Last week I was on a call with a guy who runs a $2M coaching business.
Smart guy.
Great offer.
He’d been using Claude for months, but he was ready to cancel.
“It doesn’t know my business,” he told me. “Every time I ask it to write a sales email, I have to re-explain who my customers are. What my product does. What my voice sounds like.
I asked him a hard question, and I'm asking YOU this question also...
“Where do you keep your best sales emails, your customer personas, your brand voice guide, your winning ad copy?”
Silence... and then he says... “I mean, some of it’s in Google Docs. Some in Notion. My best sales letter is a PDF somewhere in my Downloads folder. My customer persona? I think I wrote one last year but I’d have to dig for it.”
There it was. This guy had 10 years of marketing gold scattered across five platforms, three devices, and about 200 folders. None of it connected to his AI tools.
He was asking Claude to do a $200/hour job with zero training materials, zero reference docs, and zero context about his business. Then blaming the AI when the output was mediocre. Some of you are relying only on the built-in account memory... it ain't enough!
I told him what I’m about to tell you.
The AI model isn’t the problem. Your lack of context is the problem.
And this week, I built you the solution...
The Context Problem Most AI Users Have
Most business owners are using AI wrong.
Millions of people open Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever, and start from scratch. Every. Single. Time.
“Write me a blog post about X.” “Create a sales email for Y.” “Help me come up with a marketing strategy.”
And the AI does its best. But its best is generic. It doesn’t know your brand, your products, features, benefits, bonuses, competitors, etc. AI doesn’t know your audience. Doesn’t know your voice. Doesn’t know what worked last quarter or what flopped.
You’re asking a genius employee to do their job while blindfolded and handcuffed. Then you’re mad at the AI when it's a YOU problem.
Machines are input/output based. They can only do what you tell them to do, so if you're getting a bad output it's because you're giving the machine a bad input.
The problem with traditional note taking systems is they demand cognitive effort at the worst possible moments. You’re in a meeting and you have an insight. You’re driving and a campaign idea hits you. You’re in the shower and the perfect headline arrives. But by the time you get to your computer, it’s gone. Or you write it down in some app you’ll never check again. -- Nate B Jones, OpenBrain Project
Jones argues that your second brain is closed. Your AI can’t use it. All those notes, documents, recordings, swipe files, customer research docs, they’re sitting in folders your AI tools will never touch.
That's IF you even have a second brain built.
The Second Brain Movement
Greg Isenberg made waves with his video on using Obsidian and Claude Code as a personal operating system.
His setup is elegant... write everything in markdown.
Daily notes, project plans, beliefs, meeting notes, people you’ve met. Link them together so the notes mirror how your brain actually connects ideas. Then point Claude Code at the whole Obsidian vault.
His argument? “The whole game is feeding the beast good context.” The model isn’t the bottleneck. Your context is.
That’s the line that should haunt every business owner daily. The model isn’t the bottleneck. Your context is.
Isenberg built custom slash commands to load his full life and work state into Claude at the start of any session. One command, and Claude knows his current projects, recent decisions, open questions, and strategic priorities. No re-explaining anything, he just types “/context” and he’s working with an AI that actually knows his business inside and out.
Jones went a different direction. His Open Brain system uses Slack as a capture interface, Supabase for vector-based storage, and MCP for retrieval. You type a thought into Slack. It gets embedded, classified, and stored automatically. Then any AI tool, Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, whatever, can pull from that same memory through a single MCP connection.
Uhm... wut?!
Nate is my homeboy, I love his YT channel, but hot dang if that ain't the most overcomplicated nerds-only solution I've ever heard.
His framing is powerful: it’s not a notes app. It’s a database with vector search and an open protocol, built so that every AI tool you use shares the same persistent memory of you. One brain. All of them.
It's useful and it's powerful, I'll give him that.
The point is both influencers are pointing to the same truth. The businesses that feed their AI tools the richest context will produce the richest output.
Better copy. Better strategy. Better products. Better marketing.
Not because they have better AI. Because they have better context.
Goodbye Second Brain, Hello Context Vault!
Let’s drop the “second brain” language for a second.
That term has been around since Tiago Forte’s book and it carries baggage. People think filing systems. Tagging. Categories. Organization for organization’s sake. Another productivity system you set up on a Saturday and abandon by Wednesday. What I’m talking about is simpler and WAY more powerful.
I call it a Context Vault.
A Context Vault is a collection of your highest-value business documents, organized so that AI tools can access them when they need to understand your business. That’s it.
Could be a folder on your desktop. Could be a Dropbox folder. Google drive folder. Or a Notion page like I use.
Very simple. Super portable. All the same power.
What goes in your context vault? Everything!
Your customer personas. Your brand voice guide. Your best sales letters. Your winning ad copy. Your email sequences that converted. Your VSL scripts. Your product descriptions. Your case studies. Your SOPs. Your strategic plans.
When this stuff lives in a Context Vault that your AI tools can access, everything changes. Ask Claude to write a sales letter and it can reference your three best-performing letters for voice and structure. Ask it for a blog post and it knows your SEO strategy, your brand voice, and your target reader. Ask it for product ideas and it understands your market, your customers, and your existing offers.
This isn’t theory. I built mine several weeks ago and now I wouldn't dare use AI without it.
How I Built My Context Vault in One Day
Claude Desktop can access your files. So I spent an afternoon going through my Downloads folder with Claude. Hundreds of files. PDFs, markdown docs, skill files, sales letters, swipe files, transcripts, templates. Most of them sitting in subfolders I hadn’t opened in months.
I pulled out 35 key documents.
Sales letters that generated six figures. Customer personas built from real data. VSL scripts I’ve refined over years. AI detection guides. Brand voice documents. Copywriting frameworks from legends like Gary Halbert, Frank Kern, and Russell Brunson.
I uploaded all 35 files to a Notion database (use whatever you like) organized them by category (Knowledge, Training, Resource, Skill) and tagged them by which business they serve (Adskills, AgentSkills, FaithButWhy, FaithFunnels).
Now, I connected my Claude account to Notion with the Notion MCP.
The first real test? I had Claude write this very issue of Build Notes. Same skill file, same instructions as every other issue. But this time Claude had my Context Vault connected. It could see my customer personas, my past Build Notes issues, and my brand voice docs.
As you can see... Claude nailed it!
The output quality jumped noticeably. Fewer generic phrases. More of my actual voice. References to real things in my business instead of made-up examples.
That’s the difference context makes. Same model. Same prompt. Completely different output. And you’re about to build the same thing.
I'm going to walk you through it step by step and why I think Notion is the best tool for building this. It has some features that beat everything else I've tried.
Continue with Build Notes+
This is the free preview. The complete step-by-step guide and supporting files are available to Build Notes+ members.
