Startups - using AI custom instructions (Australia)

AI for Startups: Leverage Your Custom Instructions #Australia

ByLaurel Papworth

Most founders don’t need more AI tools. They need better thinking. Or at least, someone to think with (if they’ve been brought in with information). This approach treats AI not as an answer machine, but as a business partner – one that is briefed properly, challenges when needed, and guides toward real outcomes like revenue,…

Most founders don’t need more AI tools. They need better thinking. Or at least, someone to think with (if they’ve been brought in with information). This approach treats AI not as an answer machine, but as a business partner – one that is briefed properly, challenges when needed, and guides toward real outcomes like revenue, traction, and sustainability. Instead of asking generic questions and getting generic advice, you give AI a structured “thinking brief” based on your elevator pitch, priorities, constraints, and real-world context. Now it’s really useful.

The shift is subtle but powerful. You move from “give me ideas” to “help me think through this business properly”. That means defining what matters (for most startups: revenue and stability), anchoring advice in your actual channels and customers, and forcing the AI to explore options, not just optimise one path. It also means adding tension – short-term vs long-term, growth vs sustainability – because AI tends to collapse complexity unless you explicitly hold it open. Like, it loves to collapse as if it was never given context and constraints!

And importantly, you don’t let it agree with you all the time. A good startup doesn’t need a cheerleader – it needs pushback. When you instruct AI to challenge assumptions, flag risks, and point out weak logic, it becomes far more like a co-founder than a content generator. You still make the decisions, but you’re making them with more visibility, more structure, and fewer blind spots. Plus, someone to argue with is always a good idea!

AI for Startups in Australia – all startups, not just AI startups – need custom instructions that mentor them through their business.

Transcript for AI for Startups – Custom Instructions

Hello, my name is Laurel Papworth, and in this video series we’re doing AI is my startup mentor. So how to set up an AI to partner with you in your business with all the usual caveats. This video is about custom instructions, which is how you set up the whole AI account, whether it’s ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Gemma, Google, whatever, by filling in the custom instruction box in your profile, that typically is the base prompt and the system prompt. And in this video, I’m going to give you how to work with your elevator pitch and the AI to get the questions. Answer the questions, write out their custom instructions using specific headings that will really make sure that the AI is fully supporting you and your business and isn’t just giving you generic answers, because you can get that from any, any book or blog post or whatever.We need specific things for this particular business. Okay, so, on with the show. So I would recommend that you take your elevator pitch and give it to the generative AI, put it into ChatGPT, and ask for it to ask you questions so that it can help you write custom instructions for ChatGPT. And you want to say custom instructions for Claude or custom instructions for ChatGPT. They’re all different, they have different lengths, and it can get confused. [00:01:40.23]

So really anchor that into the platform that you’re using. The questions that are going to come back after it’s read through your elevator pitch is the stuff that’s missing. Who’s your target audience? Where do you want to be in the next three to six months? A whole range of questions, but it’ll ask you those questions, and I’ve got some on the screen, but you don’t have to limit yourself to answering those. You don’t have to answer any. If you don’t want to, it’s fine. But effectively, customer instructions are the elevator pitch, but for AI. So I call it the thinking brief. You’re briefing the AI on how to be a thinking partner for you so that it can mentor you through your startup stuff. [00:02:25.08]

Once you’ve done that, I would suggest that you type in these headings and then ask the AI to create the custom instructions around these headings. The reason I do this is I’m defining the option space, like where I want to come in with my customer instructions, and then I’m defining the anchoring of those customer instructions because I really need the AI to be specific for my business and not some kind of a generic business mentor. It needs to be specific for my startup, so I give it a role in Scope. And I say you are a business partner helping me with my startup in healthcare, in sals, in education, whatever it is that you’re doing and give it enough detail so it can really help you with that. Also ask it to prioritise helping you on what to do next for growth and then specify growth as revenue if that’s important to you. Maybe you don’t care about money, you’re just doing this for fun. Good for everybody else out there. Ask it to help prioritise near term revenue growth. And I would suggest that you say I prioritise revenue growth and stability over quick wins. So you do a priority weighting in there. [00:03:50.02]

The next one’s called directional context. It just simply means the main theme and it’s your primary context for setting up the AI to help you. So you say I’m a niche business with limited time and resources and money. I guess that’s resources. I’m focused on getting clients, delivering revenue, delivering great service, whatever it is.
That’s like maybe your three main priorities. And you can say I want to prioritise short term traction over playing the long game. And I usually have something in there about wanting to be sustainable as well. And this is an issue with AIs. It doesn’t deal with that tension that every AI startup holds, which is between getting money in the door and then not being swayed into something that everybody else does that you have already tried and you don’t want to keep doing.
So you always. Humans hold tension really well. We sit with being uncomfortable pretty well. AI doesn’t. It’s always resolving and optimising.
So you gotta get it to hold its horses on some of those things. Add in needle facts. So add in needle facts. Needle facts are anchors. Tell it to assume or to ask for the target audience where most of the interest comes from.
Like you can tell it, most of my interest comes from LinkedIn. Or you can ask it to assume where that is coming from and then define it for you. Needle facts or anchors means make the advice specific to this point. So rather than saying come up with a marketing campaign, you want to anchor it into make come up with a marketing campaign for LinkedIn. In a normal prompt in a custom instructions, you’re just itemising very salient key points that will impact the answer.
I mean, maybe you like going for a jog, but unless you’re selling sports equipment, it’s not an anchor fact. It’s just kind of an interesting point about you. But if you do jog and you’re selling shoes, jogging shoes, Then put that in. It’s an anchoring point. The option space typically in a prompt is where you want it to come in at.

[00:06:07.29]
Like if you ask for, I don’t know, an AI strategy or come in at a tactical level or an operations level or strategic level. In the case of customer instructions, when looking up at your AI startup, if it’s like the landscape that you’re playing in and it’s specifically around what you provide, so you can say to it, give practical step by step, it’s called chain of thoughts. Give practical step by step advice across marketing, acquiring clients, regulatory issues, whatever the key things are that you think the AI can help you with. Now, some of these things you’re a subject matter expert on, so read through its work, just double cheque that it goes through to. It gets through your philtres and then the stuff you’re not a subject matter expert on, just double cheque, ask it, where possible, to use one output and then to regenerate for multiple uses.
So if it’s. If you’re working on a business plan and the business plan has a finance section and a marketing section and different things, once you’ve generated that business plan to your satisfaction, then you can, say, read through the marketing section and come up with 10 LinkedIn posts for me. Generate five images, whatever it is, you can use the primary document you worked on to generate again and again and again. That’s going to cut down your workflow substantially. So put it in the custom instructions that you want it to, like, recommend that it can do that, just to remind you it can, because I keep forgetting how bloody brilliant the AI can be when I’m monitoring it and watching it very closely under constraints.
This is the guardrails part you’ve probably heard people speaking about. Be careful because AI can drift. It will read the constraints and then go, I’m going to ignore them because there’s so much information or there’s so much stuff going on, I need to prioritise so many competing interests. But if you define the constraints in the custom instructions and then later on put the constraints in actual prompts, as you’re working through different projects, you’ll notice that it drifts away from those constraints. So one of them might be, you must comply with Australian regulations around advertising, and that way you won’t accidentally walk yourself into a brand reputation or into a regulatory hearing because the AI told you to do something that maybe you shouldn’t have done. [00:08:43.07]

I would also, in the constraints section, prioritise competitive pricing over something else so you can feel like you’re competitive from the beginning. Obviously, if you’re in luxury goods or you’re a senior strategist who’s just going out on their own and can charge a premium, you might invert that and say come in in the top 25% of my market when it comes to pricing, something like that. But put priority weighting in. You might say something like prioritise competitive edge over low pricing. It is possible AI will try and race you to the bottom with pricing.
Everybody else out there is $25. Why don’t you do $10? You don’t want that. You want to push unique selling points and competitive edge. And you, you’re brilliant.
Tell everybody that you’re brilliant and insist the AI does as well. I like to put format in custom instructions, even though I might change it later on and it will compete with how I’ve asked for the format to be versus the other. Let me give you an example. I asked for paragraphs. Don’t do I hate it when it’s one line, space line, one line, space line and it’s a toilet roll to read because it reminds me of those LinkedIn posts where they want to keep you engaged to play gamification with the LinkedIn algorithm which looks at dwell time.
I don’t. I’m not doing that with ChatGPT. Just give me prioritise three succinct, dense paragraphs over a long toilet roll. What’s the actual wording? Avoid long scrolling responses.
I think I actually initially wrote avoid long toilet roll scrolls and then it changed it to that one. Voice is also here. Make the voice Australian English. Don’t say write in Australian or you’ll get Kui Koba and G’ day Sheila. Ain’t nobody got time for that but friendly professional.
You a startup so you can ask for the voice to be savvy, personal or personable. You definitely don’t want vanilla and corporate. There’s enough out there in that space. But if I got here Tone should start a Start tone should suit a startup founder, savvy, curious and grounded rather than corporate or overly form. I think I said boring is batshit and it rewrote it for me.
So once I’ve got all those headings in and you can literally write the headings and then ask it to fill in those custom instructions yourself. We need to take the output when we’re ready, copy it and paste it into the custom instructions box for the overall account. Now in Copilot you can’t do this for the whole company you’d need to set up an agent and then share the agent with your marketing person, your HR person, whatever. But for a startup founder, where you’re the only full time person, maybe you’re outsourcing to a bookkeeper and outsourcing to a marketing person, bits and bobs, but primarily it’s for you. Make sure it’s in any of the AI tools that you’re using. [00:12:00.04]

Custom instructions at the end of the day are the base prompt and the system prompt. Who are you? What are you about? And then finally how you want the system to behave. So this is a bonus point for the next part of the custom instructions.
This is personal. So for some of you you need a positive reinforcement and others need to think things through a little bit more. So I have a thinking control called pushback. Do not assume my ideas are good or viable. We actually use the words that they have legs.
But you do you, where appropriate, challenge my assumptions, highlight risks and point out what may not work. Point out gaps in logic, misinformation, missing information.
After all, AIs got this massive brain and it’s thought of things that I haven’t even started thinking. Offer alternative approaches if something seems weak or unclear. And be constructive. I actually have to be gentle with me, be constructive, but do not default to agreeing to everything I say. I need a business partner.
I don’t need a yes man. It’s kind of annoying when AI wants to encourage me in things that I know just aren’t going to fly once I actually sit down, have a think about it. So it’s been very interesting the way it has pushed back on me from time to time, including buying some startup software I really wanted because I’m a geek and I want to play with it. And it said, yeah, no, you’re buying this for FutureLOL to implement in your business. And FutureLOL has a really poor attendance record.
I went ow. But it was true. So the pushback can be very helpful. And it, I think it saved me three or four hundred bucks, so that was worth it. The primary thing about pushback thinking controls is don’t just help me move forward, help me understand and mitigate possible mistakes.
You’re still the human in charge, you still make the decisions. But you do need somebody to say, are you sure about this? That’s what a buddy would do. So if AI is your startup mentor, the mentor is not going to tell you yes or no to do something, but will have a look on their face and go, are you joking right now? Like, I need that I need that for my AI as well. [00:14:46.08]

Obviously, if you’re the opposite and you’re negative about everything, or at least you’re extremely concerned and anxious and so risk averse that you might need to flip it and ask it to take a different approach. But hopefully that little bonus point, hopefully this pushback area really helps. So I hope you found this useful and I’ll see you in the next video. Thank you.

Resources for AI for Startups in Australia

If you have any good resources for Startups re: AI please let me know? This will be the greatest expansion area once AI automation hits white collar workers.

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