A question I keep seeing from business owners here: should I build a Custom GPT, or is a good saved prompt enough? The honest answer is that most people reach for a Custom GPT too early, when a saved prompt would do the same job with a lot less faff. Here is the simple way to decide. Use a saved prompt when the task is a one-off shape you repeat. Things like "turn these notes into a follow-up email" or "summarise this article in five bullets". You paste the prompt, drop in your content, and you are done. Keep these in a notes file or a doc so you are not rewriting them from scratch every time. Build a Custom GPT when you need the same instructions, tone, and reference material applied again and again, especially if other people on your team will use it too. A Custom GPT lets you bake in the role, the rules, and any files it should always refer to. Good examples: a support assistant that already knows your refund policy, or one that writes in your brand voice every single time. Rough rule of thumb: if you would have to paste the same background into the chat more than a few times a week, it is worth turning into a Custom GPT. If not, a saved prompt is faster to set up and easier to tweak when you change your mind. What are you leaning on more right now, Custom GPTs or a prompt library?

I've been experimenting for the last three weeks with Wispr Flow and I have to be honest I don't think I could do without it now. As you can see from the attached screen shots, I use it a hell of a lot for writing prompts and I find it way better than either Claude's microphone or ChatGPT's microphone. It's particularly good at recognising technical words to do with hosting or domain names, things that normally would drive you crazy because after you've done speech-to-text you have to go back through and then edit it all correctly. As you can see from the attached screenshot it looks like I might be doing too much work and my poor friends don't get to hear from me too often. 😄 Anyway if you want to write detailed prompts extremely quickly and with minimal editing (I'm talking almost never), then I highly recommend trying out Wispr Flow. Cheers Jason

Most people use ChatGPT to generate ideas. That's the easy part. The more useful play is to use it as a second opinion on a decision you've already half-made. When you're about to raise a price, ship a new offer, or send a long email you're nervous about, you don't need more options. You need someone to poke holes in the one you've picked. ChatGPT is good at this if you set it up right. Here's the basic shape. Step 1. State the decision you've already made. Don't ask "what should I do", write out the choice in plain terms. "I'm planning to raise my price from $49 to $79 starting next month. Here's why…" Step 2. Give it the context. Customer base, recent feedback, what your competitors charge, why the timing feels right. Two or three short paragraphs is enough. Step 3. Ask it to argue against the decision. Try this line: "Argue against this decision as if you were a sceptical advisor who has seen plenty of similar plans fail. Be specific." That last word matters. Without "be specific" you get generic risk-talk. With it, you get the actual second opinion you came for. Step 4. Decide what to do with what comes back. Some of the pushback will be useless. Some of it will land. The point isn't to follow the AI's advice, it's to surface the angles you hadn't considered before you commit. This pattern earns its keep most on pricing changes, hiring decisions, big emails, and anything where you've already mostly made up your mind. The "give me 10 options" pattern is better suited to early-stage brainstorming. What's the next decision you'd run this on? Drop it below.

Most prompting advice tells you to write the perfect instruction up front. For everyday business tasks, I think that's backwards. You're guessing at what matters before you've really thought it through, and you end up with a vague answer because you handed it a vague brief. Here's a simpler move: tell ChatGPT to interview you first. Instead of asking for the finished thing, add one line to your prompt: "Before you answer, ask me up to five questions that would help you give a better response." Now ChatGPT does the hard part. It surfaces the gaps: who the audience is, what the goal is, what tone you want, what you've already tried. Then you just answer in plain language. The final output gets built on real context instead of assumptions. This works best on the messy, higher-stakes stuff: a sales email, an awkward client reply, pricing for a new offer, a job description. Anything where the quality depends on details only you know. Two tips. Cap the questions. Five is plenty, or it spirals. And if a question doesn't matter, just say "skip that one." You're steering, not filling in a form. It feels slower for about ten seconds. Then the answer comes back sharper than anything a one-shot prompt would have produced. What's the last thing you asked ChatGPT for that came back generic? That's exactly the kind of task to try this on. Drop it below. Jason 🙌

Just a message for the group here. I'm part of a community called AI Hammock, which is going to offer a certification course in AI coming in June. Thanks for letting me know I can share this here Julie! Here's a free preview link: http://special.aihammock.com/?fpr=eric-dennis61 That gets you a week on me. It also gets you 20% off of the standard membership fee and explains everything about the platform. FYI the upcoming certification is in addition to numerous training modules already live on the platform right now. They cover most of the AI models currently on the market. You can take advantage of all this training for the full week for free!