making money with secret knowledge using the johari window

As I thought about it more, I believe there is a type of knowledge that separates the businesses that struggle from the ones that dominate.

It's what I call "secret knowledge."

Not secret because it's locked away somewhere, but secret because nobody bothers to look for it.

While everyone else copies what's obvious, the smart money goes where others won't.

In this essay, I go into what "secret knowledge" is, how you can find it, and how it could make you more money.

understanding secret knowledge through the johari window

The Johari Window was created by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in 1955 to help people understand self-awareness and interpersonal communication.

It's a simple 2x2 matrix:

Top-left: Known to self, known to others (public knowledge)Top-right: Unknown to self, known to others (blind spots)Bottom-left: Known to self, unknown to others (hidden thoughts)Bottom-right: Unknown to self, unknown to others (unconscious needs)

In business, this framework reveals where real competitive advantages hide.

The top half is surface-level information. What customers tell you in surveys, what's obvious from market research, what everyone already knows.

The bottom half contains the secret knowledge.

Bottom-left: The private thoughts, fears, and desires customers know but won't admit publicly. The shame, insecurities, and hidden motivations they keep to themselves.

Bottom-right: The unconscious needs and wants they don't even realize they have. The problems they can't articulate because they don't know these problems exist.

Most businesses live in the top half. They ask customers what they want and build exactly that. They write copy addressing obvious pain points everyone talks about.

But when you tap into the bottom half, everything changes.

applying secret knowledge to copywriting

The bottom half of the Johari Window is where copywriting magic happens.

Think about it, copywriting is fundamentally about understanding what moves people. And what really moves people isn't always what they'll tell you in a survey.

Sometimes it's the private thoughts they'd never admit out loud (bottom-left). Sometimes it's desires they don't even know they have until you name them (bottom-right).

The best copywriters don't just address stated needs. They make the hidden conscious and the unconscious conscious.

There's a principle that explains why this works: "When you can describe someone's problem better than they can, they automatically assume that you have the solution."

Here's what this could look like in practice.

Let’s say we sell fitness coaching

Surface-level copy: 

"We help busy people get in shape with quick, effective workouts you can do anytime."

This addresses obvious stuff — busy schedule, no time. Nothing wrong with it, but nothing special either.

Bottom-left copy (hidden thoughts): 

"You've told yourself a hundred times you'd start Monday. You know you're not lazy—you're scared of failing again. That's what's really holding you back."

This speaks to the private shame they never say out loud not just about lacking discipline, but also on the fear of failure and broken self-trust.

Bottom-right copy (unconscious desires): 

"You don't just want to lose weight. You want to feel like someone who has their life together. You want to walk into a room and feel like you belong there."

This names a desire they feel but couldn't articulate—fitness as identity transformation, not only physical change.

When copy hits the bottom half, it creates an instant "mind-reading" effect.

The prospect thinks: "How did they know exactly what I was thinking?"

This builds immediate trust and positions you as someone who truly understands them.

Once again…

applying secret knowledge to product development

Product breakthroughs come from understanding the bottom half of the Johari Window—both the hidden thoughts customers won't admit and the unconscious needs they don't even know they have.

bottom left johari window:

Take Slack, for example.

The surface-level need was "better team communication." But I believe Slack's real insight was addressing a bottom-left frustration: people were tired of feeling stupid and out of the loop in email chains. They knew internal communication made them look disorganized, but perhaps they'd never admit this openly. Slack built for the hidden desire to feel more competent and connected at work.

Btw, I don’t know this is exactly what the Slack founders were thinking but I’m guessing it could be one of the unconscious mental models that went into the thought process of the product.

bottom right johari window:

Consider Instagram. If you'd asked people what they wanted from a photo app before it launched, they would have said: "Better quality photos" or "More storage" or "Easier sharing."

But Instagram's genius was recognizing an unconscious desire: people wanted to feel like photographers. They wanted to transform ordinary moments into something that looked artistically significant.

Nobody was asking for "make my lunch look like art," but that's exactly what Instagram delivered. They built for a need that existed in the bottom-right quadrant—something people didn't know they wanted until they experienced it.

Airbnb is another example. The surface-level need was "cheaper accommodation." But the unconscious desire was "feel like a local, not a tourist." The ability to stay in someone's actual neighborhood, to have a unique story about where you stayed, to feel connected to a place instead of isolated in a hotel district.

These companies solved both stated and unstated problems but they could only do that because they discovered needs customers couldn't articulate—needs the customers didn't know existed in the first place—"secret knowledge".

using AI

AI can dramatically accelerate your ability to uncover both types of bottom-half insights.

Large language models are trained on massive amounts of text data, including places where people express their real thoughts anonymously—Reddit threads, review sites, forums, comment sections.

This is where people reveal their bottom-left thoughts. Things they'd never say in a business meeting but will share when they feel anonymous and safe.

You can prompt AI to analyze patterns across this data:

"What are the hidden fears people have about starting a business that they don't usually admit publicly?"

"What unconscious needs might someone have when choosing productivity software that they couldn't articulate in a feature request?"

"What private thoughts do people have about their appearance that they'd never say publicly?"

AI can identify patterns across thousands of data points that would take humans months to process manually.

But this is hypothesis generation, not final truth.

AI will give you an educated guess, which for the most part I believe is correct about what might be happening in the bottom half of the Johari Window, yet you still need to validate these insights through real human contact.

validation through customer interviews and prototypes

For bottom-left insights, customer interviews are your validation tool.

However, you can't just ask

 "What are your fears about starting a business?" 

Most people won't give you honest answers in a direct interview.

Instead, you create safe spaces for them to reveal hidden thoughts:

"Tell me about a time you almost started something but didn't. What was really going through your mind?"

"Walk me through the last time you tried to change something in your life. What happened?"

"Describe a moment when you felt like everyone else had figured something out that you hadn't."

"Tell me about a time when you wanted to ask for help but didn't. What stopped you?"

The insights come from the stories they tell, not the direct answers they give.

You're listening for the emotions behind their experiences, the patterns in their behavior, the things they reveal without meaning to.

But customer interviews alone aren't enough for bottom-right discovery.

People can't tell you about needs they don't know they have. This is where prototypes become essential. You build something based on your hypothesis about unconscious needs, then watch how people actually use it.

The bottom-right reveals itself through behavior and feedback.

Do they use it repeatedly?

Do they find unexpected ways to use it?

Do they struggle to explain why they like it but keep coming back?

And the best test of it all… are they paying you money for it?

the competitive advantage of operating deeper

With all that said, most businesses can probably survive operating in the top half of the Johari Window.

You can build a decent business addressing obvious needs with straightforward messaging. Many successful companies do exactly this.

But the bottom half is where you create category dominance.

When you speak to hidden thoughts customers didn't know you understood, your copy doesn't just convert—it creates evangelists.

When you build for unconscious needs people didn't know they had, you don't just get users—you create addiction.

The bottom half is where the real money lives because that's where real differentiation happens both in your product and messaging.

I think most won't do this work because obviously it's hard.

It's harder than copying obvious strategies. It requires genuine curiosity about human psychology. It demands patience to dig deeper than surface-level research.

But I think just recognizing and understanding in the first place that "secret knowledge" exists and continuously aim to uncover that, would help you get closer to the success that you want—it's all a process which you might not get done immediately from day 1.

But when you continuously work on this over time, you'll eventually uncover secret knowledge and start to build a sustainable competitive advantage aka your moat.

And then as everyone else fights over the obvious opportunities, you're be building on insights they don't even know exist.

The secret knowledge isn't really secret—it's just systematically ignored.

So stop ignoring it. Start searching for it.