The first day of our workshops has ten parts, and the longest of them has nothing to do with the terminal or with automation. For almost two hours, participants tell AI about themselves, their clients and what they sell, and AI turns that into files. We only install Claude Code once those files exist. The order is deliberate: without them, every task you later hand to an AI agent starts with a guess.

Profile, persona and offer – three files and where to keep them

Profile, persona and offer are three separate files: the first describes you, the second your ideal client, the third what you sell. You write them because every new conversation with Claude Code starts out knowing nothing about you. What looks like memory is notes and files that Claude Code reads when the conversation starts. With nothing to read, the AI agent either asks or guesses – and what it guesses is usually generic.

All three are plain text files in Markdown. In our workshops they’re called profile.md, persona.md and offer.md, but the names are up to you. In a project in claude.ai or Claude Desktop, you upload them to the project’s knowledge. In Claude Code, they sit in the folder you work in, and one sentence in CLAUDE.md – the instructions file Claude Code loads at the start of every conversation – says where they are and when to use them. You can ask AI to add a sentence along these lines: “my standing details are in profile.md, persona.md and offer.md – read the right one whenever you need to know who I am, who I’m writing to or what I sell”. Claude Code opens a file pointed to this way only when it decides the file is needed. That’s why the sentence in CLAUDE.md also says when to look at the profile, the persona or the offer – without that hint, Claude Code may never open them at all.

What goes into the profile, the persona and the offer are facts that don’t change from one conversation to the next. You write them once and update them when your work changes: a new service, a different kind of client, a new price list. That’s what sets them apart from notes, which grow with every conversation.

How to keep what grows with every conversation next to these fixed facts is covered in our Tip on your own memory bank.

Memory documentation Projects in Claude

Profile: a file about you, not about your business

The profile describes you, and your business is only one of the threads in it. In our workshops, the profile comes out of a three-part interview, and those three parts give a clear idea of what belongs in it:

  • who you are – your role, what you do, which tools you use, what a normal day looks like and at which hours you do your best focused work;
  • what holds you back – what eats up the most time when it shouldn’t, what frustrates you, which projects you’re running and what commitments are on your plate right now, what you decide on your own and what you need to agree on with someone else first;
  • where you’re heading – your goals for the coming year, what you want to do more of and less of, how you prefer to get feedback and in which matters AI should ask you first.

Each of these details earns its keep in a different task. If AI doesn’t know your focus hours, it will schedule writing a proposal for the time of day when you won’t be able to concentrate anyway. If AI doesn’t know what you need to clear with someone, it will promise a client a date in its reply that nobody has signed off on yet.

The easiest way to build a profile is an interview: AI asks the questions, you answer them. The whole process, including the sentence that points to the profile from CLAUDE.md, is in the lesson on your profile in Claude Code.

Persona: who you’re writing to, and in whose words

A persona doesn’t describe a particular person. It describes the kind of client your offer is aimed at. So the file holds what your clients have in common, not the names or details of anyone you work with. The persona gets a file of its own because it describes someone other than you: the profile tells the AI agent who is writing, and the persona tells it who you’re writing to.

A good persona covers:

  • who this client is – their role, the type and size of their business, how comfortable they are with technology;
  • what they want and what hurts – their goals, their problems and how they’ll know it worked;
  • what makes them start looking for help, and which objections they raise, together with your answers to them;
  • the language they use to talk about their problem – the words that land with them, the tone they expect and what to steer clear of when talking to them.

The description of how your client talks is worth the most. A LinkedIn post or a reply to an enquiry written without a persona sounds as though it was written for everyone. With a persona to go on, AI writes in the words your client uses.

In our workshops, the persona comes straight after the profile, because AI builds it on what’s already in profile.md. If you know who your client is, AI asks questions and puts your answers in order. If you don’t know yet, it suggests a few client groups that fit what’s in your profile, and you pick one.

Offer: where AI gets your prices from

The offer is the file with your services or products. Each item should have a name, who it’s for, which problem it solves, how it’s delivered, what the client gets, the price and how it’s billed, how long it takes and what makes it stand out. With several products, this file turns into a catalogue.

The price matters most here. Without this file, when you ask AI for a quote, it has nowhere to find your rate, so it will either ask or give a number that merely sounds plausible. The file alone doesn’t stop AI from guessing, which is why it’s worth spelling the rule out: no price that isn’t in the offer. In Claude Code, ask for it to be added to CLAUDE.md; in claude.ai, put it in the project instructions.

The offer is easiest to build from what you already have: AI pulls the key details from your services page or your price list. Before AI saves the offer file, check that it read the service names and prices correctly – in our workshops we do this together with participants. Otherwise a mistake, say a price before tax read as the price including tax, ends up in the file the AI agent will take it from for every quote after that.

A work profile and a personal one – each in its own project

A work profile and a personal profile are two different files, because different things matter at work and outside it: different goals, different hours, a different tone. Each gets its own project. In claude.ai, every project has its own knowledge and its own chat history. In Claude Code running in the terminal, a project is a folder with its own CLAUDE.md: in the work folder, Claude Code uses the work profile, and in the personal one, the personal profile. There’s nothing to switch by hand.

Claude Code loads CLAUDE.md from the folder you start it in and from every folder above it. If the personal folder sat inside the work one, Claude Code started in the personal folder would get both sentences about the profile at once, and two descriptions of you that contradict each other. So keep the two folders side by side, not one inside the other.

A personal project usually has neither a persona nor an offer – those files are needed where you sell something.

How CLAUDE.md files load Projects in Claude

Several kinds of client – several personas in one project

One persona stops being enough once you have more than one kind of client. In our workshops we ask straight out: do you have one ideal client or several? One participant answered without a moment’s thought that there’s never just one – there are always several.

Here at JUSTAUTOMATE we have two personas. The first is someone who wants to learn to work with AI in a training course. The second needs help bringing AI into their business or building an automation. Each comes with a different problem and describes it in different words. A single shared persona would come out so general that the AI agent would write to both people the same way – and to neither of them well.

Each persona gets a file of its own, for example persona-training.md and persona-implementation.md, and they all sit in the same project, next to one profile and one offer. A separate project isn’t needed here, because the profile and the offer stay the same – separate projects are for separate profiles. In Claude Code, the sentence in CLAUDE.md then lists every persona file and says which kind of client it covers.

Whether one persona is enough for you is something AI can help you check:

Read persona.md and offer.md. Check whether all my services are aimed at the client described in the persona, or whether any of them is for someone else – with a different problem, different objections or a different way of talking. If so, suggest how to split the persona into several, but don't change anything until I've approved the split.

This prompt works the same way in Claude Code started in the folder with these files and in a project chat in claude.ai. AI will check whether each service in your offer fits the client described in the persona and point out the ones that fit someone else.

In short

Put together your profile, persona and offer before you start building anything with an AI agent that touches on you, your clients or what you sell. When one profile or one persona is no longer enough, the second profile gets a project of its own, and the second persona goes into the same project, next to the first.