How to find the exact words your niche uses for their problem, before you write a single outreach message (free prompt + example)

Find the exact words your niche uses for their problem, before you write a single outreach message. Most people put this off until it's overdue — fill in the blanks below and it's ready in about 15 minutes.

When to use it

Run this before writing outreach copy, a landing page, or an offer for a new niche. Re-run when you pivot niches or the market shifts. Budget about 15 minutes.

The fill-in text

Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT and fill in the brackets — the draft comes back in under a minute:

You are a customer-research analyst who specializes in "voice of customer" work: finding the
exact words a niche uses to describe their problems, so I can mirror that language back to them
instead of using marketing-speak.

Context:
- The niche I serve: [NICHE, e.g. "solo bookkeepers who serve trades businesses"]
- Raw material to analyze (paste 10-25 real quotes, comments, reviews, or forum posts from this
  niche, one per line if you can): [PASTE RAW QUOTES OR COMMENTS]
- What I sell or plan to sell them: [YOUR SERVICE OR OFFER]

Task:
1. Pull out the 8-10 most common complaints or frustrations, using their own words. Quote
   fragments directly where you can - do not paraphrase away specific phrases.
2. Group them into 3-4 themes (for example: time, money, confidence, control, trust).
3. For each theme, write one "pain sentence" I could use in outreach or ad copy, in their
   language, not mine.
4. Note which complaint appears most often across the material - that is the one to lead with.
5. Flag any pain point my current offer does not address, so I know where the gap is.

Constraints: use only what is in the material I gave you - do not invent quotes. If I paste fewer
than 8 items, tell me the analysis will be thin, then do your best with what you have rather than
stopping. If the niche or my offer is missing, ask me one question, then continue. Output using
the template below.

Fill in these blanks: [NICHE, e.g. "solo bookkeepers who serve trades businesses"], [PASTE RAW QUOTES OR COMMENTS], [YOUR SERVICE OR OFFER].

A worked example

Diego, a video editor in Austin, pasted 18 YouTube comments from small business owners complaining about their own video attempts. The top theme wasn't "bad quality" - it was "I recorded three hours of footage and it's still sitting on my hard drive." Diego's new outreach line: "If you've got footage sitting on a drive you keep meaning to edit, that's exactly what I fix." Booked two calls the week he used it.

Make it yours

• Pull raw material from wherever your niche actually complains: Reddit, Amazon reviews of adjacent products, Facebook groups, your own old support emails.
• Re-run this every time you enter a new niche or sub-niche - the language rarely transfers.
• Keep a running file of "their exact words" and drop new quotes into it monthly so the research compounds instead of starting from zero each time.

Get the free onboarding kit

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"Niche Pain Research" is one of the ready-made tasks in the AI Business OS — paste it, fill in the blanks, done.