claude Code desktop quickstart, Anthropic, checked October 30, 2026.
Use voice mode, Claude Help Center, checked October 30, 2026.
Claude for Small Business plugin, Anthropic, checked October 30, 2026.

About Mark Mason

Mark Mason leads engineering teams, including AI engineering, at a Fortune 500 semiconductor company. He has run online businesses since 2007 and has been podcasting since 2009. His YouTube channel, @MarkMasonCom, is practical AI for the business you already run: growth by design, not by grind.

Full transcript

How to set up Claude for your small business (0:00)

If you want to set up Claude for your small business, the very first thing you need to do is tell Claude about your small business. By day, I lead different engineering teams, including AI development teams at a Fortune 500 company. And I also run two small businesses, one of them with my wife. Claude does all kinds of work across those businesses and I generally don’t write even a single line of code. So if you’re a Claude beginner, this is how to use Claude for your business and it’s where I’d start if I were starting today.

And it’s not about code, you don’t write any Claude writes the code. By the end of this video, you’ll know what to tell Claude first or whatever AI you happen to be using. and I’ll show you what it found on my wife’s website while I was at dinner.

Claude for beginners: where to start (0:57)

Okay, so obvious first question, where do you start? I think most people should start with the desktop app for Claude Code. Now I’m going to be talking about Claude Code during this video because that’s what I use but if you use Gemini or ChatGPT or some other AI that’s just fine. and don’t let the name Claude Code scare you. There’s no terminal.

You download a beautiful app, sign in and open a folder. That’s it. And when I say no code, I mean you don’t write any code. Of course, Claude Code is going to write all kinds of fantastic and amazing code that’s going to make your business hum. Now, one caveat, you are going to need a small paid plan for this, and the lowest right now is Pro, which is $20 a month from Anthropic.

Now, why Claude Code and not something else? That’s really a topic for a whole future video. But for now, if I was just getting started, I’d start with Claude Code.

Claude for small business: start with the need, not the tech (2:00)

There’s a temptation to see all of this technology and look for the problems that you can solve with it. We call this in engineering a solution looking for a problem. I always flip that. I start with my biggest problems or opportunities and then I look at what AI, and in my case specifically Claude, can do about them. Claude has all of these fancy tools for making artifacts and doing design.

But if that’s not your current problem, that’s certainly not where I’d spend my time. Always put your business need before the technology, the technology works in service of the business. It’s a subtle distinction, but it’s really, really important. It’s that old solution looking for a problem thing again. Don’t fall into that trap.

This is just a version of bright, shiny object syndrome. Oh, neat, a tool can do something I don’t need in my business. Let’s go play with it. Don’t do that. Ignore features until you need them.

How to tell Claude about your business (3:10)

Okay, so you’ve just taken the wrapper off of Claude Code. Here’s the very first thing you need to do: tell Claude everything about your business. If you’ve got marketing material, feed it to Claude, feed it your website. Give it some clue of what your writing style or your voice or your company voice is like so that when it creates things it sounds like you and the things that it says are about you and your business. Tell Claude your objectives, tell it about your values, and most importantly, tell Claude about your customers.

Everything you do in business has to be in service of your customers. So Claude needs to know who they are what they care about. what their problems are and how you can help them. and then once you’ve given Claude everything that you think you have about your business, Have Claude interview you. Have it ask you 20 open-ended questions about your business, your business goals, your customers , your biggest business problems, your competition, the challenges, anything that you can think of related to your business that informs the decisions that you make.

Do this in the Claude app on your phone in voice mode and talk for at least two to three minutes on every question. Tell Claude to ask you one question at a time and then just blather on about all the things that come to mind without editing after every question. Then when you’re all done and probably exhausted from talking in your car ask Claude to write a summary document that describes your business and save it in a business folder on your hard drive. Side note, one of the things I love about Claude is that it works with CarPlay, so you can crank up CarPlay in your car, push the Claude button and get to work. Now, all of this should take you about an hour, and if you’re like me, you can do it during your morning commute.

Maybe for me, that would be half done on the way to work and half done on the way home. But don’t do too much other work inside of Claude until this is done. This is really the most important first step and it should gate all the other real business work that you do inside of Claude, because once Claude understands you and once Claude can sound like you, that opens up a huge range of possibilities. Now, of course, if your big job is accounting or processing orders, The voice work might not matter so much, start where your need is when it comes to asking Claude for help and explaining to Claude about your

How to use Claude: describe the result, check the work (6:06)

business. Of course, you might be saying, “Hey, Mark. All of that’s easy for you because you’re an engineer, you work in AI.” I think that’s really a common misconception about where we are with AI agents. In the beginning, I think that was kind of true. I had an enormous advantage because we had to tell AI agents exactly what to do to get the outcome we wanted.

Oftentimes we had to iterate. Now agents have gotten so smart that if you’re a little bit arrogant, and you tell the agent how to do the job, A lot of times you’ll get a worse solution. It’s like when you’re a manager in a corporate environment with a lot of experts on your team. Or maybe you’re a solo entrepreneur with a graphics designer. If you try to tell the graphics designer how to do their job or some expert engineer how to do her job, That’s not going to work.

You’re not going to be able to get as good an outcome when you’re telling an expert how to do their job. It’s the same thing with agents. Just describe the outcome you want and let Claude find the solution. If Claude needs help, Claude will ask you for help. Now, in an earlier video on this channel, I said to treat AI like an intern.

Now that still holds. Let’s say you’ve got an intern who’s really, really good at Excel. They learned that in school. And you’re not really good at Excel. But you need a spreadsheet to get a certain result for your business.

Well, you don’t tell the intern which cell to click on and teach them how to use Excel. You just describe the result because you care about the results going in your presentation, not which buttons get clicked in Excel. Claude is exactly the same way. We don’t tell Claude how to do things. We tell Claude what we want.

But just like an intern we always want to check the results carefully and make sure we get what we really want. It’s the same thing you do with interns, the same thing you do with skilled employees, you’re the manager and you’re the one who’s ultimately responsible for the result and making sure you got what you wanted.

Claude for business: write like you, check your work (8:27)

So what does this look like in a real business? I’ll give you three jobs as examples, each bigger than the last. Now the first example is writing and I don’t mean just something straightforward that a lot of people are already doing with AI like blog posts, In fact, I’ve described before on this channel how my wife Paula uses AI to help her draft her blog posts. So let’s take something more complicated than that like my YouTube video descriptions. They’re specific and they’re very important to viewers and honestly, I don’t like doing them and I always left details out I would promise a link in a video or a podcast that wouldn’t be in the show notes, wouldn’t be in the YouTube description.

And that? frustrated me, but it really frustrated my viewers and it just made for a terrible experience for the people that were counting on me for content. So I taught Claude to write like me and that helped with the description, but Claude can also check my work. Claude can read the transcript and make sure that what’s in the description agrees with what I actually said in the video or the podcast or the blog post or the newsletter. That’s an amazing thing.

That’s next level. That’s not just Claude creating content. That’s Claude editing, double-checking, and creating a higher quality product. I say a lot of times you can do stuff faster with AI but in all of my businesses I never employ AI unless I can do it faster and better. course, we can get more things done with AI, but the standard needs to be raising the bar.

Anytime you hand something over to AI, your goal should be to do it better.

How Claude watches your business while you’re away (10:23)

My wife Paula is busy all the time taking pictures so she doesn’t have a lot of time to go check up on our website. And even when you build a website and pay a lot to build it, it’s like a house. Paint starts to peel, you need to paint it, faucets start to leak, you need a plumber. Every once in a while things start to decay and the wood on your house starts to rot, the foundation starts to crack. It just deteriorates.

And Paula’s website had been around for a long time, so I asked Claude to launch an audit of the site. Actually did this right before we went to dinner. And the audit ran while I was at dinner and it found a very important broken link that pointed to the contact form of all places on Paula’s site. We had changed the landing page for contacting Paula and we had broken some links that we forgot about, and now customers were having a harder time getting in touch with Paula. And all this is is really just link rot.

Every site that I’ve ever had has had this problem. Links die on websites, they go stale and that can mess up your sales funnel because you lose the person who clicked. And without AI, we would have had to pay someone to audit the hundreds or thousands of links on this site. Instead we just asked Claude to do it while we were at dinner at Seasons 52. Now let me give you one more example.

One of my big failings in business over the last 15 years has been starting Facebook ads especially for Paula’s business and then getting busy and not paying attention to them as much as I need to, sometimes even forgetting to check on them altogether. And if you’ve ever run Facebook ads, you know sometimes they can go off the rails and you end up spending money that isn’t resulting in conversions, sometimes hundreds or thousands of dollars. So what did I do? I have a problem in my business and I have Claude so I asked Claude to build a routine that goes and gets the day’s ad performance from Facebook every day and do an analysis and tell me whether or not everything is okay and make suggestions if it feels like I need to change something. Most of the time, it gives me the stats and says, I recommend you do nothing.

But occasionally, if an ad is going off the rails, if I’ve got four creatives running, it might tell me, hey, creative number three is underperforming, you need to replace it. And before you say, “Wow, Mark, that’s magic, your life must be all unicorns and roses,” here’s the honest part. The login for that routine actually expired. I didn’t tell it to check for that and the routine stopped emailing me for about three weeks and I didn’t even notice. So even the thing that checks the thing needs some checking and that kind of fault tolerance is something that I always recommend that you think about when you’re building AI automation.

Who’s watching the watchers?

Run a whole process with Claude: track it, check it, do it (13:32)

Now here’s one more job. The third job, and this is the big one, This video that you’re watching right now was edited and managed and brought from idea to production to syndication. in an app called Showrunner. Showrunner, don’t Google it, Showrunner is an app that I built for me. Actually, Claude built it.

and I didn’t write a single line of code. It’s a great example of how you can take a super complicated multi-step business process like creating a YouTube video and look at each step and for each step you decide what outcome you want, what success looks like, and you can track it to make sure that it gets done and it’s not forgotten. You can check the results of every step, or sometimes Claude can actually just do it and then check it and track it. So take a process in your business. Maybe one you don’t like doing very much.

Go step by step and ask that question. Can Claude track this? Can Claude double check this or can Claude just do this?

Claude’s Small Business plugin: what’s in it (not tested yet) (14:49)

If you’ve searched for Claude for small business, you’ve probably seen Anthropic’s Small Business plugin. It has more than 40 ready-made workflows for cash, payroll, leads, marketing, hiring. You add it from Customize and then Plugins. No terminal required. Now, a lot of my business work inside of Claude predates these tools, but I’m super excited about them for owners just like you.

And I’ll be testing them over the next few weeks and bringing you real use cases in future videos.

Your first hour with Claude: 20 questions (15:26)

So if you’re brand new to Claude, here’s the one thing to do. Have Claude ask you 20 open-ended questions about your business, answer them out loud in voice mode on your phone, and then ask it to write a detailed summary document that describes your business. And here’s the really cool thing. In the next video, I’m going to show you exactly what to do with that document. Until next time.

Ciao.