Turn ChatGPT into a fast first draft for the writing every small business does on repeat — replies, listings, and policies.
If you run a small business, you write the same handful of things over and over: a reply to a customer complaint, a product description, a job post, a social caption. ChatGPT is best used as a first-draft machine for exactly that kind of repeat writing — it won’t know your business, but it’s very good at getting you from a blank page to something you can edit in thirty seconds.
Set it up once
- Create a free account at chat.openai.com. The free tier is enough for everything in this guide; upgrade later only if you want faster responses or file uploads at higher volume.
- Give it standing instructions. Under Settings → Personalization → Custom Instructions, tell it what your business does, who your customers are, and how you want to sound (“friendly but concise, no exclamation marks, UK spelling”). It will apply this to every new chat automatically.
- Start a dedicated chat per task type — one for customer replies, one for product copy, one for social posts.
Three ways to use it this week
1. Customer reply drafts
Paste the customer’s message in full and ask for a reply. Being specific about tone and length matters more than anything else here.
2. Product descriptions from a spec sheet
Paste raw specs (materials, dimensions, care instructions) and ask for a description in your brand voice, plus three shorter variants for marketplaces with character limits.
3. Turning a policy into plain English
Feed it your returns policy or T&Cs draft and ask it to rewrite for an 8th-grade reading level, then compare both versions before publishing — never publish legal or policy text without reading it yourself.
Where it goes wrong
ChatGPT will confidently invent facts — prices, policies, delivery times — if you don’t give it the real numbers. Never let it generate anything customer-facing about pricing, stock, or legal terms without checking every figure yourself.
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