Partway into my years as a family medicine doctor, something clicked that I didn’t expect. It had nothing to do with a new treatment or a clever diagnosis. It was the plain realization that the exam room was never really about the medicine. It was about finding out what your customer wants and helping them get there.
That idea followed me straight into the business I never expected to start after medicine: online teaching and publishing. Whether you’re building a list, selling a course, or simply trying to keep a handful of subscribers opening your emails, the same rule applies. You cannot help someone find their way out of a problem you don’t fully understand.
Here’s what I’ve noticed lately. The way people search for answers has changed. They’re not just typing a question into a search bar anymore. They’re asking AI assistants, reading reviews, comparing options and scrolling through forums, often before they ever land on your site. If you want to be part of that conversation, you need to know what your customer wants before you can ever hope to answer it.
Where People Actually Look for Answers Now
A few years ago, if someone wanted to know whether a certain kind of online business could work for them, they typed a question into a search engine and clicked through a handful of results.
Now that same person might ask an AI assistant instead. And here’s the part worth sitting with: research into how these tools answer questions has found they often run several searches behind the scenes to build one answer. A single question about, say, building an email list can quietly turn into searches for the best approach, real reviews, pricing, comparisons and common complaints.
Your prospective customer never sees any of that happening. They just see the final answer. Which means the old habit of only worrying about your own website is no longer enough.
The Questions Behind the Question
Here’s where it gets useful. Every big question your audience asks is really a bundle of smaller ones.
Someone thinking about starting an online income business isn’t only asking, “How do I do this?” They’re also quietly asking, “Can this really work for me?” They’re asking what it costs, whether other people like them have done it, and what usually goes wrong.
Most of us only answer the first question and ignore the rest. I’ve written about this same gap between what people ask and what we actually address in other articles I’ve shared recently, and it keeps showing up in different forms.
The fix isn’t complicated. It’s slower than most people expect, but it isn’t complicated.
Build Your Own Question List
Start with a notebook, not a spreadsheet. Write down the exact questions your audience asks you, word for word, in emails, comments and conversations.
Don’t clean the language up. If someone writes, “I have tried something like this before, but I have always failed,” write that down exactly. That sentence tells you more about what’s standing between them and a decision than any polished survey ever could.
Once you have twenty or so real questions, sort them loosely. Some are about whether the thing works at all. Some are about cost. Some are about trust, especially from anyone who has been burned by an online vendor before. Some are simply, “What happens next if I try this?”
Each group becomes something you can write toward, whether that’s an email, a page on your site, or a short piece you share with your list.
Say three of your twenty questions turn out to be about trust, from readers who’ve been burned by a vendor before and want proof you’re different. That’s not a single email, it’s a thread you can return to every few weeks: one story showing you deliver, one plainspoken answer to the trust question, one small proof point that costs you nothing but directness.
Show Up Where the Conversation Already Happens
This is the part I think gets overlooked most often. Answering questions on your own site matters, but it isn’t the whole job.
You cannot help someone find their way out of a problem you don’t fully understand.
Your future customer is also reading reviews, asking in forums, and talking to friends who’ve already tried something similar. Being present in those places, openly and without a sales pitch attached, is part of how trust gets built before someone ever reaches your inbox.
I don’t think this means chasing every platform at once. It means paying closer attention to where your own audience already gathers, and showing up there the same way you’d want someone to show up for you. Understand your customer, find out what he wants, figure out where he is stuck, and get to the unsticking of him. That line has carried me through decades of one career and most of a second one.
Turning What You Learn Into Something That Keeps Working
Once you’ve got a real list of the questions your audience is asking, the next problem is what to do with it. Answering the same question by hand, in the same email, over and over, isn’t much of a business.
This is where a written email sequence earns its keep. Instead of scrambling to respond to the same handful of concerns every week, you build the answers once, in the right order, and let that sequence keep introducing new subscribers to what you do.
If you’d like a ready framework for turning what you learn about your audience into an email system that keeps working long after you’ve written it, Lazy Way To Email Riches walks through exactly that. It’s not something I built myself, but it maps closely onto the same principle: understand what your reader wants, then answer it consistently, without reinventing the wheel every time someone new joins your list.
Worth exploring if you’re ready to stop answering the same three questions by hand.
Start Smaller Than You Think You Need To
You don’t need thirty questions and a perfect plan before you begin. Pick five. Write down exactly what your audience has said, in their own words, and let that shape your next email or article.
Maybe two of your five questions are about cost, and the other three are about whether it will actually work for someone with no experience. Write one short piece answering the cost questions plainly, with real numbers where you have them, and another walking through what “no experience” actually looks like once someone starts. That’s two pieces of content built entirely from what your customer wants, not from a guess at what might perform well.
I haven’t learned to do everything in this business yet, and I doubt I ever will. But I’ve learned enough to know that the questions your customers are already asking, wherever they’re asking them, are usually a better guide than anything I could guess on my own.
All the best,
Jon