You watched the video. Here is the setup, end to end.
The outcome: a commercial proposal that used to swallow three days from walkthrough to send now ships in roughly two hours. Pricing format right on the first draft. Product language that sounds like your business, not a generic AI export. Voice that's yours.
You get there with one structure change. Instead of writing your instructions inside the chat, you move them up to the project itself. In Claude Cowork, the project carries a single instruction block, and every chat inside that project inherits it automatically. The prompt below interviews you and writes that instruction block for you. You paste the output into a Cowork project. That's the whole setup.
The four steps
Open a new chat in ChatGPT, Claude.ai, or Gemini. Any of the three works.
Paste the prompt below into that chat.
Answer the seven questions it asks you, one at a time.
Take the instruction set it outputs and stand up a Cowork project. Paste the instructions, drop your best past quotes into the project folder, and run a second short prompt that turns your website into a brand reference file. The full walkthrough is below the prompt.
The prompt
Copy everything inside the box below and paste it into a fresh chat.
You're going to interview me about my business and use my answers to write a Cowork project instruction set for drafting commercial quotes and proposals. The instruction set you produce will be pasted into a Claude Cowork project as the project's top-level instructions. Every chat inside that project inherits it. The goal is that every draft the project produces starts already knowing who I am, how I write, how I price, and what my proposals look like, without me re-explaining any of it.
Ask me the seven questions below, one at a time. Wait for my answer to each before moving to the next. Do not assume answers. Do not skip ahead.
1. What kind of business is this? Industry, what you sell, who your buyers are.
2. What document is this project being built to produce? Quote, proposal, RFP response, scope of work, or something else.
3. Describe the voice you want the document written in. Three or four lines. Examples include: direct, plain language, no em dashes, no marketing speak, specific over abstract, confident not arrogant.
4. How is your pricing presented in a finished document? Walk me through your house format. Line items, bundled, flat per visit, tiered, what gets shown separately, what gets rolled in.
5. What are the three to five products or services you most often quote? For each one, give me the exact phrasing you use in past proposals. The wording you've already shipped, not the wording you'd invent today.
6. What is the structure of a finished proposal? List the blocks in order. One short line per block describing what it does.
7. What inputs do you need from yourself or your team before any quote can be drafted? List them. Examples: walkthrough notes, square footage, RFP file, budget signal.
Once I've answered all seven, produce the final instruction set in the format below. Use my answers word for word where I gave specific phrasing. Do not paraphrase my wording into AI-sounding language. Output it inside a single markdown code block so I can copy it cleanly.
# Project Instructions
## 1. Business and purpose
[Two sentences. Name the business. Name what this project drafts.]
## 2. Voice
[The voice rules I gave, written as direct rules.]
## 3. Pricing format
[How prices are presented in my finished documents.]
## 4. Product and service language
[The exact phrasing I use, listed by product or service.]
## 5. Document structure
[The blocks of a finished document, in order, one line per block.]
## 6. Required inputs before drafting
[The checklist of inputs the project must confirm before writing.]
## 7. Using reference files in this project
Treat any files in the project folder as reference material for structure, voice, pricing format, and the way services are described. Do not carry over client names, property addresses, contract dates, specific dollar amounts, or any other identifying information from past quotes into new drafts. Reference files are for style and language only, never for content reuse.
After you produce the instruction block, do not add commentary, summary, or follow-up suggestions. Just the instruction block, ready to paste.A quick word on how Cowork works
If you haven't built a Cowork project before: it's Anthropic's desktop app, and every Cowork project is tied to a folder on your computer. Anything you drop in that folder becomes available to the project, live. The project itself has two layers: an instruction set at the top that tells the model how to behave, and the folder that holds the reference material it pulls from. The setup below builds both.
Setting up the Cowork project
Three things go in. Skip any one and the output still feels slightly off.
Step 1: Create the project, note where the folder lives, paste the instruction set
Open the Cowork desktop app and create a new project. Cowork will ask you to point it at an existing folder or create a new one. Use a folder you already have for proposals or business docs, or create a fresh one called something obvious like "Commercial Proposals."
Take note of exactly where that folder lives on your computer. It's the folder Cowork reads from for every chat in the project, and the folder you'll be dropping past quotes into in Step 2.
Paste the instruction set into the project's instructions field. Cowork lets you do this either during project creation (if the setup flow shows the instructions field as part of the wizard) or after the project exists (by opening it and editing the instructions at the top). Either way, paste the full block from the meta-prompt and save.
Step 2: Add your best past quotes to the project folder
This is the highest-leverage piece of the setup, and the one most operators skip. The instruction set tells the project how to write. Past quotes show it what good actually looks like. Without examples, the model invents the wording from scratch every time. With examples, it pulls directly from documents you've already shipped.
Open the project folder you noted in Step 1 and drop your past quotes in. PDFs and Word docs both work. Put them in a subfolder or leave them at the root. Cowork reads everything inside the folder either way.
A few rules on which quotes to pick.
Quality over polish. Use quotes you'd happily send again. Skip the rushed jobs. The project treats anything you upload as your standard.
Variety beats volume. If you sell five services, get at least one strong quote covering each. The model can only describe a service the way you describe it if it has seen you describe it. Gaps get filled with generic AI phrasing.
More is better, within reason. Three solid quotes is enough to start. Ten is better. Twenty across services, property types, and price ranges is where the project becomes hard to distinguish from your best draft.
No need to redact. The instruction set already tells the project to use past quotes for style only. No client names, addresses, dollar amounts, or contract dates carry into new drafts. Upload as-is.
Step 3: Turn your website into a brand reference file
This step gets the project sounding like your business without you spelling out brand colors and product names line by line. You're not attaching the URL itself. You'll have the project read your site once and save the output as a reference file in your project folder, alongside your past quotes.
Open a new chat inside your Cowork project and paste this prompt:
Fetch and review my company website: [PASTE YOUR URL HERE]
Then produce a brand reference document I can use as a reference file for drafting proposals. Pull from the site directly and include:
- Primary brand color, with the hex code if you can find it
- Accent colors, with hex codes
- Two or three lines describing the brand voice and tone you see on the site
- Names of the core products or services and the exact phrasing the site uses to describe each one
- Any positioning lines, headlines, or taglines that show how the business presents itself
- Anything else on the site that's visibly intentional about how the brand reads
Format the output as a clean markdown document. Save it to my project folder as "brand-reference.md".
Do not invent or assume anything that isn't on the site. If something is missing, note it as missing rather than filling it in.Replace [PASTE YOUR URL HERE] with your actual URL. Cowork fetches the site, builds the reference, and saves it as brand-reference.md in your folder.
[Screenshot: brand-reference.md saved in the project folder alongside your past quotes]
Every draft from here on is reading from both your past quotes and the brand reference file. If your site changes later, run the prompt again to refresh it.
What the workflow looks like once it is built
Walkthrough Monday morning. Notes typed up. Open a new chat in the project. Drop in the RFP and notes. The project confirms it has the inputs it needs. It drafts.
You spend the next ninety minutes reading and pushing back where the model missed an operator-level call. Not rewriting the structure. Not relocking the voice. Not retyping the pricing format. Two hours from walkthrough to send. Same eight-page proposal that used to swallow three days.
Run a real one this week
The setup is worthless until you run a real quote through it. Pick the next RFP on your desk. Block ninety minutes. Build the project, paste the instructions, drop in a few past quotes, run the brand reference prompt, draft the quote. The first draft won't be perfect. The second will be close. By the fourth, you're working at the speed this is meant to run at.
Boots & Bots ships one of these every Tuesday morning. If you're not on the list yet, the signup is at the top of the page.
Next week: the four-tool back-office AI stack for a five-person shop, and which one most operators are missing.
— Liam