AI agents and prompts for solo founders and small teams
For people running a business of one or a few: pricing and follow-up prompts, an agent ops playbook, a Custom GPT to skill migration, an inbox triage bot that drafts but never sends, and a weekly numbers agent.
Price, pitch and follow up: prompts for solo founders selling services
14 prompts for pricing a service, writing a one-page offer, handling objections and following up without sounding desperate.
Gmail inbox triage bot: label, summarize and draft replies for review
A Google Apps Script bot that labels new mail, drafts replies in your Drafts folder and emails a morning digest to you. Nothing goes to anyone else.
Get a weekly metrics report written by an agent from Stripe, analytics and a sheet
Build a scheduled job that pulls revenue, traffic and your own sheet numbers, computes week over week changes in code and has an agent write a short report.
Move a Custom GPT to a skill before custom GPTs retire on Dec 11, 2026
Inventory your GPTs, export everything, migrate, rewrite the instructions as a SKILL.md that triggers at the right time, replace custom actions and test against the answers your GPT gives today.
Solo-founder agent ops playbook: run your business with agents without losing control
Decide which jobs go to agents, how much power each gets, one house rules file they all follow, a daily brief, a weekly review, cost caps and a runbook for when an agent gets it wrong.
Algorithm cheat sheets: what X, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok actually say they rank
The ranking signals each platform has published, labeled Published, Via secondary or Lore, with the real X For You weights read from its public source code.
Ask-first rules for AI agents: hard nos, approval cards and a test set
Paste-in rules that make an agent ask before it sends, spends, posts or deletes, define what a real yes is, and stop retries after a no, plus 12 test scenarios to check it.
Run a daily signal board for your niche on X with an agent
A read-only agent routine and a small script that rank the last 14 days of posts in your niche by bookmarks, quotes and likes, and show what moved since yesterday.
Build a writing style guide your agents can follow
Ten prompts and a template that turn 20 to 40 messages you really wrote into a one-page STYLE.md, so drafts from any agent sound like you and stay drafts.
Turn production alerts into diagnosed fix PRs with a cloud agent
A small SaaS team wired its alerts to a Claude Code routine that finds the root cause, explains it in the Slack alert thread and opens a fix PR, and its first serious incident went from alert to merged fix in 13 minutes.
Run a local shop services business with an agent team and five approval gates
A gym teacher and former steamfitter runs BuiltForShops, which builds websites, answers calls and manages reviews for independent shops, on a team of named Grok Bot agents with a short list of things that never happen without his yes.
Audit where your agent team's tokens actually go
A user went through a day of Grok Bot usage step by step and found that bots handing work to each other, not his own chats, ate most of his tokens, with each handoff costing a median of about 977,000 tokens.
Run agents as an engineering team where nobody approves their own work
A former head of a 150-person engineering org reports that agents opened 1,363 of 1,575 pull requests over ten weeks. The setup works because the ticket is the spec and the test, and a separate checker signs off every change.
Never let a booking agent type the service name itself
A team building booking agents found the model sometimes booked services that did not exist. Their fix: the model never names the service. Code maps the request to a real catalogue id, and free text reaching the booking API is blocked.
Point an agent at the order exceptions, not the routine work
Instead of automating the 90% of orders that already run fine, one operator aimed an agent at the messy exceptions. The agent drafts a fix for each one and a person approves it with one click, which cut the daily exception queue from most of a day to about an hour.
Check the Claim (expanded edition): a method, prompts and a skill for checking AI claims
A Markdown pack that makes your agent check income, tool, popularity, quote and funding claims before they reach a brief, a purchase or a post: arithmetic first, primary sources second, one honest verdict per claim.
Check the Claim: the six questions (free sample)
Six questions, one prompt and one card template that make any agent with web search check a claim before you use it.
Grok Bot Templates: personas, standing orders and handoffs
A Markdown pack for setting up Grok Bots that do useful work on a schedule: 8 ready-to-paste personas, standing order cards for scheduled routines, event routine recipes, multi-bot handoffs with a decision log and four approval gates, memory rules and a test set.
Standing orders for a scheduled Grok Bot (free sample)
The card we use for every scheduled Grok Bot job, a cron table in local time, and two reporting rules (quiet by default, end of day) that cut most of the noise.
Governed Agent Teams: subagent personas, authority maps and handoffs
A Markdown pack for running a team of coding and research agents with clear limits: 7 subagent personas for Claude Code with Codex AGENTS.md and Hermes skill versions, a Desk Authority Map, three role risk classes, a handoff packet the receiver verifies, an evidence standard, a decision ledger and a reach inventory.
The Desk Authority Map for agent teams (free sample)
One template that says what each agent may do without you, what it must ask for, what it never does and what proof it owes, with an example row and an audit prompt.
Agency Open-Loop System: meeting notes to tasks, client follow-ups and a weekly open-loop report
A Markdown operating system for owner-led agencies: turn every meeting into commitments with an owner, a date and a done test, post them where your team works, draft client follow-ups you approve, and get one weekly report of what is still open.
Turn one meeting into accountable tasks (free sample)
The extraction rules and one prompt that turn a client meeting transcript into decisions, commitments with an owner and a date, open questions and flagged items.
Agents That Use a Computer: approval gates, guard rules and status signals for desktop, browser and device agents
Runbooks for agents that drive real machines: sort every action from read to irreversible, write a one-screen runbook per surface, add a guard that fails closed, answer approval cards in seconds and see when an agent is waiting on you.
Questions
Will these tools send anything on my behalf?
No. Every business item drafts for your review. Sending, posting and paying stay manual unless you change the code yourself.
Is my data shared?
Data goes only to the model provider you choose with your own API key. Read that provider's data policy before connecting an inbox or payment account.