Monday morning. Coffee in hand. My task list looked like a chaotic museum of half-finished ideas, postponed client work, and ambitious goals I kept pushing forward week after week. I was tired of carrying every decision alone.
Like many solopreneurs, I turned to ChatGPT and thought:
Fine. You’re my cofounder now.
And for a while, it actually worked.
The First Phase: Using ChatGPT "As Is"
In the beginning, I kept it simple. I opened a chat whenever I needed help.
Brainstorming? It nailed it.
Planning? It structured things better than I could.
Daily prioritization? Surprisingly helpful.
But very quickly, the cracks started to show.
I’d come back the next day to continue the plan, and ChatGPT had no idea what I was talking about. I had to re-explain everything — the product, the roadmap, the constraints — every single time.
It wasn’t a cofounder. Or at maximum, a cofounder with a heavy side of amnesia.
The "Custom Instructions" Era: My DIY Co-CEO Setup
To move things forward, I decided to formalize the relationship and created a dedicated project: Co-CEO.
I wrote custom instructions explaining:
- my business model,
- my long-term goals,
- my short-term focus,
- and how I wanted ChatGPT to operate.
And honestly? This phase worked. For months.
Every day, I’d ask:
"Here’s what I did yesterday. Here’s what’s planned today. Help me decide the next steps."
It would track the short-term tasks from day to day. It understood my immediate priorities. It gave direction when I felt scattered.
As long as the focus stayed on the last few days, it felt like collaboration. Sadly, this was the closest ChatGPT ever came to feeling like a cofounder as the long-term work started creeping in.
Where It Slowly Went Wrong
There was no dramatic failure. No single moment where everything collapsed. It was a slow drift — subtle enough that I didn’t notice it at first.
As long as I stayed in short-term cycles — yesterday’s tasks, today’s priorities — ChatGPT felt helpful. It could track what I just said, reflect it back, and suggest the next step. For day-to-day work, that was enough.
But the moment longer-term goals entered the picture, the cracks widened.
Tasks waiting for external input quietly disappeared. Bigger initiatives with deadlines months away faded unless I manually carried them forward. Priorities skewed toward whatever happened in the last few sessions, as if the previous weeks had stopped existing.
ChatGPT didn’t steer me in the wrong direction — it steered me toward the recent direction. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, my actual long-term goals drifted off course.
And that’s when I realized the pattern: I wasn’t collaborating with a partner. I was repeatedly reloading the same strategic context, hoping it would stick
What Was Really Missing
The missing piece wasn’t just “context.” It was continuity tied to the general understanding of the business.
I needed a partner that remembered:
- that revenue was the focus this quarter,
- that certain features were paused for dependencies,
- that a client project had a fixed deadline,
- that some tasks were waiting for external input,
- that specific ideas had already been evaluated and rejected,
- and that my long‑term direction didn’t reset every week.
A human cofounder keeps all of this in their head. A chat window does not.
Even ChatGPT’s Memories couldn’t solve it — they aren’t designed for reliable, structured continuity. They blend things, lose hierarchy, and overemphasize recent conversations.
You can’t build long‑term direction on top of that.
Why Copreneur Became the Answer
Copreneur didn’t start as a product. It started as a necessity.
I needed something that:
- remembered long‑term goals without me restating them,
- kept tasks and projects consistent across days, weeks, and months,
- understood when something was blocked or waiting,
- anchored decisions to strategy rather than recency,
- and helped me decide what to work on next without reloading my entire business.
That became Copreneur.ai — an AI cofounder that helps you decide what to work on next and turn chaos into a focused daily plan.
Not a replacement for direction, but a structure that protects it.
In Short
ChatGPT is incredible for what it is: a fast, flexible assistant for one‑off questions and idea generation.
But when it comes to holding a business steady across weeks and months — remembering goals, tracking commitments, and keeping you aligned — it simply isn’t built for that.
If you’ve felt the same drift I did — the disappearing goals, the scattered plans, the constant re‑explaining — you’re not imagining it.
And if you want a system that doesn’t start from zero every morning, Copreneur.ai is built to finally fill that gap.