“Build me a website for my small coffee shop.” Nine words. What comes back looks perfectly fine and does nothing for you. A big photo of latte art at the top that isn’t yours. A line about handcrafted beverages and community. An About section describing a passion for coffee that began years ago. None of it is wrong. All of it is the average of every coffee shop website on the internet.
The fix isn’t a longer first message. People try that: they write four paragraphs, paste them in, and still get an average site, because they guessed at what mattered instead of being asked. What actually works is treating this like briefing a new employee. You say enough to start, they ask questions, you answer honestly, and the shared understanding you build is worth more than any one message.
What the first message has to cover
Your opening message has one job: give the AI enough to ask good questions. Four things do that.
- Who you are. The business name, and what you actually do said the way a customer would say it. “I do therapeutic massage” beats “wellness solutions.”
- Who it’s for. Not everyone. The customer you want more of. A photographer who mostly shoots weddings and a photographer who mostly shoots headshots need different websites.
- Where. Your city, your neighborhood, the towns you drive to. Or that you work online and location doesn’t apply. This one line changes half the copy on the site.
- The one thing a visitor should do. Book, call, order, get a quote, come in. If you don’t name it, the AI will pick one for you, and it will pick the generic one. Your homepage is built around this choice.
Add one or two plain sentences about what makes you different, and stop. “I’m the only shop in town that repairs vintage machines” is useful. “Quality service and customer satisfaction” is not, and worse, it invites the AI to write more of the same.
Let it interview you
Here is where most people go wrong. They try to anticipate every question, front-load everything, and hit send on an essay. You can’t anticipate it, and you shouldn’t have to. Ask the AI to interview you instead, one question at a time, before it builds anything.
This also gives you a way to judge the conversation you’re getting. An AI that asks nothing and immediately produces a finished-looking website has filled every gap with a guess. A good one will want to know:
- Your hours, including the awkward parts. Closed Mondays. By appointment only after 4pm.
- What things cost, or at least a starting figure. If you truly can’t say, it should ask what you tell people who call and ask.
- What proof you have. Reviews, real customer quotes, photos of finished work, years in business, a license number.
- The one action again, in concrete terms. Which phone rings? Which booking link? Where does a form message go?
- What you don’t do. The jobs you turn down are as clarifying as the ones you take, and they keep the wrong leads off your phone.
Answer with facts, not vibes
When the AI asks what makes your bakery special, the tempting answer is “we really care about quality.” Every bakery says that, so it carries no information, and the copy that comes back will say it too. The useful answer is “everything’s made the same morning, we sell out of the sourdough by ten, and we do custom cakes with two weeks’ notice.”
Specifics are what an AI cannot invent for you, and they’re what a stranger reads to decide. If you don’t know an answer yet, say so plainly and ask for it to be marked as a disclosed placeholder rather than filled in. A blank you know about is a task. A plausible sentence you never wrote is a problem you’ll find six months later, in a customer’s email.
The brief outlives the first message
Everything you just told the AI is a document, not a magic sentence. It’s the standing description of your business, and it stays useful long after the site is live.
Say it’s six months later and you start offering catering. That isn’t a new website. It’s an amendment: catering joins the services, it may deserve its own page, the opening line might change, and the one action stays the same. If your AI has the brief, the request is one sentence. If it doesn’t, you are re-explaining your entire business to build a single page.
So keep the brief somewhere you can paste it back. A note on your phone works. Some setups hold it for you: with AgentBuild the brief is saved alongside the site, so a conversation months later starts from what you already answered. Either way, the discipline is the same. Update the brief when the business changes, and the website follows.