How a Divorce Coach Found 40 Hidden Pain Points Through Niche Research for Coaches
TL;DR: A divorce coach spent three years creating thoughtful, empathetic content and getting almost no enquiries. Then she spent one weekend doing proper niche research for coaches, the kind that involves reading what people actually write in anonymous online spaces when nobody’s watching. She found 40 pain points she’d never heard a client say out loud. Not because they weren’t real. Because nobody says “I think I need help with identity reconstruction after marital dissolution” when they’re sitting in their car at 11pm wondering why they just drove to their old house on autopilot. This article walks through what she found, how she found it, and why the gap between what coaches think their niche struggles with and what those people actually say is almost always wider than anyone expects. If you’ve been creating content that other coaches love but potential clients scroll straight past, this is probably why.
She already knew everything about divorce. She didn’t know how her audience talked about it.
I want to tell you about a divorce coach. I’ll call her Rachel. That’s not her name, and some details have been changed, but the patterns are real and drawn from actual niche research across coaching businesses.
Rachel had been coaching for three years. She was qualified, experienced, genuinely good at what she did. Her content was thoughtful. Empathetic. Well-researched. She wrote about navigating the emotional complexities of separation, rebuilding identity, rediscovering purpose after loss.
All correct. All invisible.
Her Instagram engagement was other coaches leaving heart emojis. Her blog posts ranked for nothing. Her discovery calls were rare enough that each one felt like an event rather than part of a pipeline. And when she sat down to plan her next month of content, she kept circling back to the same professional vocabulary, the same frameworks, the same careful clinical language she’d absorbed during training.
Rachel didn’t have a knowledge problem. She had a language problem. And the only way to see it was to go where her audience actually talks, without her there, and listen.
That’s what niche research for coaches actually looks like when it works. Not surveys. Not competitor analysis. Not guessing what your ideal client might be thinking. Reading what real people write when they’re not performing for anyone.
What happened when she actually looked
Rachel set aside a weekend. No content planning. No strategy frameworks. Just reading.
She went to Reddit. She went to Facebook groups she’d never posted in. She read Mumsnet threads. She read anonymous confession forums. She searched for “just separated,” “he moved out,” “she left,” “divorce and kids,” “starting over after marriage.” She wasn’t looking for content ideas. She was looking for language.
Three hours in, she had a list of twelve things she’d never seen anyone say in a coaching context. By Sunday evening, the list was at forty.
Not forty topics she’d never considered. Rachel knew divorce inside out. Forty specific, felt, raw descriptions of experiences that her audience was living through, described in words she had never once used in any of her content.
Here’s a sample of what she found:
“I still reach for his coffee mug every morning and then remember.”
“The kids asked why daddy’s toothbrush isn’t in the bathroom anymore and I couldn’t speak.”
“I spent 45 minutes in Tesco unable to decide what to buy for dinner because I’ve never cooked for one person before.”
“Everyone keeps saying I should be relieved. I don’t feel relieved. I feel like someone died but I’m not allowed to grieve because I’m the one who ended it.”
“My mother-in-law unfollowed me on Facebook and it broke me more than the actual divorce.”
“I caught myself still saying ‘we’ in conversation six months later.”
None of these are clinical. None of them map neatly to the section headings of a coaching programme. Every one of them is a pain point Rachel already understood at a professional level. The gap wasn’t in her knowledge. It was in the distance between how she described these experiences and how the people living through them described them.
I’ve written about this distance before in The Language Gap. It shows up in every coaching niche I’ve looked at, and it’s almost always wider than the coach expects.
Why forty problems she already knew about still changed everything
You might be thinking: if Rachel already understood all of these pain points, what difference does it make that she found them described in different words?
All the difference. Accurate content that sounds like a textbook floats past. Content that sounds like the person reading it, that uses the words they’d use at midnight when they’re being honest, that’s what stops the scroll.
When someone is sitting in Tesco with a basket containing one chicken breast and no idea how to plan a meal for a household of one, they’re not searching for “rebuilding independence after divorce.” They’re typing “how do I cook for one person” or “why can’t I make simple decisions since my divorce” or, more likely, they’re scrolling through their phone looking for anyone who seems to understand what this specific, small, stupid-feeling moment actually feels like.
Rachel’s old content would have addressed the underlying issue brilliantly. Decisional fatigue post-separation. Loss of shared domestic identity. The cognitive load of restructuring daily routines. All real. All well understood. All written in a language her audience hasn’t learned yet and won’t learn until they’re already working with a coach.
The guessing tax here is real. Every piece of content written in coach language instead of client language costs you. Not just in engagement metrics, which are easy to dismiss, but in real people who need your help scrolling past your post because nothing in it sounds like what they’re actually going through.
The entry point problem
This is the pattern that shows up in every niche research project I’ve seen. The coach understands the problem better than the client ever will. That’s the whole point of being a coach. But understanding the problem and understanding the entry point are two different things.
The entry point is the moment someone first recognises they might need help. It’s almost never a clinical realisation. It’s a moment. A small one, usually. The coffee mug. The Tesco aisle. The toothbrush. The mother-in-law’s Facebook unfollow.
If your content meets people at the entry point, they feel understood before they know anything about your methodology, your qualifications, or your programme structure. If your content starts at the professional level, it floats above them. Accurate and unreachable.
Rachel’s list of forty pain points wasn’t really a list of problems. It was a list of entry points. Forty doors into the same house she’d been trying to get people to walk into for three years, each one closer to where her audience was actually standing.
How she actually did the research (and how you can too)
Rachel’s method wasn’t complicated. It didn’t require any special tools or training. It required patience and a willingness to read a lot of posts that were messy, raw, and not organised into tidy categories.
Where she looked
Anonymous and semi-anonymous online spaces where people discuss divorce without performing for anyone. Reddit was the primary source. Subreddits like r/divorce, r/relationship_advice, r/SingleParents, r/datingoverforty. She also read Mumsnet threads, closed Facebook groups she joined as a member rather than a coach, and a few anonymous confession sites.
The key filter: she avoided spaces where coaches were already present and shaping the conversation. She wanted to hear how people describe divorce when nobody is trying to reframe it for them.
What she looked for
Not topics. Language. Specific phrases. Images. Metaphors. The physical, sensory details people use to describe abstract emotional states.
“I still set the table for two” is not a topic. It’s a piece of language that contains an entire emotional world. The habit the body can’t break. The identity that hasn’t caught up with the reality. The small, daily evidence of loss that nobody warns you about.
Rachel kept a simple document. Left column: the actual quote or phrase. Right column: what she, as a coach, understood it to mean. The gap between those two columns was her content strategy in miniature.
This is very close to what I’ve described as pain-language mapping. Coach language on one side. Client language on the other. The map between them is your content plan.
How she organised what she found
After the weekend, Rachel grouped her forty pain points into clusters. Not by coaching framework. By life stage and emotional temperature.
Some were early-stage: the shock, the disorientation, the physical habits that haven’t adjusted. Some were mid-stage: the social fallout, the family dynamics, the unexpected triggers. Some were late-stage: the identity questions, the dating fears, the grief that arrives six months late when everyone else thinks you should be fine.
Each cluster contained pain points she already knew about, described in language she’d never used. And each cluster became the foundation for content that sounded like the people living through it, not the coach observing from the professional side.
What changed when she started using their words
Rachel didn’t overhaul her coaching. She didn’t change her niche. She didn’t rebrand. She changed her language.
Her next blog post opened with the Tesco story. Not as a clinical illustration. As the actual opening. A person standing in an aisle, unable to buy food for one, wondering whether this is what the rest of life looks like now.
Then, and only then, she brought her expertise to it. Explained what’s happening. Why it’s normal. Why it doesn’t mean you’re broken. Why the small moments often hit harder than the big ones, and what that tells you about how you’re actually processing the separation.
Same coaching. Same knowledge. Different door.
That post outperformed eight months of clinical content combined. And the people engaging with it weren’t other coaches. They were people mid-divorce, people recently separated, people six months out who thought they should be over it by now. The invisible audience Rachel had been trying to reach for three years was there all along. They just couldn’t hear her through the professional vocabulary.
The enquiry shift
Within six weeks, Rachel’s discovery calls shifted. Not just in frequency, which increased, but in quality. People were arriving having already felt understood. They’d read something that sounded like their experience, in their language, and decided Rachel was someone who actually got it.
Compare that to the old pattern: someone finds your content through a search, reads something clinically accurate but emotionally distant, and adds you to a list of coaches who probably know what they’re talking about. The second route leads to price-shopping and comparison. The first leads to trust.
This is the same pattern described in what coaching clients actually want to hear. They don’t want to hear your methodology. They want to hear their own experience described back to them by someone who clearly understands it. Then they want to know you can help.
The forty pain points, grouped
For anyone doing niche research for coaches in the divorce space, or using this as a template for your own niche, here’s how Rachel’s forty clustered into groups. The specific language is from real anonymous posts (anonymised and paraphrased where necessary).
The body hasn’t caught up
Pain points about physical habits and muscle memory that persist after separation:
- Still reaching for their coffee mug every morning
- Setting the table for two
- Rolling over in bed to tell them something before remembering
- Driving to the old house on autopilot
- Hearing a song and physically flinching
These are the earliest, most visceral pain points. They’re also the ones that make people feel the most foolish, which is why they tend to appear in anonymous spaces rather than conversations with friends.
The small decisions that break you
Pain points about the sudden cognitive load of living alone:
- Unable to choose what to eat because you’ve never decided alone
- Paralysed by household admin that used to be shared
- Not knowing how to book a holiday for one person
- The first time you have to fill in a form that asks for marital status
- Financial decisions that used to be joint
These cluster around a specific experience: the loss of the shared operating system two people build over years. Coaches know this as “restructuring daily routines” or “rebuilding practical independence.” People living through it experience it as standing in a supermarket aisle unable to think.
The social fallout nobody warned you about
Pain points about how other people respond to your divorce:
- Friends who take sides without telling you
- The mother-in-law relationship disintegrating
- Couples who stop inviting you places
- People who say “I never liked them anyway” as if that’s comforting
- The friend who treats your divorce as a cautionary tale for their own marriage
- Being the first in your friend group to divorce and becoming the thing everyone is afraid of
This cluster was the most surprising to Rachel. She knew the social dimension of divorce was significant. She didn’t realise how much of her audience’s distress was about other people’s reactions rather than their own grief.
The grief that isn’t grief (but is)
Pain points about loss that doesn’t fit the available frameworks:
- Grieving someone who is still alive
- Grieving the future you’d planned more than the relationship you lost
- Being told you should feel relieved when you initiated the divorce
- Guilt so heavy it mimics depression
- Missing the version of yourself that existed inside that relationship
These are the pain points that tend to drive people toward coaching. They’re also the hardest to write about in professional language without stripping out the raw, contradictory texture of how they actually feel.
The identity vacuum
Pain points about not knowing who you are outside the relationship:
- Realising you don’t know your own taste in anything because all your preferences were compromised
- Not recognising yourself in photos from before the marriage
- Introducing yourself at a party and not knowing what to say beyond your job title
- The specific loneliness of being alone versus being lonely inside a marriage
- Still saying “we” months after separation
This cluster connects directly to the work Rachel does as a coach. But the entry point for each one, the specific image or moment, is something no training programme would ever teach her. She had to go find it.
What this means for your niche
Rachel’s niche was divorce coaching. Yours might be career coaching, health coaching, business coaching, relationship coaching, ADHD coaching, parenting coaching. The niche doesn’t matter. The pattern is identical.
You already understand the problems your clients face better than they do. That’s your expertise. What you probably don’t have is a library of the specific, felt, raw language your audience uses to describe those problems before they’ve found you.
That library is the thing that makes your content findable, relatable, and trustworthy. Without it, you’re creating what I’d describe as coaching content for clients you’ll never reach. Accurate, well-intentioned, and invisible to the people who need it most.
How to run your own version of Rachel’s weekend
The weekend audience research sprint covers the full methodology, but the essentials are:
- Identify 3 to 5 online spaces where your audience talks about the problems you solve, without coaches present.
- Read for language, not topics. You already know the topics. You’re looking for images, metaphors, phrases, raw descriptions that surprise you.
- Capture the exact words. Don’t paraphrase yet. The value is in the specificity.
- Map what you find against your professional vocabulary. Coach language on one side, client language on the other.
- Group the pain points by emotional temperature and life stage, not by your coaching framework.
If reading hundreds of posts sounds like a lot (and it is), tools like Pain Point Pulse can accelerate the collection stage by pulling language from online sources across your niche. But the reading, the noticing, the moment something lands and you think “I’ve never heard anyone say it like that,” that part is yours.
The compound effect
Rachel’s forty pain points didn’t just give her forty blog post ideas. They rewired how she communicated. She started hearing the professional vocabulary in her own speech and catching it. She started leading with images instead of frameworks. She built a content calendar that mapped to the emotional timeline of her audience’s experience rather than the structure of her coaching programme.
Six months later, she had a waiting list. Not because she’d changed what she offered. Because she’d changed the door she was holding open.
The gap is always wider than you think
I’ve seen this pattern in every coaching niche where someone has done proper research. Career coaches who discover their audience says “fraud” instead of “imposter syndrome.” Health coaches who find that “I’m so tired of being tired” outperforms any clinical description of fatigue. Business coaches who learn that “everyone else seems to know what they’re doing” resonates more than any content about strategy or scaling. I’ve documented five specific cases in audience research examples from real coaching niches.
The gap between how coaches describe problems and how their audience experiences them is structural. It comes from the training itself, which gives you vocabulary your clients don’t have yet. It comes from spending time in professional communities where everyone speaks the same language. And it comes from the feedback loop problem where coaches end up creating content for other coaches because those are the people who engage with professional-level language.
The solution is not to dumb down your expertise. Rachel didn’t become less knowledgeable. She became more articulate, in the specific sense that she learned to speak in a way that her actual audience could hear.
What most coaches get wrong about niche research for coaches
Most coaches approach niche research as market research. Who is my ideal client? What do they earn? Where do they hang out online? What do they value?
Those questions aren’t useless. But they’re surface-level. They give you demographics and psychographics, which help with targeting. They don’t give you language, which is what makes people stop scrolling.
The kind of niche research that actually changes a coaching business is linguistic. It’s about the words. The specific, surprising, “I would never have said it that way” words that your audience uses to describe the problems you solve.
When coaches tell me their content isn’t working, the first thing I look at is language. Not strategy. Not frequency. Not platforms. Language. Because in almost every case, the content is good. The expertise is real. The language is professional where it needs to be personal.
Audience surveys won’t close this gap, by the way. I’ve written about why in Beyond Surveys. When you ask someone directly how they’d describe their problem, they perform. They give you the composed version. They use the words they think you want to hear. The raw version lives in the anonymous spaces, written at 1am, unedited, unperformed.
The research loop that keeps giving
Rachel’s initial weekend sprint gave her forty pain points. But the practice of reading what her audience actually writes didn’t stop there. She now spends thirty minutes a week, most weeks, scanning the same forums. Not to find new pain points, though she does. To stay calibrated. To keep her ear tuned to how the conversation shifts over time.
Because audiences evolve. The pain points around divorce during a cost-of-living crisis look different from those in a stable economy. The language shifts when new cultural conversations change how people think about relationships. Niche research for coaches isn’t a one-off project. It’s an ongoing practice, like any other professional development. The complete audience research guide covers how to build this into a sustainable rhythm.
What Rachel would tell you
She’d say the hardest part wasn’t doing the research. It was accepting that three years of content had been written in the wrong language. That stings. Especially when the content was good, informed, and genuinely helpful.
But she’d also say that the moment she started writing in her audience’s words, everything shifted. Not gradually. Quickly. The people who needed her could suddenly find her. And when they found her, they already felt understood, because her content sounded like them rather than like a textbook about them.
Forty pain points. One weekend. The same expertise she’d had all along, now expressed in a way the right people could actually hear.
If you’re a coach creating content that other coaches love and potential clients ignore, the language gap is almost certainly the reason. The only way to close it is to go where your audience talks and listen. Not for topics. For the exact, specific, felt, raw words they use to describe what you already understand.
That’s what proper niche research for coaches looks like. Not market segmentation. Not persona building. Listening.
Frequently asked questions
How long does niche research for coaches actually take?
Rachel’s initial sprint took one weekend, roughly six to eight hours of reading across Saturday and Sunday. That gave her forty pain points. You don’t need to match that number. Even five or six pieces of raw audience language will shift how you write. The ongoing maintenance, scanning forums weekly, takes about thirty minutes once you know what you’re looking for.
Do I need special tools to do audience research for my coaching niche?
Not for the initial research. Reddit, Facebook groups, Mumsnet, and similar forums are free to read. The value comes from the reading itself, noticing what surprises you, not from the tool you use to find it. If you want to scale the collection across multiple sources, Pain Point Pulse pulls language from online sources automatically. But the core practice is free.
What if my coaching niche doesn’t have active online communities?
Every niche has people talking about their problems somewhere. They might not be in a dedicated subreddit, but they’ll be in adjacent communities. A financial coaching audience talks about money stress in parenting forums, relationship subreddits, and career groups. A health coaching audience shows up in general wellness threads, chronic illness communities, and even recipe forums. Search for the problem, not the solution. Your niche is defined by the problem your clients face, and people always talk about their problems somewhere.
How do I use the pain points once I’ve found them?
Each pain point is a potential content opener. Start a post or article with the specific, felt experience. Then bring your coaching expertise to it. The pain point is the door; your knowledge is the room behind it. Over time, you’ll build a library of entry points that map to different stages of your audience’s experience, which becomes a content calendar organised by emotional reality rather than coaching modules.
Is this the same as conversation mining?
Closely related. Conversation mining is the broader practice of reading what your audience writes in unfiltered spaces. Niche research for coaches applies that practice specifically to the coaching context, where the gap between professional vocabulary and client language is typically the widest. The method is the same: go where they talk, read for language, capture the words that surprise you.
Pat Kelman. Come and look at this.
Image: Photo by Ron Lach on Pexels
