The Verses vs The Chorus

A friend of mine is a personal trainer. Good at what he does. Gets results, genuinely cares, the kind of coach people stick with. He asked me to look at his messaging because something wasn’t clicking. People were following his content but not signing up. Likes but no bookings.

So I asked what he knew about his audience. He’d done the work. He had a survey. Forty-odd responses. The answers were what you’d expect. People said things like “I want to get fitter and feel more confident” and “I’m looking for accountability and structure.” Reasonable. Sensible. The kind of thing you’d write if someone was going to read it with your name attached.

Then I went to Reddit.

I found a post written at 2am by a bloke who could easily have been one of those survey respondents. He wrote: “I’m 42 and I can’t get off the sofa. I used to play football three times a week. Now I get out of breath going upstairs and I’m too embarrassed to walk into a gym.”

That’s not the same sentence as “I want to get fitter and feel more confident.” One is what you say when someone’s watching. The other is what comes out when it’s dark and anonymous and the thing you’re actually feeling is too raw to dress up.

The distance between those two sentences is where my mate’s messaging should have started.

I keep finding this pattern. I think I’ve been finding it my whole life, actually, just in different rooms.

When I was teaching English, the best stuff a student wrote was almost never where it was supposed to be. It was in the margins. The throwaway line in a paragraph about something else entirely. The kid who was supposed to be writing about Lennie Small but ended up writing about loneliness. He hadn’t answered the question. He’d answered something underneath it. My job was to see that and pull it out.

When I started distributing films, I’d stand at the back of cinemas and watch audiences. Not the screen. Them. The official response, “yeah, it was really good,” tells you almost nothing. The real data is in the silences. The scene where nobody reaches for their phone. The thing they mention to their friend in the car park that they didn’t mention to you.

Same thing. Every time. The surface answer and the real answer, living in different places, and almost nobody looking at the gap between them.

Reagan used “Born in the USA” as a patriotic anthem at his rallies. The chorus sounds triumphant if you’re not paying attention. The verses are about a Vietnam veteran who came home to nothing. Springsteen was writing about abandonment, and Reagan heard a celebration. He listened to the chorus and missed the song.

Paddy McAloon of Prefab Sprout wrote a whole track criticising Springsteen for being shallow. Cars and girls, that’s all it is. But McAloon hadn’t listened either. Springsteen’s cars are escape from dead-end towns. The girls are the last good thing before the factory closes. “The River” is about a teenage pregnancy that kills a dream. McAloon mistook the symbols for the substance.

Two very clever people (well, McAloon anyway. I actually love Prefab Sprout.) Both listening. Neither hearing.

Most market research works the same way. You send out a survey. You read the responses. You build your messaging around what people told you. And what people told you was the chorus. The measured version. The version they were comfortable sharing with their name attached.

The verses are on Reddit at 2am.

I didn’t set out to build a tool. I’m not really a tools person by instinct, I came to it sideways, through needing something that didn’t exist. I’d been doing this pattern-reading thing manually for years, across classrooms and cinemas and late-night Social scrolling, and I got frustrated that nobody else seemed to be looking at what was obviously there.

So I built something that does what I was doing at that kitchen table in 1994, and at the back of that cinema, and at two in the morning with too many browser tabs open. It finds the gap. It goes into real conversations where people are talking honestly, anonymously, without performing for anyone, and it maps the distance between what they say publicly and what they say when they think nobody’s listening.

I called it Pain Point Pulse, because the real pain points aren’t in the survey. They’re in the pulse of what people actually say when the question isn’t being asked.

The PT rewrote his landing page. The headline changed from a version of “get fitter, feel confident” to something much closer to “you used to be active and you’re too embarrassed to go back.” Sign-ups went up. Not because the copy was cleverer. Because it started in the right place.

I’ve spent forty years reading the gap between what people say and what they mean. English essays, cinema audiences, anonymous forums at stupid hours of the morning. I think it might be the only thing I actually do, just in different rooms with different furniture.

If you’re building something, selling something, trying to reach someone, and you suspect your messaging is landing close but not quite, the place to start isn’t with what your audience tells you. It’s with what they tell each other when you’re not in the room.

That’s where the truth is. It’s always been there. We just need to listen to the verses.