- The difference between using Claude like a chatbot and using it like a builder will change how you think about AI entirely.
- You can migrate all of your ChatGPT data to Claude in five minutes. The switching cost most people fear is almost entirely psychological.
- Claude Projects, Skills, and a single source of truth are the three-part infrastructure that turns casual AI use into a business operating system.
- The biggest reason people get bad results from Claude is they skip the setup. Your personalization, your context, your voice documents. That's what makes the output world class.
- Four steps to get started today: migrate your data, sign up for Pro ($20/month), add your personalization, and use it every single day.
Right now, Claude is coming in hot. There is a mass exodus of people switching from ChatGPT, and I recently had a friend slide into my DMs and say, "Rob, I want you to turn me into a Claude God."
So that's exactly what I'm going to do right here.
I'm going to give you an entrepreneurial driven, non-technical, business outcomes focused breakdown for how to use Claude to grow your business. Everything I'm about to share comes from lived experience. Real projects. Real results. Real receipts.
Why Did I Switch From ChatGPT to Claude?
I switched because the results spoke louder than any loyalty to a platform. I used ChatGPT from the first week it launched in December 2022. Over a thousand days of daily use. In 2025, I was a 0.01% user in the entire world. So when it comes to being all in on a platform, I was as committed as you can get.
But I am not romantic about any of these tools. They are all just tools.
About eight weeks ago, my friend Colin Scotland called me and said, "Rob, everything just shifted. I just created three websites over the weekend using Claude." Every alarm bell went off in my head. Up until that point, I was using ChatGPT 98% of the time and Claude for 2%. Claude was always a better writer, more emotionally resonant. But ChatGPT handled everything else.
Once Colin said that, I spent the next three days building my own website using Claude Code with zero developer experience. That was the moment everything changed.
The thing that makes Claude different right now in April 2026 is that it allows you to be a builder. ChatGPT is great as a chatbot. Claude lets you build things alongside it. It's proactive. It's agentic. It does things for you that ChatGPT is not touching.
What Are the Biggest Challenges People Face When Switching to Claude?
The biggest challenges are psychological, not technical. I hear the same three things from almost everyone considering the switch.
"Switching from ChatGPT feels like starting from scratch." I get it. Those of us who have been using AI every day for a year or two or three are very pot committed to what we've been doing.
"I've spent so much time in ChatGPT. How do I get all that data out?" This one is simpler than you think. You can migrate everything in less than five minutes. I published a YouTube video showing the exact three steps.
"Can Claude understand me the way ChatGPT does?" Yes. And here's the key. One of the fundamental things I teach is that you want to be platform and tool agnostic. Everything that matters about how you grow your business with AI should not live in one tool.
Think about the early internet. Lycos. Infoseek. Ask Jeeves. Yahoo. Google. Could you imagine saying, "I'm sticking with one of these and I'm done"? The AI era is moving too fast. If you do not have flexibility in what you are doing and how you are growing, you are limiting your growth potential.
This is growth mindset 101. Growth mindset says I can always make the situation better and I will always learn something new. Fixed mindset says I'm trapped in this position. Too many people are allowing the past to dictate their future.
How Do You Use Claude in Your Business Every Day?
I have Claude up nonstop. Every single day. I only do three things in my business: I coach, I create, and I use AI. That's it.
The ceiling and the capacity that Claude is currently operating on right now has never been matched before. I'm using Claude, Claude Code via VS Code, Open Claw, Manus, and a variety of Skills.
The light bulb moment for me was building my website. I migrated off of WordPress where I had been for more than a decade. Hundreds of blog posts. A ton of SEO and link juice. Claude Code moved it all over to my brand new website. That's when I knew this was a movement, not a moment.
Some of the things I'm building with Claude right now: a full AEO strategy for my business (answer engine optimization, showing up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews), Claude Projects for every major area of my business, and Claude Skills that automate the things I used to do manually every single week.
How Do You Set Up Claude Projects for Your Business?
Claude Projects are individual containers where you can go deep on a specific area of your business. Each project operates on its own capacity outside of your overall Claude account.
Here's what my project structure looks like. I have one for my Undeniable brand. One specifically for learning Claude and Claude Code, because all of this is new and part of the game is documenting what you learn. One for building new products like the Gold Vault. One for dropping in transcripts and extracting the gold from them. One for systems design and AI architecture.
The most important thing you do when you create a project is add your context. Your AI foundational data. I'm talking about your Soul Data, your vision, your values, your identity, your business context, your operating context, your 2026 goals, your brand voice.
For 99% of people, they don't even know that personalization is a thing inside of Claude.
Here's a tip that takes one minute and is a massive level up. When you create a new project, speak into Claude and say, "Hey Claude, I'm creating a new project around growing my brand. Help me create the custom instructions for this project." Tell it what you'll be working on inside this project. It will generate the instructions for you. Copy, paste, drop them in. Do this every time you create a project.
I also keep a folder on my computer with all of my AI context foundational documents. Soul Data, business context, brand voice, Voice DNA document. This makes you platform agnostic. When you leave ChatGPT, or you use Claude, or you use Gemini, or anything else, by having these documents locally and in the cloud, you can give any AI tool your most important personalized context at the push of a button. Set it up once and you've got it.
What Are Claude Skills and How Do You Use Them?
Claude Skills are an absolute game changer once you understand them. Go to Settings, then Capabilities, scroll to the bottom, and click "Go to Customize."
My encouragement is to build skills from the inside out, not outside in. Right now on Twitter you'll see people sharing libraries of 250 Claude Skills. That's the same thing that happened with prompt libraries. Start by understanding the thinking behind why you would build one for your own business.
Here's the question I ask: am I going to do something more than once? If yes, I don't want to keep doing it manually.
The simplest example: every time I write my Undeniable newsletter, I need a title. I could think about it on my own every week. Or I could build a skill. So I created the Newsletter Title Writer. I gave it the research, the principles (20 to 40 characters, lead with the hook, make it curious, make it specific, make it emotionally resonant), and I gave it 10 examples of titles I liked. Took less than 10 minutes to create. Now it runs every single week.
Same thing with my Podcast Description Writer. Same thing with the Gold Mine, which extracts the best mindset, language, wisdom, and themes from any transcript or content. Same thing with a skill that turns my newsletter into an Instagram carousel. And my favorite, the Client Wow Machine, which I created in real time on a client call. It builds a cinematic, personalized, interactive artifact that shows them something in real time that makes them say, "I cannot believe what I just saw."
These are repeatable tasks turned into automated excellence.
What Does a Human First Approach to Using AI Look Like?
You lead with your vision, your identity, and your values before you ever open a tool.
As Claude gets better at building and agentic AI starts coming alive, it's going to be very easy for people to outsource their authenticity to the robots. To let AI lead. To let it be the boss.
This is completely contrarian to how most of the market operates. Everyone talks about tech and tools and updates. It's very sterile.
There's one thing AI will never have. Soul.
Your ability to infuse your essence, your heartbeat, your vision, your identity, your values from a human first perspective with a lens of service and growth in everything you do is what separates you from everyone else who's just slinging AI to automate a sterile business.
Claude is more emotionally resonant than ChatGPT. When you're building with Claude, you want to feel what you're building. Adopt a human first approach to it because that foundationally will separate you from everyone else.
What Are the Biggest Mistakes People Make With Claude?
The first mistake is being hesitant to switch from ChatGPT because of all the context you've built up. All you have to do is ask the AI how to overcome that. It'll handle the migration in 30 seconds. Most people just don't see that this is a possibility. I call this a friction trap. If you run into a point of friction or a challenge, ask the AI how to solve it.
The second mistake is not learning how to use Claude and thinking you can just start and get world class results. You can sign up for Claude and use it and it will give you results. That does not mean they are good results. It would be like picking up a bike for the first time, falling off, and saying, "I don't get what everybody's talking about with bikes." Part of the game in the AI era is your willingness to learn something new. For me, not knowing how to do something is not a challenge. It's an opportunity.
The third mistake is not having a single source of truth. People are creating ideas, projects, and builds across dozens of tools and conversations. Nothing compounds. Nothing connects. This is why I built the Gold Vault in Notion connected to Claude via MCP. It has a Build Tracker for logging every project, a Signal Bank for capturing ideas, a Playbook Library for documenting systems, an Intelligence Vault for storing insights from high level conversations, and a Field Notes library for logging what I learn every day. I spend very little time inside Notion, but I log everything I build and send it there as my single source of truth.
The fourth mistake is believing "I'm not a tech person" and letting that stop you from exploring Claude Code. I don't have a tech background. I don't have an AI background. I know zero just like everybody else. I just keep showing up and shipping every single day.
How Do You Get Started Using Claude Today?
Four steps to becoming a Claude God. One day at a time.
Step 1: Migrate your data from ChatGPT. Go to my YouTube channel at Rob Cressy. I've got a five minute video showing you exactly how to do this. Three simple steps. Most people only do one of them. Do all three and you'll move everything over.
Step 2: Sign up for the Claude Pro plan. $20 a month. This is a non-negotiable. If you're a high performer and leader in the AI era, you do not use free tools. I went from the $20 plan to the $100 plan within a day because I hit my limit building. A month later I was on the $200 plan. That's how fast things move when you commit.
Step 3: Add in your personalization. Your AI context foundational documents. Your Soul Data. Your business context. Your brand voice. Give Claude everything it needs to know about you and your business.
Step 4: Use Claude every single day. Track how much time you're spending using it. Track how much time you're spending learning. If you tell me you're using Claude one hour a week and learning zero hours a week, you're telling me everything I need to know. The AI era is unromantic about who you are, what you do, and how much money is in your bank account. It says show me your receipts.
You learn, you build, you ship. You rinse and repeat. You document this in a single source of truth.
Ready to Go Deeper?
The Gold Vault is my AI operating system built in Notion. Every system I described in this post, the Build Tracker, the Signal Bank, the Playbook Library, the Intelligence Vault, the Field Notes, lives inside the Gold Vault. If you're ready to build your own AI foundation, check it out at RobCressy.com/goldvault.
