---
title: "Introduction"
module: "general"
type: reference
order: -1
draft: false
---

# Introduction

## 11pm and a Blank Cursor

It's eleven o'clock on a Tuesday night and Sam is still at his desk. The workshop is quiet — the planer off, the sawdust settled, the smell of fresh-cut oak still hanging in the air. His phone has fifteen unread messages. His inbox has thirty-seven. He has a trade show in nine days and no copy for his Facebook ads.

He opens ChatGPT. Types:

*Write me a Facebook ad for my sofa set.*

The AI produces something. It's not wrong, exactly. It mentions quality craftsmanship. It says "transform your living space." It ends with "order yours today." It reads like every other furniture ad on the internet. Sam stares at it. Reads it again. Closes his laptop.

He's heard the promises. AI is going to change everything. AI will write your marketing for you. AI will 10x your business. He's tried it three times now and each time he's gotten something that sounds vaguely like marketing copy written by someone who has never been inside a furniture shop, never run a Shopify store, never packed a dining table into a van on a wet Friday morning in Limerick.

He knows, somewhere in the back of his mind, that this isn't what AI is supposed to be. He's seen the demos. He's read the threads. People are apparently doing extraordinary things with it. He just can't figure out why it keeps giving him this — this beige, flavourless, everyone-approved nothing that doesn't sound like him or his work or his customers.

He pours a glass of water. Looks out the window. Goes to bed.

The problem wasn't the AI. The problem was what he gave it.

---

## The Problem Nobody Names

Here's what happens when most business owners use AI for the first time. They open the chat window, type something loosely resembling what they want, and wait for genius. Sometimes they get something serviceable. Usually they get something generic. Occasionally they get something so far from useful that they close the tab and go back to doing things manually.

Then they draw one of two conclusions: either AI is overhyped and doesn't actually work, or they're not the kind of person who can make AI work. Both conclusions are wrong.

The real problem is a principle so obvious it gets ignored: garbage in, garbage out.

AI language models are extraordinarily capable. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini — at the technical level, these systems have processed more marketing copy, more product descriptions, more email sequences, more ad creative than any human team could read in a thousand lifetimes. They understand structure. They understand persuasion. They understand what makes a headline land and what makes it die.

But they don't know your business. They don't know that your customers are predominantly women in their late thirties buying for family homes, not minimalist apartments. They don't know that your brand voice is warm and direct, not formal and polished. They don't know that your bestselling product is the oak dining table, not the sofa set Sam was trying to advertise. They don't know that your average customer takes three weeks from first click to purchase. They don't know that your main differentiator isn't price or speed — it's the fact that every piece is made by one person, in one workshop, and you can see the maker's hands in the grain.

Without that context, the AI reaches for the nearest available pattern. It finds the average of all furniture marketing it has ever seen. It produces something that has never offended anyone and has never compelled anyone either.

> **The AI isn't stupid. It's uninformed. There's a significant difference.**

Most advice about this problem focuses on the wrong fix. "Write better prompts," people say. Buy a prompt engineering course. Learn the tricks. Add "please" at the end. Specify a word count. Ask it to "think step by step."

These techniques help at the margins. They don't solve the underlying problem, which is that a single prompt — however well-crafted — still doesn't tell the AI who you are, who your customer is, why they buy, what language they use, what fears they carry, what transformation they're hoping for when they hand over their money.

What you need isn't a better prompt. What you need is a system.

A system means: before you ever type a request, you've loaded the AI with your business context. Your customer avatar. Your brand voice. Your offer. Your positioning. The stage of the customer journey you're working on. When all of that is present, the AI stops producing the generic average of everything it has ever seen and starts producing something that sounds like it was written by a senior marketer who has been inside your business for three years.

That system is what this book is.

---

## What ELEVATE Is

ELEVATE is a framework for thinking about your ecommerce customer's journey in nine stages — not invented, but named and systematised.

Every ecommerce business that works moves customers through three phases. First it attracts them: someone who has never heard of you discovers you exist and decides you're worth paying attention to. Then it converts them: that attention turns into a purchase. Then it grows the relationship: the customer who bought once buys again, refers a friend, becomes an advocate.

ELEVATE maps those three phases into nine specific stages. **ATTRACT** covers Hook (getting attention), Gift (earning trust with something valuable), and Identify (qualifying who your real buyers are). **CONVERT** covers Engage (deepening the relationship), Sell (removing the last barriers to purchase), and Nurture (bringing fence-sitters back around). **GROW** covers Upsell (increasing lifetime value), Educate (turning customers into knowledgeable advocates), and Share (building referral and word-of-mouth).

Underneath all of it sits **Foundation** — the layer that makes everything else work. Your Foundation is your business context: who you sell to, why they buy, what you make, how you sound, what makes you different. Foundation isn't a stage in the journey. It's what you load into the AI before you ask it to do anything at all.

ELEVATE isn't a new idea. Any good ecommerce operator, if you sat them down and mapped their business, would produce something close to this. The framework's value isn't novelty — it's that it gives you a map. When you know which stage you're working on, you know exactly what the AI needs to produce and exactly what success looks like. You stop asking it for "content" in the abstract and start asking it for a specific asset at a specific stage with a specific job to do.

Every chapter of this book takes one stage in the ELEVATE framework and shows you how to use AI to execute it — from the copy on your first ad to the referral email you send six months after a purchase.

---

## What ROCKET Is

ROCKET is how you talk to the AI. It stands for **Role, Objective, Context, Key Instructions, Examples** (optional), **Tone and Format**.

Those six components aren't a script. They're a structure. A way of organising the information the AI needs before it can produce anything useful. When you fill them in — even quickly, even roughly — you solve the garbage-in problem.

Here's what each component does, and why each one matters.

**Role** tells the AI who it is for this task. There's a version of this that sounds like a parlour trick — "pretend you're a marketing expert" — and that's not what Role is for. The mechanism is more practical. When you prompt ChatGPT or Claude with no role, the model defaults to a generalised helpful assistant. When you say "you are a senior Facebook ad copywriter specialising in handcrafted goods and DTC ecommerce," you're not tricking it — you're activating a specific subset of its training. The model has seen thousands of examples of how senior direct-response copywriters think, structure arguments, and approach cold audiences. The Role instruction tells it to draw on that specific knowledge rather than averaging across everything it knows. The output changes — not at the margins, but in kind. Try it once with "write me a Facebook ad" and once with the same brief prefaced by a specific role. You'll see the difference in the first line.

**Objective** states exactly what you want produced and what it needs to accomplish. Not "write an ad." A 150-word Facebook ad for a cold audience scrolling on a mobile device, designed to drive clicks to the oak dining table product page, where the primary goal is a click — not a sale. The sale happens on the page. The ad's only job is the click. Precision here isn't pedantry. When the AI knows the format (150 words), the placement (Facebook, mobile), the audience temperature (cold), and the single job it's being asked to do (click, not purchase), it makes different structural decisions. It chooses a hook differently. It chooses where to put the call to action differently. The Objective is your brief.

**Context** is the most important component. This is where your Foundation data goes — your customer avatar, your brand voice, what you make, who buys it, why they buy it, what they're afraid of, what they're hoping for. This is the component that solves the problem Sam had at 11pm. Without context, the AI generates the average of all furniture marketing it has ever seen. With context — "our customers are typically women in their late thirties and early forties, buying for family homes, who are tired of flat-pack furniture that falls apart, and who are willing to pay more for something that will still be in the family in twenty years" — the AI stops producing generic copy and starts writing for a specific person with a specific mindset. Context is the unlock. Everything else in ROCKET amplifies it.

**Key Instructions** are the constraints and non-negotiables. Don't use the word "luxury." Don't mention competitors. Lead with a problem, not a product. Keep sentences under twenty words. Use the word "handmade" at least once. This component is where you override the AI's defaults — and AI models have strong defaults based on what they've seen most frequently. If you've ever gotten copy back that says "elevate your space" or "crafted with care," you've encountered the defaults. Key Instructions are how you override them.

**Examples** are optional but powerful. If you have three email subject lines that generated above-average open rates, paste them in. If you have an ad that outperformed everything else you've ever run, show it. Demonstrating your tone through examples is faster and more accurate than describing it in words. It's the difference between saying "write in a warm, direct, conversational tone" and showing the AI two paragraphs that sound like you. The AI extracts the pattern from the example more precisely than it can from a description.

**Tone and Format** closes the loop. How should this sound — warm and conversational, or authoritative and precise? How should it be structured — three variations, bullet points, or a single piece of flowing copy? Should it be ready to paste into Ads Manager, or formatted as a draft for your approval? These aren't finishing touches. Specifying format prevents the AI from making structural decisions you'd then have to undo.

That structure, consistently applied, is the difference between the beige nothing Sam got at 11pm and something you can actually use.

> **A well-structured ROCKET prompt isn't a clever trick. It's an information transfer. You're giving the AI enough of your business that it can think on your behalf.**

The reason ROCKET works isn't technical. It's logical. An AI with full context produces better output than an AI with no context for the same reason that a new employee with a comprehensive brief does better work on day one than a new employee who was just told to "get on with it." Intelligence isn't the bottleneck. Information is.

Here's why ROCKET is different from generic advice about writing better prompts. Anyone can write a better prompt. You can spend an afternoon learning techniques, read a few threads on X, get moderately better results. That's useful. But it doesn't scale.

When you build 100 prompts organised by ELEVATE stage, with your Foundation data pre-loaded, something different happens. Every person on your team — even if they've never thought about copywriting in their lives — starts from the same context. Your social media manager, your VA in the Philippines, your business partner who handles logistics and occasionally helps with emails: they all run the same prompts, load the same Foundation data, and produce output that sounds like it came from the same business. The brand voice doesn't fragment as you scale. The customer avatar doesn't drift depending on who's writing. The system holds.

That's what separates a collection of prompt tips from a prompt system. The system doesn't depend on any individual's skill or memory. It's infrastructure.

---

## Meet Sam

*Sam Store, owner of Sam's Workshop, makes handcrafted hardwood furniture in a unit on the Naas Road in Dublin and sells it online across Ireland and the UK.*

The unit is a converted garage — twelve metres deep, fluorescent lighting, a hand-painted sign on the front that his brother did in 2021. Inside there's a bandsaw, a planer thicknesser, a bench that has been refinished six times, and enough offcuts in the corner to heat the place through a bad winter. Sam works primarily in oak and ash. The pieces he's known for are dining tables — thick-topped, simple-jointed, designed to look like they've always been there. He does the odd commission for bespoke shelving or a kitchen island, but the bread and butter is tables and the sideboards that go alongside them.

He's been doing this for six years. He started because he was good with wood and frustrated working for other people. He built a kitchen table for himself, a friend saw it, asked him to make one, posted a photo on Instagram, and Sam had his first three orders before he'd thought about what to charge.

The business grew the way most craft businesses grow: organically, slowly, on the back of quality and word of mouth. He set up a Shopify store in year two. Started a basic email list in year three. Ran a few Facebook ads in year four that sort of worked, he thinks, though he never tracked it properly.

When we meet him, he's at €8,000 a month in revenue. That's not bad for one person making furniture by hand. But it's not what he needs. His workshop costs are up. He wants to take on an apprentice. His partner is back in work and they're thinking about a bigger house. He needs to get to €25,000 a month, and he's not sure how.

The frustrating thing is that he knows he has something people want. He gets emails from customers telling him the table they bought is the best thing in their house. He has an Instagram account where a post of a half-finished oak sideboard will get eight hundred likes without any effort. He's sold pieces to customers in Edinburgh, Manchester, and once to a man in Geneva who saw his work and paid shipping without blinking.

The product is not the problem. The process is the problem. Specifically: there's no process.

Sam writes ad copy when he remembers to, usually late at night when he's too tired to do it well. He responds to every DM himself, on his phone, between cuts. His email list exists but he hasn't sent anything in two months because he doesn't know what to say. He has no abandoned cart sequence. He has no post-purchase email. He has no referral programme. He has no way of systematically turning a first-time buyer into a repeat buyer.

He is, in other words, a craftsman who built a business — not a marketer who happens to make furniture. Everything about the way he spends his time reflects this. He is very good at the thing inside the workshop. Everything outside the workshop is improvised, intermittent, and dependent on his personal energy at any given moment.

By the end of this book, that changes. Sam implements ELEVATE stage by stage, using ROCKET to generate the assets at each stage with his Foundation data loaded. He builds an ad that consistently brings cold audiences into his world. He creates a lead magnet that converts them into email subscribers. He writes a welcome sequence, an abandoned cart sequence, a post-purchase sequence. He runs a referral programme. He builds the upsell.

He doesn't become a marketer. He becomes a craftsman with a marketing system — and the system runs without him having to make every decision from scratch at eleven o'clock at night.

We follow Sam through every chapter of this book. His actual numbers. His actual copy. His actual prompts. Not a hypothetical ecommerce business used for illustration — a specific person with a specific product and a specific gap between where he is and where he needs to be.

---

## How to Use This Book

There are three ways to read it.

The first is straight through. If you're new to AI-assisted marketing or new to ecommerce, start at Foundation and work forward. Each stage builds on the one before. The Foundation chapter sets up your customer avatar, brand voice, and offer — the context that every subsequent prompt depends on. Without it, the prompts in later chapters will produce something closer to what Sam got on Tuesday night than what he eventually builds.

The second is by bottleneck. If you're already running an ecommerce business and you know exactly where you're leaking money or time, go to that chapter. Struggling with cold traffic? Go to Hook (Chapter 3). Your ads are working but people aren't buying? Go to Sell (Chapter 7). You have customers but no repeat purchases? Go to Upsell (Chapter 9). Each chapter is self-contained enough that you can implement it without reading everything before it — though you'll need your Foundation data regardless of where you start.

The third is alongside the AI tutor at one.ie/learn. Every chapter in this book has a corresponding set of prompts built into the platform, pre-structured with ROCKET, waiting for you to load your Foundation data. You don't have to type prompts from scratch. You read the chapter to understand the stage, then run the prompts with your own context loaded. The tutor walks you through it.

One recommendation regardless of which path you choose: **read Foundation first**. Even if you jump to Chapter 7 for the Sell prompts, go back and do Foundation properly before you run anything. The Foundation chapter takes around two hours to complete — filling in your customer avatar, writing your brand voice guide, documenting your offer and positioning. Those two hours are the highest-leverage two hours in the book. Every prompt you run after that becomes sharply more useful because the AI finally knows who you are.

Foundation is not the interesting part of this book. It's not the part that feels like progress. It's admin. It's structured thinking. It's sitting down with a blank document and answering questions you've never formally answered before. Do it anyway. The rest of the book is built on it.

---

## A Note from Anthony

I've been building digital products since before SSL was common. Sold physical products online before Google Shopping existed. Ran ecommerce for clients when "ecommerce" meant putting a PayPal button on a website and hoping for the best. I've seen every wave of tools that were going to change everything — and most of them changed something, for some businesses, some of the time.

The moment I remember most clearly from that period isn't a technology triumph. It's a client meeting in 2014. We had a Shopify store that was converting at 0.8% on cold traffic. The client had a gut feeling about what was wrong — the photography, he thought, wasn't professional enough. I had a different hypothesis. We ran both: professional photography on half the traffic, rewritten product descriptions on the other half. The descriptions won by 2.4x. Not because his photography instinct was wrong — the photos probably did need work — but because we stopped arguing from intuition and started arguing from data. The systematic test gave us an answer that neither of us would have reached by feeling our way toward it.

That lesson has stayed with me across everything I've done since, and it's the spine of this book. AI tools amplify whatever you bring to them. If you bring clear thinking — a specific customer, a defined problem, a structured brief — they produce specific, useful output. If you bring vague ambition — "make my marketing better" — they produce vague, hedged content that nobody will read.

AI is different from previous waves of tools. Not because of the hype around it, which is, as with every technology, somewhat excessive. Because of what it actually does when you use it properly. In 2023 I started rebuilding how I worked and how I helped clients work. The change I kept seeing — in myself, in the clients I worked with closely — was that the bottleneck shifted. The bottleneck stopped being execution. It became thinking. The businesses that thrived were the ones where someone had done the thinking clearly: who's the customer, what do they want, what are we saying, what's the structure of the journey. The businesses that struggled were the ones prompting AI the way Sam was — expecting the AI to supply the thinking because they hadn't.

This book is the system I built to do the thinking first. I built it for myself, then for clients, now for you. There's no fluff in it. Every chapter is structured around a specific stage, a specific problem, and a specific set of prompts that solve it. Run the prompts. Load your Foundation. Watch what happens to the output.

One more thing, so it's not a surprise later. I'm Anthony — and I'm the one who walks Sam through all of this. He enrolled in my Playbook course six weeks before the night with the blank cursor, and through every chapter of this book you'll find us in the same conversation: me asking the awkward question, Sam working out the answer at his bench. I'm not a guru and he's not a student. We've both spent years selling things online and getting it wrong before we got it right. Think of me as the person on the other end of the phone when Sam doesn't know what to email his list — because that's exactly what I am.

Sam figures it out. You will too.

Let's start with Foundation.
