Your Customers Already Wrote Your Ads
Marketers write copy. Customers write the truth, on Reddit, at one in the morning. The skill that mines their exact words into ranked pains, a swipe file, and ten testable angles.
When my ad agent needs a new angle, it doesn't brainstorm. It reads Reddit.
That's where people describe a problem the way they'd tell a friend at one in the morning, not the way a marketer would write it. The phrase that becomes your best hook is already sitting there with two hundred upvotes on it.
One creator in our study, a former Meta ads employee, said this exact thing to 184,000 people: the best ad copy she writes now comes straight from Reddit. We've been doing it for clients for a year. This skill mines the language, ranks the pains, and hands you ten angles you can test this week. Every phrase traced to a real thread. Nothing invented.
The three levels
Sit in a room and guess what customers are thinking. Write ads in marketing language. Wonder why nobody clicks.
Point the skill at three subreddits, get the ranked pains, the verbatim swipe file, and ten angles with the customer's own words as hooks.
The mining runs monthly, new pains flow to the content board and the ad-creative queue, and winners get traced back to the thread that produced them.
The free skill
It harvests verbatim pains, desires, and objections from the subreddits you name, ranks the pains by frequency and intensity, builds a 30–50 phrase swipe file with sources, and writes 8–10 distinct angles with the customer's own words as the hooks.
---
name: reddit-angles
description: Mines the subreddits where your customers actually complain, ask, and argue — then turns their exact phrasing into ranked pain points, a swipe file of real customer language, and 8–10 testable ad and content angles. Trigger on "find ad angles on Reddit", "what are customers actually saying", "mine Reddit for my niche", "customer language research".
---
# Reddit Angles
The best ad copy is written by the customer. Reddit is where people describe their
problems the way they'd tell a friend, not the way a marketer would. This skill pulls
that language out and turns it into angles you can test the same week.
## Before you start (connector-first)
Pick 3–5 subreddits where the target customer actually talks — not where marketers talk
about them. Get the threads through a connected source: a Reddit connector or scraper via
a connector hub, or the free repo at github.com/drleadflow/thumbnail-system-starter which
reads subreddit feeds as an idea source. Manual fallback: the top-of-week RSS/Atom feed
for a subreddit is public and reliable when the JSON API blocks servers; titles alone
carry most of the signal. Pull the top 25–50 threads from the last week or month.
Never invent a quote. Every phrase in the swipe file must be traceable to a real thread.
## Step 1: Harvest the language
From titles, posts, and top comments, collect verbatim phrases in three buckets:
- **Pains:** what's broken, what they're sick of, what they tried that failed.
- **Desires:** what they want it to feel like when it works. Often hidden inside
complaints ("I just want to open my inbox without dreading it").
- **Objections & skepticism:** why they don't believe the usual promises, what they
call a scam, what they've been burned by.
Keep the exact words. "It just sits in my inbox" beats any rewrite.
## Step 2: Rank the pains
Cluster the phrases into 6–10 pain points. Rank by frequency × intensity (upvotes,
comment count, emotional language). Report each with 2–3 verbatim quotes and the thread
count behind it.
## Step 3: Build the swipe file
30–50 phrases, organized by bucket, quoted exactly, source thread noted. This file is
the deliverable people keep — it's the customer's vocabulary, and every ad, hook, email,
and landing page should be written from it.
## Step 4: Turn language into angles
Write 8–10 angles. Each must be a DIFFERENT problem, desire, or objection — ten versions
of one idea is one angle. For each: the customer phrase it comes from, the hook line
built from that phrase (their words, lightly tightened), the format it suits (ad, reel,
carousel, email), and the objection it pre-empts.
## Step 5: Rank the angles for testing
Sort by evidence strength — how many threads, how intense, how specific. Mark the top
three as this week's tests. Note which angle belongs on the landing page, not just in an
ad: a winning angle is customer research they already paid for.
## Rules
- Their words, not marketing words. If a phrase sounds like a brand wrote it, it's out.
- Quote short. Attribute to the subreddit and thread, not a username.
- An empty or thin subreddit is a finding — report it and pick another.
Want angles like this feeding your ads every month?
Inside the AI CEO Lab I teach the full creative research loop run by agents. Or my agency does the research and the ads.