How to Use Claude: The Complete Guide

How Do You Get Started With Claude?

1. Create a free account at claude.ai (or the iOS/Android/desktop apps).
2. Start a chat. Be specific: instead of "write an email," try "You're responding to an unhappy customer whose delivery is 2 weeks late. Warm but not grovelling, offer a 10% credit, under 120 words."
3. Attach files (PDFs, spreadsheets, images) with the paperclip — "summarize the risks in this contract" is where Claude shines.
4. Iterate in the same chat: "shorter," "more formal," "now as a table." Claude keeps context.
5. When you hit free-tier limits on real work, that's the signal Pro pays for itself.

What Are Projects (and Why Do They Matter for Business)?

A Project is a workspace with memory. Load your reference material once — brand voice, product sheet, rate card, contract boilerplate — plus standing instructions, and every conversation inside that Project starts already briefed. A bookkeeper's "Client invoices" project, a realtor's "Listing descriptions" project, a founder's "Investor updates" project: this is the feature that converts Claude from novelty to daily tool, and it's the pattern we set up first when we train teams.

What Are Artifacts?

Ask Claude for a document, a webpage, a diagram, or a small interactive tool, and it opens in an artifact — a live pane beside the chat that updates as you refine it. It's the difference between receiving a wall of text and watching your landing-page draft, org chart, or price calculator take shape. Artifacts can be shared with a link, which makes them handy for quick internal tools.

How Do You Use Claude Code?

Claude Code is Claude as a hands-on coding agent: it runs in your terminal or IDE, reads your whole codebase, writes and edits files, runs tests, and manages git — you describe the outcome, it does the work. It's included with Pro and Max subscriptions (no separate price — see what Claude Code costs), and it's the reason a large share of developers now default to Claude. Non-technical teams won't touch it — but it's also the engine we use to build client automations quickly, which is why fixed-price AI projects have become affordable for SMBs.

Which Model Should You Pick?

Claude offers a fast everyday model (Sonnet) and a deeper reasoning model (Opus). The practical rule: default to the fast model; switch to the deeper one for gnarly analysis, long legal documents, or complex multi-step plans. Extended thinking (paid tiers) lets Claude reason longer before answering — worth it for hard questions, unnecessary for emails.