You just downloaded Claude for the first time. There's a blank text box staring at you, and it feels a little like being handed a phone with no instructions. What do you even type?
You're in good company figuring this out. Claude has grown to over 11 million daily active users and hundreds of millions of monthly visits to claude.ai. Most of those people started exactly where you are right now: staring at a blinking cursor with no idea what the first move should be.
Here's what to do with your first ten minutes.
Start With a Real Question, Not a Test Question
The instinct with new tech is to poke at it. Type something like "what can you do" or "hi" just to see what happens. Skip that. Anthropic's own guidance for new users is to start with straightforward questions to get a feel for how Claude responds, and the fastest way to actually learn what it can do is to ask it something you genuinely need answered today.
Got a work email you're dreading writing? Ask it to draft one. Trying to figure out how to word a tricky conversation with a vendor? Ask Claude to help you think it through. A real question, even a small one, teaches you more in one shot than ten minutes of testing the water ever will.
And talk to it the way Anthropic recommends: like a coworker or friend, naturally and conversationally. Not like you're typing search terms into Google.
Give It More Than One Sentence
This is the mistake almost everyone makes on day one. You type something short like "write me a marketing email" and get back something generic, and you think, well, that wasn't very impressive.
The problem isn't Claude. It's the prompt. The single biggest mistake beginners make is treating Claude like a search bar — a one-word or one-sentence prompt gets you a one-dimensional answer, because Claude has nothing to work with.
Try it again, but this time give it context: who the email is for, what tone you want, what you're actually trying to get the reader to do, any background it should know. Same task, completely different result. This is the single habit that separates people who think AI is overhyped from people who use it every day and can't imagine going back.
Once you get an answer, don't stop there either. Push back on it. Ask it to make it shorter, or punchier, or to try a different angle. Iterating on a first answer is normal and expected, not a sign you did something wrong the first time.
Upload a File and Let It Learn a Little About You
Once you've got the hang of asking real questions with real context, try two more things that make Claude noticeably more useful right away.
First, click the paperclip icon and upload something. A PDF, a spreadsheet, a photo of a whiteboard, whatever's sitting around. It's simple enough to be a good first action for a brand-new user, and it shows you Claude isn't limited to typing back and forth. It can read a contract and summarize the parts that matter to you, or pull numbers out of a report so you don't have to.
Second, know that Claude picks up on things about you as you use it. It learns from your past interactions and remembers preferences and writing style for future conversations, built automatically from things like your name, your profession, and how you like things phrased. The more you use it normally, the less you have to re-explain yourself every time. Worth knowing going in, so you're not surprised when it remembers something from last week.
One thing worth setting expectations on: by default, Claude doesn't browse the live internet and each new conversation starts fresh unless memory features are in play. It's not a search engine standing in for Google. It's better thought of as a very well-read assistant who's great at reasoning through a problem with you, not looking up today's news.
Why This Matters for Your Business
None of this is about becoming a power user overnight. It's about building the one habit that actually pays off: giving Claude context instead of one-liners. That habit is exactly what separates a business that uses AI to save real hours every week from one that tried it once, got a mediocre answer, and wrote the whole thing off.
If you've made it through your first ten minutes and you're already wondering how this could actually work inside your business, not just for drafting emails but for the stuff that eats up your team's week, that's the conversation we have all day at Level Up AI. Reach out and we'll walk through what it could look like for you.