Free Starter · Soul-Forged Founders

Claude Code Starter

Give Claude a permanent memory of your business, so you stop re-explaining yourself every single time you open a new chat.

Runs in the Claude desktop app, on your own computer. You click, paste and read; Claude writes the files.

What you'll have at the end

A folder your assistant actually reads

Right now, everything Claude knows about your business lives inside one conversation. Close the tab and it's gone. You paste your voice, your offers, and your ideal client back in every time, and you have gotten very good at it, which is the sad part.

By the end of this guide you'll have a private folder holding your brand voice, your offers, and your client notes, and an assistant that opens it before answering you. A filing cabinet instead of a sticky note.

Read this before you start, so nothing surprises you four steps in.

You'll need a Claude plan at Pro or above. Claude Code is part of the paid plans. If you're on free right now, read along anyway, and upgrade before Step 3.

You'll need a Mac or a Windows computer for the desktop app.

Time: about 20 minutes, most of it the download.

Step One

Get the Claude desktop app

Claude Code lives inside the same Claude app you already chat in, once it's on your computer. Same account, same login.

Go to claude.ai/download
Download the version for your computer, Mac or Windows, and open the installer
Open the app and sign in with the Claude account you already use

Already have the desktop app? Check it's up to date, then carry on to the next step.

Step Two

Download your filing cabinet

Your business brain is a folder on your computer, holding other folders. You get a head start: it already exists, with every folder and file named and waiting. You're downloading your own copy.

Download the Claude Code Starter Kit. It arrives as a zip file.
Unzip it. On a Mac, double-click it. On Windows, right-click it and choose Extract All.
Rename the folder inside to biz-brain, lowercase, with the hyphen
Move biz-brain into your Documents folder, so it lives somewhere you'll find it again

It stays private. The folder lives on your computer, and Claude opens it only when you point the app at it. Your client notes and your offers stay with you.

What you just got. Empty labeled files, nothing filled in: your voice, your offers, who you are, who you serve, plus a CLAUDE.md holding the standing instructions Claude reads at the start of every session. The names matter more than they look like they do. Every lesson after this one says things like "put that in your brand folder," and that has to mean one thing.

Step Three

Turn on Claude Code and open your folder

This is the step where Claude gets permission to open your files. Takes about a minute.

In the desktop app, click Code. It sits next to Chat.
Choose the folder to work in, and pick biz-brain in your Documents
When Claude asks to read and edit files in that folder, say yes
Type this and send it: Read CLAUDE.md and tell me what this folder is for.

If it answers with your folders and what each one holds, you're in. Claude is reading your filing cabinet.

This is the step that needs Pro. If you're on the free plan you'll get stopped here, and it's the plan, not anything you did wrong.

On Windows, the app may ask you to install Git before Claude Code will start. Say yes and follow its link. It's a free tool Claude Code uses behind the scenes, and you'll never have to open it.

Stuck on a setup screen? That one's yours to click. Claude can't change your plan or install software from inside a conversation. It will sound like it's helping, and nothing will move.

Buttons move around as things get updated. If a label reads a little differently than what's written here, you're still in the right place. Look for the word Code or folder and follow it.

Step Four

Fill the drawers

Empty folders do nothing. This is the step that turns a tidy structure into an assistant that knows you.

Open a normal Claude conversation, the regular chat and not Claude Code, and paste this:

You've been helping me with my business for a while. I'm building a permanent folder of files so you don't start from scratch every conversation. Using only what you actually know about me, write me ONE file called business-brain-dump.md, with these four sections inside it: who-i-am My story. What I do, how I got here, what I did before this. who-i-serve My ideal client. Who they are, and what's going on for them when they find me. voice How I sound. Phrases that are mine. Words and tones I'd never use. offers What I sell. Name, price, and what's different for the person afterward. Important: - Use only what you genuinely know about me. Do not fill gaps with reasonable guesses. - Anywhere you don't actually know something, write [FILL IN] and move on. I would much rather have a visible gap than a sentence that sounds right and isn't true. - Write it in my voice where you can tell what my voice is. Give me that one file in ONE markdown block. One block, one copy. Do not split it into separate blocks, separate documents, downloads, or attachments. After the block, in a few lines outside it, tell me which of the four sections came out thin and what's actually missing from each. I want to know where to spend my time.

Why one file and not four. Ask for four files and Claude tends to hand you four separate boxes, which is four copies and four chances to lose one. One file with four sections inside it comes back as a single block. Claude Code does the splitting in the next step, which is the part it's good at.

Copy the whole block. Go back to Claude Code and paste it in with this underneath:

If it still splits the answer into separate boxes, say "put the whole thing in one markdown block so I can copy it in one go" and it'll redo it.

Above is a brain dump with four sections in it. Split it into the matching files in this folder, replacing the placeholders: who-i-am goes into context/who-i-am.md who-i-serve goes into context/who-i-serve.md voice goes into brand/voice.md offers goes into offers/offers.md Keep the text exactly as written, including every [FILL IN] marker. Don't tidy them up or fill them in. Save the files when you're done.

Claude may mention it can't find business-brain-dump.md in the folder. That's expected. You pasted the text rather than saving a file, so there's nothing to look for and nothing to delete. It splits from what you pasted.

Then read what it wrote. Every [FILL IN] is a real gap, and anything that isn't marked is something Claude believes about your business. Check the prices. Check the offer names. A wrong fact in here quietly becomes a wrong fact in everything it writes for you afterward.

Step Five

Make the holes chase you

You will not have filled everything in. Nobody does. There are [FILL IN] markers scattered through those files right now, and left alone they'll still be there in March.

So don't rely on remembering. Build the reminder into the folder itself.

Go through every file in this folder and find every gap left for me: [FILL IN] markers, any text still sitting inside square brackets, and any section that's still a placeholder rather than real information about my business. Create a file at the root called open-questions.md: - Turn each gap into a plain question I can actually answer, not a label. "What does the Premium tier cost?" rather than "[FILL IN: price]". - Put the file it belongs in next to each question. - Use checkboxes so I can watch the list shrink. - Order them by how much they're holding back. The gaps that block the most of your future work go at the top. Add one line at the top explaining that order. Then add this standing rule to CLAUDE.md: At the start of every session, check open-questions.md. If anything is still unanswered, tell me how many are left and ask me exactly ONE of them, starting from the top. When I answer, write it into the right file, tick it off in open-questions.md, and then carry on with whatever I actually came in to do. Then save the files.

Why one question and not the list. A list of fourteen questions gets closed and ignored. One question gets answered in thirty seconds while you're already here for something else. Answer one a day and the whole thing is done in two weeks without ever sitting down to do it.

Why the order matters. A missing price breaks every sales email you'll ever ask for. A missing origin story breaks one about page. Same effort to answer, very different payoff, so the list puts the expensive gaps first.

One trick for when it asks about your voice. Don't describe how you sound. Paste in three things you've actually written that felt like you, and let it work out the pattern. Describing your own voice is genuinely hard. Showing it is easy.

This is the part that keeps working after you close the tab. Everything up to here was setup you did once. This is the folder getting better on its own, every time you come back, without you managing it.

What comes next

Now that it's running

Having it set up and knowing what to do with it are two different things. Inside Soul-Forged Founders we build real tools together, live and on screen, and you leave with something that works.

See the community

Claude for tarot readers and coaches · 7-day free trial