Most marketing advice tells you to chase the people who are already shopping. Bid on their search terms, retarget their visits, answer their comparison questions. It works, but it puts you in a bidding war with everyone else chasing the same small pool of ready buyers. There’s a much larger group standing right next to that pool, and almost nobody is talking to them.
ScoreApp co-founder Daniel Priestley built a career on that gap, and one story from early in his working life shows exactly how much it’s worth. At 23, a single afternoon spent rewriting a newspaper advert earned him a $90,000 commission, not because he found new customers, but because he changed who the advert was speaking to.
Two events, two very different crowds
Priestley was helping set up chairs for a business event expecting a strong turnout. Next door, a financial planning firm was running a smaller event and pulling chairs out of the room because they expected fewer people than planned. The firm’s organiser walked over and asked a simple question: they had spent more on advertising than Priestley’s event, so why were so few people showing up?
Priestley asked to see the newspaper ad the firm had run. The headline read something like “Brisbane’s most awarded financial planning firm,” followed by a list of awards, years in business, and the range of funds on offer. It read like a resume. The problem wasn’t the budget behind it. The problem was who it was written for.
That kind of headline only lands with someone already comparing financial planners on their qualifications, which is a tiny slice of the market. Priestley offered to rewrite the ad for free, on the condition that he’d take ten percent of whatever uplift it generated over the following six months. The firm agreed. He spent one day on the rewrite. Over the next six months, the new version brought in an extra $900,000 in business, and Priestley collected $90,000 for that single day of work.
Dormant frustration beats active searching
The rewrite worked because it targeted a different kind of buyer. Priestley separates the market into two groups. Active buyers are already searching, already comparing options, and already have a budget and a checklist in mind. Dormant buyers have a frustration sitting under the surface, but they haven’t gone looking for a fix yet.
Most businesses chase the active group because it feels safer, but Priestley argues that’s backwards for two reasons. First, active buyers arrive with rigid criteria that rule you out fast. Someone hunting for a gym with CrossFit classes at under $59 a month will dismiss a better, safer alternative at $79 without a second look, simply because it doesn’t match the checklist they walked in with.
Second, the dormant group is just bigger. Ask a stadium of 20,000 people who is actively looking for a business coach right now, and maybe a hundred hands go up. Ask who owns a business and feels frustrated with how it’s growing, and thousands of hands go up. Priestley points to a similar gap in fitness: research shows roughly 68 percent of British adults are unhappy with their current fitness level, yet fewer than 20 percent plan to join a gym in the coming year. The frustration is everywhere. The active search demand is a fraction of it.
Becoming the business that supplies the lightbulb moment
Here’s the part that makes this more than a copywriting trick. Whoever gives a dormant buyer their first moment of clarity about their own problem becomes the default choice. Priestley calls it the lightbulb moment: a person realises why they’re stuck, and the business that handed them that realisation is suddenly the one they trust to fix it. Competing offers barely get a look in unless something clearly better shows up fast.
That’s the shift Priestley made with the financial planning ad. Instead of leading with credentials, he opened with the feeling: “Feeling crabby watching your investments move sideways?” paired with an image of a crab clutching a banknote. The copy leaned into the frustration of checking your statement every month and seeing no gains, then offered a conversation with a financial planner as the natural next step. Same firm, same team, same offer. A completely different headline reoriented who felt the ad was written for them, and that’s what expanded the pool of people willing to respond.
Anyone running lead generation today can apply the same thinking, a point covered in more detail in this breakdown of lead generation principles fast-growth companies rely on. The pattern holds across industries: name the frustration before pitching the fix.
Turning a frustration headline into a working system
A strong frustration headline is a start, but it needs somewhere to send the reader once they’ve clicked. This is where a diagnostic tool does more work than a static landing page. ScoreApp lets a business turn a frustration headline into a short interactive assessment, so instead of dropping a visitor onto a generic contact form, the next step is a set of questions that name the problem in their own words.
The structure is straightforward. Open with the frustration, something like “Feeling frustrated that your marketing keeps missing?” Follow it with a short series of questions, commonly around fifteen, that diagnose what’s actually happening. Then hand the visitor a personalised result: what’s likely causing the problem, and what to do about it. That result page is where the business earns the trust to be the next call the visitor makes, rather than one of several tabs still open in their browser.
This is the mechanism behind what ScoreApp calls scorecard marketing, and it’s worth reading the fuller explanation of how to get started with Priestley’s scorecard method if the concept is new. Businesses that have shipped a scorecard already know the value of avoiding the obvious pitfalls, and this rundown of common lead magnet landing page mistakes is a useful check before publishing a new one.
Where to find the frustration in your own market
Finding a frustration headline worth testing starts with a plain question: what are people in your market annoyed about before they’ve thought to search for a solution? A gym doesn’t need someone typing “personal trainer near me.” It needs the version of that person who’s frustrated about clothes fitting differently since the holidays and hasn’t connected that feeling to any specific action yet. A cybersecurity firm doesn’t only want the IT director already comparing vendors. It wants the one quietly worried about the last attack in the news, who hasn’t made a move.
Once that frustration is named clearly, in the customer’s own language rather than industry jargon, the headline nearly writes itself. The harder part is resisting the instinct to list credentials, features, or awards in that first line. Priestley’s rewritten ad didn’t drop the financial planning firm’s expertise; it just moved that proof further down the page, after the reader already felt understood.
Businesses that want to test this without rebuilding an entire funnel can start with a single scorecard aimed at one dormant frustration and measure the response against whatever their current lead form produces. A free ScoreApp account includes templates built around this exact structure, along with Priestley’s own Scorecard Marketing book for anyone who wants the fuller framework behind it.
The next step
The lesson from a single afternoon of ad-rewriting in Brisbane hasn’t aged in the twenty-five years since. Most advertising still talks to the small group already shopping, while a much larger, quieter group of frustrated prospects waits for someone to name what’s bothering them first. Writing to that second group, then giving them a clear next step, is what turned one rewritten headline into $900,000 of new business.
Anyone ready to put this into practice can build a frustration-led scorecard and start testing it against their current lead capture within the hour, using ScoreApp’s free tier to launch the first version and see what kind of response it pulls.
