🤖 Stop asking ChatGPT to read your mind
I got tired of explaining Custom GPTs with words.
So I made one for people to test drive.
Meet my beta GPT: The Do Less Marketing Coach — a personal marketing strategist for burnt-out brands who want to do less marketing with better results.
And no, I didn’t build it by typing “be a marketing coach” and hoping for the best. 🤞🏼
I trained it using my personal knowledge files—the stuff I’ve built over years. The kind of documents that make marketing decisions less chaotic and way more consistent.
Things like:
My Brand Book
My frameworks, standards, and “don’t say it like that” rules
How I think about positioning, messaging, and what’s worth doing (and what’s a waste of time)
In other words: it’s not generic. It’s not a random internet smoothie of advice. It’s me, in a format business owners can access 24/7.
And now I’m in the unsexy but important phase: beta testing.
It’s been:
build it
test it
get feedback
tighten the guardrails
fix the parts where it got a little too “you’ve got this!”
adjust the tone so it actually sounds like ME
Because most people aren’t using ChatGPT “wrong” because they’re bad at it.
They’re using it wrong because they’re treating it like a mind reader.
And that’s where the chaos begins.
Stop Treating ChatGPT Like a Magic Search Bar
You know the “prompt”:
“Write me a newsletter.”
“Give me 10 Instagram captions.”
“Create a marketing plan.”
That’s not a prompt. That’s a wish.
And it’s tempting because it feels like productivity. You hit enter, it spits out words, and you feel accomplished.
For about seven seconds.
Then you read it and think:
Why does this sound like it could be about my competitor?
Why is it weirdly confident about things that aren’t true?
Why is it using phrases I would never say?
So you rewrite. And rewrite. And rewrite.
At which point AI didn’t save you time.
It just handed you a horrible first draft and said, “Good luck, champ.”
The hidden cost isn’t just extra editing time.
It’s:
decision fatigue (“Is this on-brand? Is this accurate? Do I hate this?”)
inconsistent messaging (because every output is a new personality)
false conclusions (“AI isn’t the right tool for my business”)
AI isn’t useless.
Untrained AI is.
If you want it to act like a team member, you have to start training it like one.
Rant over.
Why Custom GPTs Actually Work
A Custom GPT isn’t “better” because it’s smarter.
It’s better because it’s specific.
It knows:
your voice and messaging
your audience and offers
your standards (and your hard no’s)
your priorities for the next 12 months
It doesn’t replace your team.
It makes them dangerously efficient:
less rewriting
fewer “can you tweak this?” loops
faster drafts that actually sound like you
more consistency across everything you put into the world
And yes, it saves money—because time is payroll and chaos is expensive.
If AI Has Felt Disappointing, Here’s Why
You’re not broken.
You’re just trying to get a generalist to do specialist work with zero onboarding.
This week, try one shift:
Stop asking ChatGPT to “write the thing.”
Instead, set aside time to start training it to write like you. Your audience will thank you…
