From idea to shipped, in seven stages

Your minimum viable brand needs exactly four things: a name, a one-line positioning statement, a visual identity (colors + font), and a consistent voice. Everything else can wait until you have revenue. Brand archetypes, mission statements, competitive matrices — skip them for now.

Your positioning statement follows this template: “I help [specific audience] achieve [specific outcome] through [your unique method].” That one sentence drives everything — your content, your product, your pricing. Get it right and the rest follows.

Voice comes from constraints, not brainstorming. Pick three adjectives for your tone (e.g., “direct, technical, warm”) and use them as a filter for everything you write. Your brand is not your logo. It's the consistent experience people have interacting with you across platforms.

You're helping someone quickly define their personal brand positioning. Ask these 5 questions ONE AT A TIME. Be direct, be conversational — like a smart friend, not a consultant.

Questions:
1. "What do you do, and what are you genuinely good at?"
2. "Who would pay you for that? Describe one specific person."
3. "What do you know that most people in your space get wrong?"
4. "What's your goal — more clients, a product, a side income, or something else?"
5. "How do you want to come across? Pick 3 words."

After all 5 questions, output:

BRAND SNAPSHOT
- Positioning: "I help [who] [do what] through [how]" (one sentence)
- Audience: Who you're talking to (2 sentences)
- Your Edge: What makes you different (2 sentences)
- 3 Content Topics: Things you could post about this week
- First Product Idea: One thing you could sell (1 sentence)

Keep it tight. This is a snapshot, not a strategy document.

Ten minutes gets you a working answer. Come back to it after you've talked to five real people — the second pass is always sharper than the first.

Pick ONE primary platform and go deep. If you write well, go with X/Twitter or LinkedIn. If you're comfortable on camera, YouTube or TikTok. Don't spread yourself across five platforms doing mediocre work on each.

Define 3-5 content pillars — recurring themes you'll create around. For a dev building AI tools, pillars might be: building in public updates, AI/automation tutorials, lessons from shipping, tool reviews, behind-the-scenes of your business.

Follow the 70/20/10 rule: 70% proven formats your audience already engages with (tutorials, how-tos, lists), 20% iterations and repurposed content, 10% experiments. Aim for 3-5 posts per week minimum. Hooks matter more than anything — you have 1-2 seconds to stop the scroll. Effective hooks: a specific story (“I built the booking page for my studio in a weekend; here's what broke”), contrarian takes (“Stop doing X”), and specificity (“The exact stack I used to build Z in 3 days”).

I'm a [role] posting on [platform] about [topic]. My content pillars are: [list them]. Generate 20 post ideas across these pillars. For each, write a hook (first line), a brief outline (3-4 bullet points), and a CTA. Make the hooks specific and scroll-stopping — no generic advice.

Here's what each tool does and the order to set them up. Total starting cost: $0-20/month. You set this up once and it runs for every project you build from here on.

The most important tool is your AI. Claude will guide you through setting up each piece. You don't need an in-depth guide. Just ask it, add screenshots if you're stuck, and follow the advice. This is the most important skill you'll build: being self-reliant and pairing with AI on things you haven't done before. Later you'll learn faster and smarter ways to do it — but this is how you start.

Your MVP should do ONE thing well. Scope it to 3-5 core features that complete a single user workflow end-to-end. If your product is a course platform, the MVP is: user signs up, pays, accesses content. That's it. No admin dashboard, no analytics, no community features. You can do those manually for your first 50 users.

Integrate payments on day one, not as an afterthought. Even in beta, having a “pay what you want” or discounted early-access price validates willingness to pay. Use Stripe Checkout — it handles the entire payment UI so you don't build forms.

Your testing baseline: every payment flow works in Stripe test mode, auth flows work, and the core value delivery works on mobile and desktop. That's it. Ship when that's true, even if it's rough.

I'm building [product description] for [audience]. The core workflow is: [describe the steps]. Help me scope an MVP. What are the absolute minimum features needed for a user to complete this workflow? What can I handle manually for the first 50 users instead of building? What should I explicitly NOT build yet?

Your launch is not a single event — it's a sequence. Pre-launch (1-2 weeks before): tease on social, email your waitlist, get 5-10 beta testers for feedback. Launch day: post on your primary platform, email your list, post on Product Hunt or Indie Hackers, and personally DM 20 people who expressed interest. Post-launch: share metrics publicly, respond to every piece of feedback, ship fixes daily.

Getting your first 10 users is hand-to-hand combat — not a marketing funnel. DM people individually. Offer free access in exchange for feedback. Post in relevant communities (but add value first, don't spam). Your first users are your most important because they'll tell you what to fix and become advocates if you treat them well.

Automate what you do repeatedly, not what you do once. The first things to automate: customer onboarding emails, content repurposing, code review, and deployment. The test is simple: if you have done it the same way three times, it is a candidate.

Start with what's already built into your tools. Claude Code for the codebase; the Claude app for files and schedules. Claude Code builds features, reviews code, runs tests and opens PRs while you do something else. Then routines and schedules, level 3 of the map, do the connecting work: a payment lands, the customer record updates, the welcome email goes out. A tool like n8n comes in only if you outgrow them. Running several projects becomes feasible when each one has onboarding, payments and content on a schedule.

Here are the repetitive tasks in my business: [list them]. For each, suggest: (1) can it be fully automated, partially automated, or does it need human judgment? (2) what tools/integrations would automate it? (3) a step-by-step setup guide. Prioritize by time saved per week.