Customer Obsession, in the age of AI

How to use Claude to give you 24/7 access to your ideal customer.

Knowing who you’re making something for matters. That’s been gospel forever, whether you’re building a product, writing a substack, leading a team, or just trying to show up for the people in your life. Steve Blank’s old line for it in startup-land was “get out of the building,” meaning go meet real customers instead of guessing about them in a conference room. The trouble has always been cost. Real customer research has historically meant weeks of interviews, scripts, spreadsheets, sometimes a consulting budget, sometimes a small team. Always humility and willingness to feel awkward and to be wrong. In short, it’s hard.

In my recent work, AI has been changing that. A pass that used to take hours or weeks, can now run in an afternoon.

I recently read a post from Tayla Burrell on her publication Dangerously Educated about using deep research as an audience research tool. Her method is clever. You run the same research prompt through the four AI tools that have deep research modes (Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini), then feed all four outputs back to Claude with a synthesis prompt that merges them into one definitive brief. You get four independent reads and let the overlap be the signal. Go read her original post for the full thinking.

I didn’t do the whole method. I only had an afternoon, so I just ran the prompt in Claude’s deep research mode. I figured I’d come back and do the full version if the single-model output felt thin. It didn’t.

I have two sections on this Substack, Work and Life, with pretty different readers, so I wrote a separate research prompt for each. Eight questions per section, things like: who the reader is, what they want, what’s stopping them, the exact language they use, what they’ve paid for and what they bounced off of, where they read, who they trust, and what “this is working” actually feels like for them in a given week. I kicked each one off in Claude’s deep research mode and went and made coffee.

The Work brief basically rewrote who I thought I was writing to. I’d been picturing other hobbiest builders like me. The brief pointed at a much wider audience of non-engineer professionals who are using AI every day at work and are tired of hype. Side-project builders are part of that audience, just a slice of it. That changes who I picture when I open a post.

The Life brief pulled back specific phrases the audience rolls its eyes at (”digital detox,” “dopamine fast,” “mindful moment”) and phrases they actually use themselves. One line from an r/nosurf post said: “I feel like I’m in slow motion while everyone is running at hyperspeed.” That alone made the pass worth running. This was “getting out of the building”

I filed both briefs as internal reference docs and set up the skill I use to get audience feedback on what I’m writing.

What I hadn’t fully realized when I started is how much the same brief does. The picture you get back is who your customer is, which is the input to anything you’re going to put in front of them next, whether that’s a substack post, a homepage copy rewrite, an ad test, the next product feature, a cold email, pricing options, or an onboarding flow. Writing was just where I needed it first.

If you want to try this yourself

The simple version for what I did was one research prompt; run it in Claude’s deep research mode, file the output somewhere your work will actually pick it up. The fuller version is Tayla’s: run the same prompt in Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, then feed all four outputs back to Claude with a synthesis prompt that merges them. You’ll get more confidence the results aren’t specific to one model’s blind spots. I’ll probably do that on the next pass.

A few things worth knowing either way. Push the prompt to demand direct quotes, named communities, and exact vocabulary instead of generic personas. If your publication or business has more than one audience, run a brief for each. And put the output somewhere your workflow will actually pick it up.

Here’s a prompt you can paste into Claude to get started. It’ll interview you first and then give you a research prompt you can use on your own publication or business.

I want to write an audience research brief for something I’m publishing or selling, and I’d like to use Claude’s deep research mode to do it. Before we start, please ask me five or six questions, one at a time, so you have the context to do this well. Things you’d probably want to know: what I’m publishing or selling, who I think my audience or ICP is right now, what the through-line across what I publish or how I position is, which communities and sources my audience likely lives in, and what outputs I want back from the research (direct quotes, named communities, exact vocabulary, language to use and language to avoid, competitor positioning).

Once I’ve answered, draft me a research prompt I can paste into deep research mode. The prompt should ask for eight dimensions: who the reader or buyer is, what they want, what’s stopping them, the language they use, what they value and pay for, how they consume content or research vendors, the competitive landscape, and what success feels like in their week or month. It should demand direct quotes and real named communities rather than generic marketing personas.

If I say I want to run the fuller multi-model version, also draft me a synthesis prompt I can use later in a fresh chat after I’ve gotten outputs back from Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. That prompt should tell you to lead with findings that appear across multiple briefs, flag single-source findings, preserve direct quotes verbatim, cut generic advice, and end with a day-in-the-life, top five insights, and language-to-use and language-to-avoid lists.

Two rules: Don’t write the brief yourself from training data. And push for specificity and verbatim language, not summaries of what the audience “probably” thinks.

After I filed my two briefs, I got thinking how much this could help other people I work with or know - regardless of function or industry. I had been talking to a friend with a mid-sized 3PL company - a warehouse, kitting, shipping operation behind a lot of brands. We had been talking about how they use Claude, and so I wondered if the audience research would work for them. Who should they be selling, what they should put on their site, how do they compare to or compete with main industry players, without spending what they spend on ads.

So I went through the exercise -if I paste that opener into Claude with the prompt above, the first thing it does is interview me, not to fill in a form but to get the context it needs to write a research prompt that’s actually about my business. What size brands am I set up to handle well, what’s the throughline I want every piece of content and every sales call to point at, which communities and publications do these founders actually read, what’s my specialty, and what’s the one thing I wish prospects already knew about me by the time they hit the contact page. Six questions or so, one at a time. Then Claude drafts the actual deep research prompt I’d paste into research mode, the same eight dimensions from before tuned for B2B services: who the buyer is, what they want, what’s stopping them from switching, the language they use, what they value and what they pay for, how they research and choose a fulfillment partner, the competitive landscape, and what “this is working” feels like in a given month.

After I let the run as deep research, I went to do something else…

What comes back was much more specific than my mental model of who buys 3PL services. It told me about the triggers that cause most companies to switch, the forums they live in, the trade press they ignore, the verbatim quotes from founders venting on actual switching moments, and the worry that runs through almost every one of those stories (that nobody picks up the phone during Black Friday week).

So, what changes once a brief like that sits in a file in your Claude system?

Now your homepage can get specific. The same logic carries to a paid ad, the language, and who to target. Every piece of customer-facing language, from the support reply to the cold email to the onboarding flow, runs through the brief before it goes out.

The brief also turns out to be the most useful thing I’ve seen feed an SEO and GEO effort. The exact-vocabulary section is the keyword list. The trigger moments are the question-shaped queries somebody runs the week they decide to switch (”when to move from in-house fulfillment to a 3PL,” “questions to ask before signing a 3PL contract”).

It works as a product input too. The pain points customers feel sharply enough to talk about, in their own words, become a candidate list for what to build, prioritize, or kill. None of this overrides the call on what’s feasible next quarter. It just narrows the list of feasible bets to the ones a customer would actually notice.

And then there’s the move I’ve been most curious about, which is what happens when you stop treating the brief as a document and start treating it as something you can query.

I’ve actually run a version of this end-to-end on a recent project. Claude wrote a PRD, I took it into Chrome to multiple tabs, each a separate chat with different Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) agents and asked for a critique. Claude improved the PRD and took it to another Chrome tab with Lovable, where Claude asked Lovable to build a prototype. Then back and forth - Claude would check in with the ICP agents, and then go back to Lovable. That loop ran several days, with almost zero input from me. I’d check in a few times a day, approve or nudge something, and walk away. After a few days, what came out was nearly flawless, and I’d barely had to interface with it along the way.

For revising a blog post:

Revise the attached blog post against the customer research brief saved in this project. Flag every phrase that uses vocabulary the brief lists as language-to-avoid. Surface every passage where I’m being abstract when the brief tells me to be specific. Rewrite the headline and the opening hook to match the angles the brief identifies as pulling my ICP in. Leave the middle of the post for me unless something has to be cut. Show your work in the margins.

For optimizing a landing page, where I want the work to do two jobs at once, brand fit and conversion:

Score the attached landing page against the customer research brief in this project and against landing-page conversion best practice. On the brief side: flag any vocabulary the brief lists as language-to-avoid, identify where the page is abstract when the brief says to be specific, and check whether the page addresses the signature worries the brief surfaces. On the conversion side: assess above-the-fold clarity, headline specificity, social proof quality, the primary call to action, and objection handling. Return a prioritized list of changes from highest expected impact to lowest, then draft the rewrites for the top three.

For an SEO and GEO audit:

Use the customer research brief in this project to run an SEO and GEO audit on my site. Pull the exact-vocabulary section of the brief and turn it into a prioritized keyword set, marked by intent. Generate twenty question-shaped queries my ICP is probably typing into Google the week they decide to switch, and another ten they’re likely typing into ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. For each one, tell me whether a page exists on my site that should rank for it today, and if not, what page I should create. End with the five highest-leverage moves I should make this quarter.

For pressure-testing a product roadmap:

Use the customer research brief in this project to pressure-test the attached product roadmap. For each item on the roadmap, score one to five on how directly it addresses a pain the brief surfaces, and explain in one line. Flag any item that doesn’t trace back to the brief. Suggest three features the brief implies I should be building that aren’t on the roadmap, with the verbatim customer language behind each one.

And for setting up the ICP agent itself…

The hard part of the original pass was admitting I’d been working for weeks without a real picture of my audience. What I keep coming back to now is that the brief only earns its keep once it actually changes what a customer sees, hears, or signs up for. Running the research is the clever afternoon. The more valuable part is everything that comes after, when the language from the brief actually shows up on the homepage, in the product copy, on the roadmap, and inside the agent that triages ideas and opportunities.

If you give something like this a try, let me know how it goes. If you’ve already got an approach for getting a real picture of your audience, deep research prompts of your own, or a clean way to turn a brief into an ICP agent, I’d love to hear them. And if this kind of post is useful to you, subscribing would mean a lot. I’ll keep sharing what I’m picking up as I build Saalo.