Customer Language Mining
Ten free 15-minute calls, transcribed, and your audience writes your marketing for you.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
Johnson's answer to what one thing makes you more profitable tomorrow: set up free 15-minute calls with 10 prospects or clients and mine their language. You ask what they want and what's in the way — 'Hala, I know you really want to build a personal brand. What's in the way? What are you struggling with?' Record all ten, transcribe them via Zoom or Otter, dump the transcripts into ChatGPT, and extract the actual vocabulary your audience uses. Then sprinkle that exact language into landing pages and social content. The mechanism is simple: most marketing is written in the founder's words from the founder's perspective; flipping to the customer's words and perspective produces materially higher conversions, and the reader feels you're in their head.
Origin
Johnson offers this as her single most actionable profit lever on the Young and Profiting closing question, drawn from her own experience running content and offers — noticing that landing pages and social content default to the creator's perspective and vocabulary, and that the fix is a transcription and extraction routine that AI now makes trivial.
Core principles
- 01Marketing written in your words converts worse than marketing written in theirs.
- 02Ask about the problem and the obstacle, not your solution.
- 03The exact language matters — paraphrasing loses the conversion.
- 04The goal is the reader thinking 'how are you in my head right now?'
How to run it
- 1
Offer 10 free 15-minute calls
Give away short free calls to prospects or clients. The call is the research instrument, not a sales pitch.
- 2
Ask about the problem and the obstacle
Ask what they want and what's in the way: 'I know you really want to build a personal brand — what's in the way? What are you struggling with?'
Pro tip You're not there to solve it on the call; you're there to hear how they phrase it.
- 3
Transcribe all ten
Use Zoom, Otter, or whatever tool you have to get full transcripts of every interview.
- 4
Extract the language with AI
Put the transcripts into ChatGPT and pull out the language of your audience — their words, their framings, their metaphors.
- 5
Sprinkle it into your marketing
Rewrite landing pages and social content using their exact language rather than yours.
Pro tip The target reaction is 'oh my god, how are you in my head right now?'
Watch out Paraphrasing into your own vocabulary defeats the whole exercise — take their exact language.
In the wild
Johnson observes that when creating landing pages and social content, most people write from their own perspective in their own words. She prescribes ten free 15-minute problem interviews, transcribed and mined via ChatGPT for the audience's actual vocabulary.
→ Flipping to the customers' perspective and words produces way higher conversions and thus more profit — and readers respond as if you're reading their mind.
Common mistakes
Writing marketing in your own words
Founder vocabulary describes the solution as the founder understands it. Prospects scan for their own problem in their own words and don't find it, so they don't convert.
Using the call to pitch
The free 15 minutes is a language-extraction instrument. Pitching contaminates it — you end up hearing reactions to your framing instead of their native framing.
Is it for you?
Best for
Entrepreneurs and creators with an existing offer whose conversion rates are underperforming.
Not ideal for
Pre-audience founders with nobody to interview yet, or products where users can't articulate the problem.
From the transcript
“Set up a free call with 10 prospects or clients. It could be a 15-minute call. What you're going to do is you're going to…”
“When you flip that to your customers' perspective and words, you're going to get way higher conversions and thus be way more profitable.”
“They're like, 'Oh my god, how are you in my head right now?' Like, that is what you want.”
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