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Three Ways to Use ChatGPT in Your Sourdough Microbakery | Episode 39

  • Nov 21, 2024
  • 6 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts or watch on YouTube


The first time I opened ChatGPT, I asked it to write me an Instagram caption. What came back was stiff, full of emojis I would never use, and did not sound remotely like me. So I closed the tab and did not touch it again for months.


I came back to it the following summer, when I was building this side of my business, and realized I had been using it completely wrong. I had been asking it to be me. What it is actually good at is taking the mess of thoughts already in my head and putting them in an order I can act on.


That shift is why I can run a microbakery, raise my family and publish this podcast twice a week. Not because a robot writes for me. Because I stopped spending an hour organizing a thought I could have brain dumped in ninety seconds.


Here are the three ways I use it that save me the most time.


Start by teaching it how you actually sound

Before you ask ChatGPT to write anything, spend twenty minutes teaching it your voice. This one step is the difference between output you throw away and output you can tweak in two minutes.


Open a chat and say: "I would like you to learn my voice. Can you ask me five questions to help you understand the tone I communicate in?" Answer the questions like you are talking to a friend, not filling out a form.


Then feed it your own long-form writing. Emails you have sent your list, captions you were proud of, a blog post if you have one. It picks up how you build sentences, the phrases you lean on, whether you run warm or professional.


And then keep correcting it. It has a learning capacity, so use it. When a word comes back that is not yours, say so plainly: "That does not sound like me at all, can you make it warmer?" I say "can you make it sound less robotic" almost every single time, and it adjusts.


One: your captions, product descriptions and event invites

Now that it knows your voice, this is the fastest place to see time come back.


For a caption, do not ask for a caption cold. Brain dump first. Tell it the top points you need to communicate, numbered one, two, three, stream of consciousness, no polish. Then ask it to organize that into a compelling caption. All the content is still yours. It came from your heart and your brain. ChatGPT just put it in order.


Product descriptions work the same way. Say you are adding an item to the menu. Dump in why you added it, how the flavors work together, what the texture is like, how a customer might serve it. Then ask for a description. You can hand it constraints too: "I need a 200 character product description," or one paragraph, or two sentences, and it will work inside them.


Event invites are the third easy win. If you are teaching a workshop or joining a pop-up, give it the date, the time, who it is for, what they will walk away with, and how they buy a ticket. Ask it for the description.


One rule on all of this. ChatGPT makes your first draft, never your final one. Even once it knows your voice, it will read a little robotic, because it is not a human. You go in and tweak it until it sounds like you. Your voice goes in, your voice comes out, and the machine in the middle just does the organizing.


Two: the customer messages you keep rewriting in your head

You know the ones. A customer with an unusual request you are not sure how to answer. Someone who has been late to pick up three weeks running and you have rehearsed the text eleven times without sending it.


Go into ChatGPT and lay it out: "Here is my situation. Can you help me draft a response that communicates warmth and integrity, but also firmly communicates my policy?" You will get a draft in seconds. Adjust it to sound like you, send it, and stop carrying it around.


This is not only for the hard conversations. Some of my biggest time savings are the boring, repeating messages:

  • The text that goes out when orders open.

  • The pickup reminder.

  • The gentle nudge when someone is running late and it has not become an ordeal yet.

Draft those once, save them, reuse them all year. And the more you have taught it your voice, the less tweaking each one needs.


Three: your shopping list and your bake schedule

This is the one I tried as an experiment because I genuinely did not think it would work, and it blew me away.


I grabbed four recipe URLs from various sourdough blogs and pasted all of them into ChatGPT. I said: I am multiplying the first one by three, the second by six, the third by two. Please create one consolidated shopping list of everything I need.


It did. A thousand grams of flour here, five hundred there, seventeen hundred somewhere else, all added up into one line. Same with the cinnamon showing up in two different recipes. No more flipping back and forth between tabs with a pencil.


Then I pushed further and asked it to build me a baking schedule from those same recipes. It gave me one starting Tuesday morning. So I invented a harder version of my life and told it: I work a nine to five, I leave the house at eight and get home at six, the hours I actually have are 6am to 8am and 6pm to 10pm. Please rebuild the schedule inside those hours.


It did that too!


If your recipes are your own and not on the internet, put them in a Google Doc or a Word doc and attach the file to the chat, then give it the same instructions.


The same trick works for your whole week, not just the bake. Tell it everything: the hard commitments like lessons and drop-offs and meetings, and the flexible things that still have to happen, like the walk you want to take every morning, lunch, the laundry that goes in Wednesday and gets folded Wednesday afternoon. Add your bake schedule and your Saturday market. Then ask it to organize all of it and tell you what to do when, making sure you still get enough sleep.


One more line to add, and it is my favorite: "add a 25% time buffer to all of my baking prep tasks." Because something always takes longer than you planned or your dough proofs slower than you expected, and a schedule with no give in it is how you end up baking at midnight.


If you are a few years in

Once you have real volume, the value moves from writing captions to protecting your capacity.


Use the consolidated shopping list on your biggest week of the year rather than your quietest, when the math is genuinely hard and a missed ingredient means an emergency store run mid-bake. Run the 25% buffer against your holiday production plan before you open pre-orders, so you find the bottleneck on paper instead of at 2am.


And use it as a researcher. I ask things like "can you research the options available for this and explain my choices" all the time before I make a decision. You can even ask it to explain something to you at a fifth grade level and it will.


Final thoughts

We are all about burnout proofing our businesses here, and this is one of the ways you do it. Not by working more hours, and not by handing your voice over to a machine. By refusing to spend your good energy on organizing tasks that do not need you.


Pick one of these three. Just one. Teach it your voice this week, or run your next bake through it for a shopping list, and see what comes back.


I would love to hear how you are using it. Screenshot the show, tell me your takeaway, and tag me at @carolinebower_sourdough. It makes my day every time!


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

If this one was useful, these three go deeper on working smarter in your bakery.


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