The Four Files
The four short files AI needs before it writes anything for your business, as a fill-in template.
Want help setting these up for your business? Get in touch and tell me what you'd like AI to write for you.
Why AI writes like nobody in particular
Ask AI for a Facebook post with nothing else to go on and you get something polite, a bit stiff and true of any business in America. In my experience the AI can write just fine. It knows nothing about you, so it writes the average of everyone.
When I built a weekly posting system for a personal trainer, four short files came first, before any of the automation. How he talks, who his customers are, what he offers, and the plain facts like his phone number, prices and hours. Everything the system writes reads from those four. Getting them wrong showed up in every post, and getting them right is most of what makes the posts sound like him.
You don't need a system to use them. The same four files make ChatGPT or Claude write better for you by hand, whether it's a post, an email or the About page on your website.
The voice file took the longest, and it always will. The setup was about a weekend. Getting the posts to sound like the owner took weeks of reading them and adding the rule that was missing.
The template
Copy it into a document and fill it in. A first version takes about an hour, and you'll keep adding to it every time the AI gets something wrong.
FILE 1. HOW I TALK
How long my sentences run: ____________
Words and phrases I use a lot: ____________
How I usually start and end things: ____________
Words I never use: ____________
Three things I wrote myself (paste below): ____________
A few minutes of me talking about my business (paste below): ____________
FILE 2. WHO I SERVE
My best customer, in their own words: ____________
What's going on in their life when they find me: ____________
What they worry about before they buy: ____________
The questions they ask me most: ____________
FILE 3. WHAT I OFFER
Each service or product, in plain words: ____________
Who each one is for: ____________
What I don't do, and what I never promise: ____________
FILE 4. MY BUSINESS FACTS
Phone, email and website: ____________
Hours and service area: ____________
Prices (only the ones I'm happy to publish): ____________
Customer quotes, copied word for word, with permission: ____________
Done when: the AI writes something and I don't have to fix a single fact.
How to fill in each file
Each file has a plain way to do it. The right-hand column is what it changed on the trainer's posts.
| File | How to do it | What it changed |
|---|---|---|
| 1. How I talk | Paste three things you wrote before AI came along, and record yourself for three minutes explaining your business. The recording catches habits you'd never write down about yourself. | His voice file was built from recorded interviews with him, so the posts started from his actual words. |
| 2. Who I serve | Write it the way your customer would say it, not the way a marketer would. Their worries and their questions matter more than their age or income. | Every week's plan is checked against it, so the posts talk to the people who actually book. |
| 3. What I offer | List what you sell in plain words, and write down what you never promise. AI will happily promise results unless told not to. | His rules, like no medical claims and no promised outcomes, went in here and stopped showing up in posts. |
| 4. My business facts | One place for the facts that must never be wrong. Copy customer quotes word for word from the original message, never retype them. | When I checked, three of his five stored quotes had drifted from what customers actually wrote. All five now match the originals. |
The prompt
Paste your four files in first, then this, then what you want written.
Above are four files about my business: how I talk, who I serve, what I offer and my business facts. Use only these files for anything about me, my business or my customers. Write the way File 1 describes, and never use a word from my "never use" list. Take every price, phone number and customer quote exactly from File 4. If you need a fact or a customer story the files don't give you, list what you need and stop. Don't invent it. Here's what I'd like you to write: [describe the post, email or page]
The line about stopping does the most work. In my experience, when AI is missing something it fills the gap instead of asking. On the trainer's system it once wrote a whole post about a customer who didn't exist, because the real story never reached it.
Three things I'd do from day one
- Start the voice file from a recording. Describing yourself gets you the person you'd like to sound like. A recording gets you how you really talk.
- Add a rule every time you fix something. When a post says something you'd never say, put that word or phrase in File 1 so it doesn't come back.
- Read every post before it goes out. The files make the first draft much closer, and a person still checks the facts.
About Andrew Voskov
Andrew Voskov is the founder of Cherry Pi AI. He spent twenty years running online businesses before AI, and now builds writing and posting systems for small businesses. The full story of the trainer's system is in the blog post on having AI write your social media posts, and there's more about custom AI tools on the services page.
If you'd like AI writing for your business without sounding like everyone else, get in touch. Tell me what you'd like it to write.
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