Why AI Alone Can't Find Real Pain (But This Combo Can)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "Why AI Alone Can't Find Real Pain (But This Combo Can)"

Podcast: AI-Driven Marketer: Master AI Marketing To Stand Out In 2026
Host: Dan Sanchez
Co-host: Ken Frere
Episode Date: November 12, 2025

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Main Theme / Purpose

This episode examines why AI-driven marketing alone cannot effectively uncover the real, actionable pain points of an audience, and explains how combining AI research with direct human conversations creates a more powerful approach. Dan and Ken share a practical playbook for becoming a "problem hunter," discuss effective frameworks for surfacing high-impact pain points, and share actionable tactics for marketers who want their content to truly resonate.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Relevance Means Hitting Real Pain Points

• [00:04] Dan Sanchez: Points out that while everyone gives advice to "be relevant" on social media, few explain what relevance actually means—it’s about addressing people's core problems.

“If your advice is hitting on their main problems, if they're feeling the pain and you're speaking to that pain, that post has immense relevance.” — Dan [00:15]

• Posts that stand out are those that solve real, felt problems (“pain points”), not just what’s trending.

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2. The "Problem Hunter" Mindset

• To become a trusted authority, you need to become a “problem hunter,” tuning your ear and eye to notice what issues people genuinely care about.
• [01:02] Dan: Advises marketers to look at their most-bookmarked or memorable LinkedIn posts—chances are, those posts solved an actual challenge.

"If you want to lead and influence others, you have to speak to the pain that they feel on a daily basis." — Dan [01:15]

• [02:36] Ken: Warns against chasing quick "hacks" that only solve surface problems instead of addressing root causes.

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3. Practical Tactics for Finding Problems

Observing Social Media

• [03:04] Dan: Social platforms are a goldmine for problem discovery—but it takes skill to distinguish real pain from noise.
• Pay attention to complaints, rants, repeated questions, and the way people phrase their challenges.

Being an “Active” Social Media User

• [05:02] Ken: Recommends spending time searching for problems intentionally during scrolling, not just consuming content passively.
• Keep notes or a running document of key pain points as you find them.

“There are people who are either passive users on social media or active users... Instead of me just scrolling through reels, I'm actually going to search for problems.” — Ken [05:16]

The Real Gold: Direct Conversations

• [06:07] Dan: The most powerful method is talking directly to customers, prospects, or your audience.
• Surface-level complaints online only tell part of the story; conversations reveal nuance and specifics.

"Most marketers...skip actually talking to customers. You can tell because there’s always a difference...you’re never going to get there in actually standing out and being relevant without understanding the nuance." — Dan [07:31]

• [08:49] Ken: Even after years in sales, staying curious prevents making wrong assumptions about the customer’s real pain.
• [09:52] Dan: Talking to customers often gets deprioritized in marketing because it doesn’t feel “urgent"--but it’s vital.

Research Through Podcasts

• [13:26] Ken: Podcasts double as customer research tools—interviewing guests and asking the same questions surfaces trends and pain points.

"All they're doing is customer research." — Ken on podcasters who ask repeat questions [13:41]

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4. The Role (and Limits) of AI in Problem Finding

Using AI Deep Research Features

• [14:11] Dan: Outlines a powerful prompt for using tools like ChatGPT or Gemini to gather and organize pain points from online conversations (forums, Reddit, social, review sites).

• AI provides quick, broad scans of trending or repeated issues, including direct quotes and source links.

• AI Prompts: One for pain points, another for gathering questions—which often indicate underlying pain.

“This report is invaluable...it’s pulling from the places where your audience is hanging out and griping essentially about their pain.” — Dan [16:44]

• Limitation: AI is excellent for breadth and speed, but only real conversations add depth and nuance. AI should be a starting point, not the conclusion.

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5. Validating & Prioritizing Pain Points with RFM Analysis

• [20:47] Dan: Shares a framework for prioritizing problems that resonate most with your audience, adapted from direct-mail marketing's RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) model.
  • Recency: How recently have they felt the pain?
  • Frequency: How often do they experience it?
  • (Monetary) Intensity: How strong or visceral is the pain?

“Not all pains are equal...the ones that matter the most to most people are going to be the ones that have happened recently...Frequency is the next thing that matters...and then...the amount of visceral pain.” — Dan [22:14]

• Recent and frequent pains are more likely to be top-of-mind (and get engagement), even if deeper problems exist.
• Posts that address current or frequent pain points will consistently outperform content that tackles only root/deep issues.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On skipping surface-level symptoms for depth:

  "Hacks only deal with surface problems, not the root problem. And that's what we're trying to help you find—what's that root pain that people would be like, 'Yes, I want to actually follow, subscribe, and engage with your content.'" — Ken [02:36]

• On collecting real customer feedback:

  "You're looking for gold hidden amongst rocks and sand and dribble of kinds. But you need to start developing eyes to see and ears to hear the real pains..." — Dan [04:01]

• On combining AI and human insights:

  “AI...is just a starting point. It doesn't make up for actually having the conversations with customers themselves where you can actually get the nuance, because here are the surface-level problems in the conversations. You can get to the problem behind the problem, and that's what you really want to address as someone who wants to lead the thinking of others." — Dan [17:58]

• On applying RFM to pain points:

  "You would think you would want to order it in order of magnitude to how strong the pain was. That's where that one's on the last priority. You want to go with recency, then frequency, then total pain." — Dan [25:58]

• Lighthearted moment about AI-cliché writing ("em dash" tell):

  “I do avoid the EM dash because so many people judge it so hard, even though grammatically it's fine, people actually use it...but I definitely take EM dashes out because I don't want people to stumble over that thing and people are hyper aware to it now.” — Dan [27:41]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:04] — Defining relevance on social media—why most advice falls short
• [01:02] — The “Problem Hunter” concept for content creators
• [03:04] — Techniques for finding problems on social (rants, comments, questions)
• [05:02] — Active tactics for searching for problems as a social media user
• [06:07] — Importance of keeping a running list of discovered pain points
• [06:07 - 08:49] — Why direct customer conversations always provide the best insights
• [13:26] — Using podcasts and interviews for qualitative customer research
• [14:11] — Using AI deep research prompts to quickly scan large volumes of online pain points
• [20:47] — Sorting/prioritizing pain points with the RFM framework
• [27:41] — “EM dash” moment and how small cues reveal deeper social pain points

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Actionable Takeaways

• Master relevance by targeting recent, frequent pain points—those will get immediate engagement.
• Develop a muscle for scanning social feeds, not just consuming but intentionally hunting for problems.
• Supplement your AI findings with real conversations—AI gives you breadth, but dialogue gives you crucial depth and nuance.
• Validate and sequence the pain points you surface using the recency, frequency, and intensity criteria.
• Use podcasts not just as content, but as ongoing, free customer research.

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Final Thoughts

In a world overflowing with generic AI-generated content, true marketing authority comes from combining digital research with real human connection. The "combo" of AI and genuine customer dialogue is the key to finding and addressing pain in a way that resonates—and stands out—in 2026 and beyond.

Transcript

[A]

Everybody, and I mean everybody, gives the advice for social media to be relevant, but hardly anybody talks about what relevance actually means. If you're somebody who leads with your expertise and is trying to help people, it's really easy. It's relevant. If your advice is hitting on their main problems, if they're feeling the pain and you're speaking to that pain, that post has immense relevance. But what are their pain points? Actually, there are so many different pains that they have, yet oftentimes we're reverberating on social media, talking about the things that are trending that have nothing to do with the pain they're thinking about and feeling every single day. So in this episode of the AI Driven Marketer, we are continuing the series of own, the show, where we're going from podcast to book on the topic of becoming an authority in the age of AI. I. I'm Dan Sanchez, and I'm joined by my co host, Ken Frere.

[B]

Hey, what's up, bro?

[A]

And we're going to talk about the exact playbook you can use in order to make your social media, your content, and all the ideas you're putting out there actually relevant. And we call this idea Becoming a Problem Hunter. Yes, it's pretty clear and straightforward because that's essentially what you got to do if you want to become a thought leader. If you want to lead and influence others, you have to speak to. To the pain that they feel on a daily basis. Ken, I have to ask you, if you opened up LinkedIn right now and went back to posts that stood out to you or posts maybe that you've bookmarked, what topics would they be on?

[B]

Oh, specifically on LinkedIn, it would probably be things on, like, growing on LinkedIn or a problem that I faced. I was like, how do I solve this in the future? I can think of several that I've. I've bookmarked that I'm like, ooh, I'm getting. I know this is gonna help me with either AI or podcasting or audience growth.

[A]

I know I can think of similar LinkedIn posts, ones that I'm, like, always looking at and bookmarking are people who found exceptionally clever ways of standing out on social media. Because I feel like that's always a problem. You know, posts are always up and down. You're kind of, like, always trying to figure out, like, how do I actually stand out on this thing? Because it's changing every day, and as soon as one thing works well, everybody else figures it out and then it doesn't work. I'm always looking for these new ideas or to fix problems that I have with AI or things that AI addresses that might actually solve real pain points. And I think a lot of people do the same. We're always hunting for the things that alleviate pain.

[B]

I think what we need to be careful is too many people sometimes pursue hacks versus solutions and they think that if they find that one hack, their problems are going to go away. But the reality is that I found most of the time hacks only deal with surface problems, not the root problem. And that's what we're trying to help you find is like, what's that root pain that people would be like? Yes, I want to actually follow, subscribe and engage with your content.

[A]

So in this episode we actually want to unpack. Now that we've unpacked the reason why we're looking for problems, it's important to actually start to develop almost like a skill in and of itself to to find problems. Almost like you have to tune your ear to finding people's problems. You'd think it stands out to you, but because I'm seeing post after post on X and LinkedIn and on YouTube that are just falling empty on ears and they're not getting the reach they want, it's because it's not resonating with the problems people are actually having an issue with. So if you try to lead people's thinking and you're coming up with awesome new unique ideas and gaps, because you're doing all the reading, you're doing all the research and you find there's gaps in people's thinking, well, they might not be the right gaps if it's not aligned to people's actual pain and problems or the questions that they have. So I want to talk about some ways that I found work best when actually finding their pains. The first one is as you're on social media and actually on LinkedIn, you're posting and you're commenting, you have to keep your eyes open. What people actually complain about. Every rant is a complaint to take note of every time someone questions something or asks good questions. And it's hard because most people are pretending to be authorities and some people actually are. So it can be hard. You're looking for gold hidden amongst rocks and sand and dribble of kinds. But you need to start developing eyes to see and ears to hear the real pains from that work on social media. In fact, that's one of the best parts about actually engaging in the comments, is you're getting out there. You're looking through it, you're sifting and sifting and sifting and looking through. Not just prompts people to engage with that are your prospects, but also prompts for your posts and those problems that they're actually facing.

[B]

Yeah, and one practical way that I love to do this is, you know, there are people who are either passive users on social media or active users. And the way I like to think about being an active user is that now at nighttime when I like if I'm on social media for 30 minutes or whatever, I take those 30 minutes and I say, hey, instead of me just scrolling through reels, I'm actually going to search for problems. I'm just going to be scrolling and I'm purposely like skimming things. But I'm looking at comments, I'm looking at how people are engaging, what's the questions? And I'm taking that information and then putting it in the note and be like, oh, this is the problem that people are having. And even for own the show, I'm doing this. I'm like following certain people now to see like, oh, what are they talking about when it comes to audience growth? Or what are people talking about when it comes to influence and figuring out what people are asking or the way they're phrasing certain comments? I'm like, that's a weird take on it. I think they're really just trying to hide their question in a authoritative comment. And I take that and I'm like, okay, this is what they're really trying to say.

[A]

It's one of the best ways to kind of have like a general feed of problems because social media is always going, the hamster wheel never stops. And it's probably one of my first places just to kind of go and always be paying attention to, to see what the, the trend is. There's some problems that are like almost always problems. Like companies will always need leads. That's just kind of a general always on problem. You always need more leads. You can never have enough leads, especially qualified leads. A cry, of course, course we could all get as many leads as we want now because since we could just buy the list we need. But getting qualified leads of people coming to you asking for help, no business could ever have enough of those. That's a. It'll always be a problem. But what are the specific pain points of getting leads? Like if you're in marketing, what are the specific problems of getting people to show up to meetings? What are the specific problems of getting people to say yes to your offer? Like there's general categories you can always go looking for and what are the specifics around it. That's what you need to be hunting for all the time. And I like to be fed like a general diet of it. I sometimes I even copy and paste it and put into a notion doc of problems just to keep track of them and try to quantify them somehow. I don't take the quantification, the quantifications too. I don't try to go too, I don't know what you call it hard on like tracking it via Excel and adding it up and making like a point system. I'm just trying to inform my general like gut impression of what the problems are. And as I'm looking for solutions, as I'm trying to solve them, I'm using that to keep me informed of what the real pain point is. The one way though, even though that's a good general habit to build and it's easy because we're already in there, the one that rules them all is actually talking to customers, actually talking to prospects. This is the one most, most marketers, most creators, influencers, people who want to have an authority skip. And you can tell because there's always a difference between the way people talk about it online, even though it's a good place to start and gives you inventory, gives you the breadth you're never going to get there in actually standing out and actually being relevant without understanding the nuance of it. And to me there's no way to do that better than actually having conversations with them either via video meeting or face to face or at least a phone call can. Have you ever spent some time doing like some customer discovery? It's, you're a sales guy so like you spend the most time with customers. I'm probably like my most, my like I'm so jealous of salespeople because they actually get to spend more time with customers. At best I get to listen to their sales calls and try to understand what's going on. But I know because you're so good at sales that you generally, you're like, you can hear the problem. You can hear the thing that's going on after talking to them, right?

[B]

Yeah. And you know what's fascinating is even after so many years of doing it, I still have to be careful because I can make assumptions and if I make those assumptions, I could end up not closing the deal. Like I have to always be paying attention and staying curious. Like, what's this person's actual pain problem and how is it affecting their life Right now, and that's what most people skip, even in talking to clients, is that they're like, oh, I think I know the problem, but you don't know the effects of the problem specifically for that person. And when you can start to diagnose that and communicate that and empathize, dude, all of a sudden people are like, this guy understands me. And they're willing to trust you more and they're willing to like say, oh yeah, I'll buy from you, whatever the situation is. Here's what I'm curious from you, Dan. Why is it that people have a hard time reaching out to their own clients or potential customers and just doing the work of, of getting feedback and asking the right questions?

[A]

I think there's just a need to always be talking. If you're not diving like drowning in client work or work for yourself, then you're drowning in trying to say something on social and create content. And so it's always talking to people. For marketers, this isn't for sales. For sales, this is like the main thing. But for marketers, talking to customers, talking to prospects is always in the important but not urgent. It's never urgent. This is the least urgent thing on a, on a marketer's list or on anybody who really wants to grow. It could be a founder, it could be whatever. It's just on the bottom of the list. So it always gets cut out. But it's generally one of the more important things you could ever schedule time to do. And I like to do it in a number of ways. Luckily, like I have this audience of people listening to this podcast right now. So even last summer I was like, hey, you want to Talk? I'm open 30 minutes, whatever you want to talk about. And I just opened up my calendar link for a couple of days and then I closed it because it packed like two weeks in my afternoons and I just did back to back conversations asking about what people were doing, what they're trying to learn in AI and what some of the pain points of learning AI were for them in order to make this show better. I wasn't even thinking about how to. I guess I was using it to come up with thought leadership ideas, because I was using it to come up with content. So I was trying to in some sense understand the real reasons behind why people were suffering with deciding around what tools to pick, how to build automated workflows and all kinds of things. I learned from actually just having conversations with them. If you don't have that same thing, it's just A one to one thing. You probably have customers right now scheduling time with them and then just asking them the same five questions over and over and over again is really what I start to look for. Even what if I take a new marketing clients, like the first thing I do is schedule interviews with their customers, generally 10 to 15. And I just start to ask the same five, six, seven questions over and over again to try to understand the pain. And then I look for the trend across what have what out of 15 of them, what if, what are five of them saying? And they're saying in a different words, but they're all meaning the same thing. And now I know I've hit something.

[B]

Yeah. And I, I, I could tell you how many times you have done this in the past. We've worked together for like 15, 18 years now. So like, I've just seen it time and time again when that's been super helpful. And even times when you were like, hey, let me see all of your sales calls or, or all of the people under me, their sales calls and you're listening to them and you're like, oh, here's a problem, here's a situation. And even when we're processing about the problem, we, we quickly can diagnose like, oh, they used these words. But the way that they were talking about it afterwards, this is actually the problem. I mean, we had this conversation yesterday, we were talking about something and we're like, I think this is a problem. And then 10 minutes later we're like, oh, no, this is the problem. And we both were like, it felt like an aha moment. And I think that's what you want to start looking for when you're doing all this client research is those AHAs where they're like, yes. They almost kind of like jump out of their seat like, that's exactly what I've been feeling, or that's exactly the pain I've been under or the pressure I've been under. And I want to start walking through that. I think another great way that we could do customer customer research is through a podcast.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Like interviewing people and going through a podcast and saying, hey, let me have five questions. I don't know if you guys have ever noticed this, but some podcasts used to do this, that at the end of the interview, they would ask the same five questions to their people. Oh, yeah, right.

[A]

I've done it many times.

[B]

All they're doing is customer research.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

So my encouragement to you guys, if you're like listening to this and you may be Wondering, like for another reason to do a podcast. This may be a very good reason. Now you may be wondering, is a podcast right for you? I would say go to aidrivenmarketer.com pod and we have an assessment that you can take there that it could help you assess. Like can you start using a podcast for your industry or the thing that you're doing?

[A]

Definitely go and take that assessment. Because I've used a podcast many times to do interviews because everybody it's easier for people to say yes to being on a podcast. It's actually a great way to kick off a show. And before you even start talking about your ideas as a thought leaders, just interview all your ideal buyers on the show. Talk to them about their journey, their story and their 2 cents of advice. But then ask them all the same 5 fast 5 questions at the end and you'll start to pick up the trends after you've done 10, 15, 20 interviews. It's a great way to kick off a show and then you could start layering in more solo episodes where you actually have solve some of these problems for them. Yeah, there is a cheap hack you can use to find people's problems. It's not as nearly as good as talking to people, but it's fast and it's a good way to do it. Do some research before you start to take the do the time consuming thing of actually meeting with a bunch of individuals is actually using AI. I mean this is the AI driven marketer and I want to talk about AI. And while I've talked about this in past episodes, this is a practical example of where this particular like one, two punch with AI becomes really helpful. And that's using AI's deep research feature. Now almost all the tools have this feature now, whether it's ChatGPT, Gemini Grok has a deep research feature and this works well in any of them. But I have two different prompts loaded for deep research to do customer analysis. So use any of the either of these prompts. I'm going to go ahead and read one to you. The other one's similar and I'll explain the nuance, but I'm only going to read the one to you. But prompt one is like this. Conduct a deep analysis of online conversations to identify specific pain points that your target audience frequently discusses regarding. Insert your product category or service type source information from forums, social media, Reddit, quora and customer review sites. Provide a written summary of your findings followed by a clear table summarizing the categories and their frequency for each category. Identified include clearly titled sections containing an analysis of the findings and a bulleted list of 12 bullet points that contain direct quotes, each accompanied by its source. I promise this kind of quote, this kind of prompt will get it going. It'll of course chatgpt will come and ask some follow up questions for clarity. But generally, even if you're just kicking it off with Gemini, this is going to provide a report that gives you a good snapshot of the actual pain points people are wrestling with, the things they're whining about, the complete things they're questioning, the things that they are feeling the most intense. And it actually goes and quantifies it and then gives you a table showing you which ones are the most painful. Now it even gives you the full list with quotes and links back to the quote so you can go and validate it. And making sure it's coming from the right person is talking about the right thing. Because you know, AI can make stuff up sometimes. That's why the back part of the report has all the examples and links, so, so it comes with receipts. This report is invaluable because it's not just pulling from polished things, it's pulling from the places where your audience is hanging out and griping essentially about their pain. And that becomes a fairly reliable source of information. It would take a long time for you to be able to do it without AI helping you. It, though, is just a starting point. It doesn't make up for actually having the conversations with customers themselves where you can actually get the nuance, because here are the surface level problems in the conversations. You can get to the problem behind the problem, and that's what you really want to address as someone who wants to lead the thinking of others. The more, the deeper, the closer you can come to like the real pain point underneath. The more that post is going to stand out, the more it's going to be like offering a cup of fresh cold water when they're dying of thirst out in the desert. Now the other prompt is like it, but instead of just looking for pain points, you're hunting and pulling just questions. Because questions, all questions, are a source of some kind of pain, of something they're looking for or something they feel like they need. So one looks for pain, the other one looks for just questions. It's a similar prompt. So we'll put both in the show notes for this podcast. And of course I have a whole resource just full of prompts just like this, over a dozen of them. If you go to go.dances.com. deep-research-toolkit. Kind of a loaded URL, but there will be a link in the description to that as well.

[B]

You know, Dan, I remember you giving me my first deep research prompt. This is when I first started using AI and it, like, blew my mind of all the quotes, the information. And I use it as a great sounding board to say, okay, well, now let me start doing more analysis. And it actually pointed me in the right direction. And this is where I think most people go wrong, is that they start writing and commenting and posting stuff, making these assumptions, but they don't. They don't have any solid footing. Now that I have solid footing, it, like, it informs everything, right? It informs my. Our landing pages, it informs how we write socials, it informs our scripts. It just informs that. So for those of you listening, this is the deep work that sometimes you want to skip because you think you know what the problems are. But if people are not responding back or engaging on, could tell you very quickly. I'll give you one great example. You know, as we have been doing Own the Show this series, I've been accelerating how much I'm posting on LinkedIn. Part of it is because I'm taking the transcripts and it's. It's a good, great sounding board. It's easier. But every once in a while, I'm like, paying attention to how many impressions I get on a post within 24 hours. And there's some posts that, like, it's just like 50 impressions. It's not doing anything. And then there are others that I'm like. I'm like, whoa, within two hours, I'm getting like 150, 200 impressions, you know, within just a matter of. Of hours versus the whole day. And I'm like, ooh, that's just showing me that I'm hitting on a pain point. I should focus on that versus on the other thing. And that's been super immensely, like, just helpful to think about that. I'm. I'm not making assumptions. And that's. That's what this whole episode's about. It's just like making sure you're finding the right problems and engaging the people correctly.

[A]

So if you're doing all this work, you're paying attention to social, you're seeing people talk about different things. You're starting to catch on some trends, you're talking to customers. So you're starting to go deep on these and you're running, you know, AI deep research reports. You got a lot of problems in front of you. Now. I want to talk about what you can do in order to sort the problems of ones that are the most important to talk about now. And this is the counterintuitive part because not all pains are equal. And the way I would I as a marketer would like validate pains is not based on the deepest pain. Believe it or not, the ones that are going to resonate the most and get the most attention actually will be surfaced by this one type of analysis. And it's an old school framework that actually goes all the way back to the days of direct mail. But I find this particular framework works in a lot of situations and oddly works in this one. It's a framework called an RFM analysis. You ever heard of this one, Ken?

[B]

No. I'm like, I'm about to learn something new right here, live on this pod.

[A]

And this is something old school direct marketers would use in order to analyze how good a list is. And you can use this for a few different things, but it can also be used to kind of validate or prioritize pain points. And the RFM stands for recency, frequency and monetary. But we're gonna have to change it a little bit for what we're dealing with most of the time. Direct mail. Direct mail marketers would look at be like, okay, recency. When's the last time they bought from you? And that would be the highest priority frequency. What frequency have they popped from you? That would be the second priority. Weighted. And then monetary. How much total money have they spent with you? That's the least important priority or like measurement. Of course, if it's they recently bought from you, had been buying from you from 12 months and they spent a lot of money with you, that would be the ultimate indicator versus if even. But even something recent is more important than if they'd spent a lot of money but a long time ago and only once. Well, that's not a good score of somebody who's likely to buy from you again. And it's the same thing with pain. We tend to pay attention to the pain in our life that has happened recently. Even if there's deeper pains from long ago. Right. Those are the ones. The ones that matter the most to most people are going to be the ones that have happened recently. That's why hitting on current trends can be so freaking hot, because it's on their minds right now. And it's the same thing with pain points if there's a new pain point. Because maybe like if I'm marketing to marketers and we're all on LinkedIn. And like, LinkedIn shifted the algorithm. And I talk about, hey, here's the three things that LinkedIn changed and how you can deal with it. I've tested it and here's what I found. Is that post gonna go viral? Yes. Why? Because everybody's thinking and talking and griping about it. The freak, the. The recency of that pain is high. Is it the most important one? Freaking no. Like, that's gonna be here today, gone tomorrow. But it's on people's minds. It's a pain now. And if I'm walking in with a freaking fresh cup or I keep saying fresh, as if water can be fresh. Can water be fresh? Can water be stale?

[B]

It could. It could taste good.

[A]

Then they're going to say yes, and they're going to take it and they're going to drink. So recency matters. Frequency is the next thing that matters. How often are they feeling this? Are they feeling it daily, weekly, monthly? So frequent recency. How. How. When was the last time they felt this pain frequency. Are they feeling this every. Every so often. And then monetary, we're gonna shift to just like, the amount of visceral pain. Right. Or mental pain anguish. And that's the last one to wait. Because while the pain might have been large, but it was six months ago, it's kind of worn off by now. For example, like, if you're dealing with people in their careers, there's always that pain that of like, the rejection around the time when you're like, you're having your annual review and you're hoping for that promotion, but you didn't get that promotion. Like, that's a real pain that people deal with. So how do you deal with that, that pain? Well, if I, if I posted about that, like, sure. Would some people pay attention to. Sure. But the, the, the hopes that they're going to be still feeling that pain, even though for most people it's happened less than three months ago, is going to be low. So while that's a very painful moment, we've all, We've all gone through that annual review time. We crushed it. They're like, yeah, we're not, we're not. We're gonna pass over. We. We promoted so and so instead. Or no, we're not. We know what you want to raise. You know, we've all had that moment where we, like, felt really justified in that and then it didn't. But that's a good example of, like, something that's really painful, but because it was really painful but wasn't Frequent and it wasn't recent then it's just not that big of a pain. The posts about that aren't going to hit as hard as something that just happened recently or has been happening with a certain frequency. So when you're looking, you're hearing about all these pain points, make sure to give it a little grade, even either mentally or even on paper. How recent was this pain for them? Is it happening frequently? How frequently and how strong was that pain? You would think you would want to order it in order of magnitudes to how strong the pain was. That's where that one's on the last priority. You want to go with recency, then frequency, then total pain. So did you learn something new?

[B]

Dude, I've been thinking, as soon as you started talking about it, I was like, oh my gosh, that was mind blowing. Well, and here's the reason why, because I think I naturally from. For those of you who don't know, I've done a lot of lay counseling and coaching background and we're always trying to find the root problem, like what's the biggest pain point? You know, and sometimes that biggest pain point is something from six months ago, you know, but when it comes to social media, it's like, no, no. What's the frequency thing that that hits? That was kind of eye opening and, and I, I even started thinking, tell me if I'm right or wrong on this. You know the reason why so many people gripe about the EM dash. This is a hypothesis. I don't know if I'm correct. You guys who are listening to this. You could tell me, like engage in my comments and stuff, but I think the reason why so many people are arguing of the EM dash is because it's revealing to them that they're using AI and they want to make it easy for them. But now everybody knows that they're not being authentic, quote unquote authentic on it. And it's like, oh, that's why people are griping like, oh, everybody's using an EM dash. It's like, well, yeah. Or everybody's using AI. Well, yeah, we all know everybody's using it, but now it's not coming out as the real you.

[A]

I do avoid the EM dash because so many people judge it so hard, even though grammatically it's fine, people actually use it. I didn't use it before, but I definitely take EM dashes out because I don't want people to stumble over that thing and people are hyper aware to it now. Yeah, but it is, it is an issue. It is an issue. People are feeling it. People are feeling it pretty frequently if they're. Especially if they're scrolling through LinkedIn. So it's a good example when it comes to counseling and actually doing, like, deep consulting. I actually think going for the deeper pain is probably, that's the reason why you're on. Because they're probably distracted by the recency. And I think that's where good counselors and consultants are like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You think these are the problems. These are not the problems. These are just the recency, maybe even frequent problems. They're always going to go for the deeper ones, are going to have the most bang for their buck as far as problem solving goes. But that's already once they're in, once they have the trust and now they're saying, help me. But what we're talking about is finding the problems that are going to resonate the most. And the deeper problems don't resonate the most. That's why, like when you put out LinkedIn posts and they're freaking bangers, you know it because you know this is a problem and you have a fricking awesome solution and then it doesn't do well. Well, it's probably because it's neither recent nor frequent. That's why it doesn't resonate. So it's not that those problems aren't as good to solve and address with coming. Coming up with unique solutions for which is what we're going to talk about in the next episode is how to actually validate and how to actually create solutions for the problem and a process for it. But if you focus on the ones that are more recent and frequent and think about how fast you can for recency, especially if it's a trending one, then coming up with solutions for it more quickly really pays off in social media. But even the frequency of the frequency of the one that's coming up is going. They're going to be much more. It's going to be easier to stand out and build authority around those ideas. And maybe you still build solutions for the bigger problems, of course, but you deal with those on the back end, not on the front end. You capture attention and grow authority online and on stage by addressing the ones that are recent and frequent. You still create solutions around the ones that are deep, but those are the ones you have to do on the back end because they're just not going to grab the attention that they need on the front end.

[B]

Yeah. And that right there is the reason most people mess up in most of their social media engagement is that they're actually just going too deep, and you need to go a little bit. And it's okay to go deep at certain times, but you need to hit the situational problem that they're feeling in that moment that you're like, oh, I scratched the itch kind of feeling. And that's where it builds trust.

[A]

Coming up.