The Setup Interview: Teaching the Skill Your Business

Install a Vexlo skill and its first move is to interview you. Five or six questions, asked before it does any work at all. This lesson covers why that interview exists, how to answer it well, and the one privacy rule that outranks everything else in it.

Why the skill asks first

Each Vexlo skill has a Setup section instructing the assistant to ask before working. The finance analyst, for example, opens by asking what you sell, roughly what monthly revenue looks like, what the big fixed costs are, how customers pay you, where your pricing sits, and what worries you most about the money side.

The reason is blunt. The skill file carries your rules and output formats, but it can't carry knowledge you haven't handed over. A skill doesn't give the assistant real memory; what it has is the file plus whatever you've pasted, and nothing beyond that. The setup interview is how your business gets on the record, once, instead of ten minutes at the start of each conversation.

Answer with numbers and ranges

Vague answers produce vague analysis. "Revenue is decent" gives the skill nothing to work with. "Revenue runs $18,000 to $24,000 a month, slower in January and February" gives it a baseline, a seasonality note, and something to compare against when you paste next month's figures.

You don't need precision. Ranges are honest and they're enough. "Rent and payroll are about $11,000 a month combined" beats an exact number you'd have to go dig up, and it beats "our costs are high" by a mile.

"I don't know" is a legitimate answer too. Say you can't name your three biggest fixed costs off the top of your head. Saying so beats guessing, because a well-built skill treats a stated gap as something to flag, while a guess gets stored as fact and quietly distorts each analysis built on top of it.

Confirm the summary

After the questions, the skill plays back a short summary of what it heard. Read it slowly, and correct anything that's off before you move on. This is your one cheap chance to catch a wrong number or a garbled detail before it hardens into working context. If the summary says $80,000 a month when you meant $18,000, the cash projections that follow are fiction with a straight face.

Assistants can still make things up, even with a clean setup. The summary check doesn't cure that, but it removes the errors you'd otherwise have planted yourself.

Redo setup when the business changes

Setup isn't permanent. Raised your prices? Added a service line? Switched customers from invoices to subscriptions? Tell the skill the business has changed and ask it to rerun the interview. The skills are written to expect this.

Stale setup is worse than no setup. The answers keep arriving confident, and they describe a business that no longer exists.

The privacy rule

No account numbers. No passwords. No customer personal data. Not in setup, and not in any paste afterward.

The skill needs shapes and amounts, not credentials. Paste exports from your accounting software with account numbers trimmed off. Use ranges where exact figures feel sensitive. Describe customers by segment, "about 40 repeat clients on monthly retainers," rather than by name. The finance analyst raises this itself during setup and is built to avoid repeating credentials that slip through, but the safer version of the story is the one where nothing sensitive got pasted at all.

Try it now

Open your installed skill and tell it you're ready for setup. Draft your answers before you send them, and run this check first:

Then read the summary the skill plays back, fix what's wrong, and confirm it. From here on, your conversations start warm. The next lesson is about bending the skill until it sounds like you.