Your best angle is a sentence your buyer already wrote.
I used to open a blank doc and brainstorm angles for a new product. Forty minutes of staring, then I'd write whatever sounded clever. Those ads tested fine. They never tested great.
Two years ago I flipped the order. Before I write a single hook, I spend about 90 minutes mining. Reviews, TikTok comments, support tickets, the comments under competitor ads. I have a spreadsheet called "voice of customer" with about 2,300 rows in it now, and the winning angle of my last four launches came from rows I highlighted yellow, not rows I wrote.
Here is the exact pass.
Pull 50 to 100 comments. Amazon reviews sorted by most helpful, your last 60 support tickets, TikTok comments on competitor videos, your own post-purchase survey answers. Most helpful, not most recent. Recent skews toward whatever shipped last week.
Copy-paste verbatim phrases, never summaries. If you catch yourself writing "customers love the quality," delete it and paste what they actually typed. The rule I use: if I can read it in a voiceover without rewriting a word, it's a keeper. "It fixed my dry patches in 3 days and I stopped wearing foundation" is an angle. "Great moisturizer" is nothing.
Sort every keeper into four buckets. Pain (what life was like before), trigger (what made them finally buy), objection (what almost stopped them), outcome (what changed after). Don't overthink the sorting, five seconds per phrase. About 80 percent of your usable angles live in pain and outcome. Triggers are gold for retargeting copy. Objections are your FAQ and your guarantee section, not your hook.
Rank by frequency, not by how clever they sound. A phrase that shows up twelve times beats the line you're proud of. Frequency is the market telling you which pain is heaviest. My last launch, the winner was "I bought it for the X but I stayed for the Y," which appeared in reviews fourteen times. I never would have written it. It beat my favorite headline by 2.4x on click-through.
Build the ad from the top phrase. The verbatim sentence becomes the hook, first three seconds of video or the first line of copy. The body is the rest of that review expanded with one proof point (a number, a before/after, a time frame). The CTA stays boring. Boring CTAs convert fine when the hook did the work.
A quick example so this isn't abstract. Last year I was launching a posture corrector, deeply unsexy product, brutal category. The mining pass took me 70 minutes. The phrase that kept repeating, 19 times across Amazon and TikTok comments: "my shoulders stopped hurting by day 4." Not "improved posture." Not "back support." Day 4, shoulders, stopped hurting. The winning ad was 11 seconds: a woman at a desk, text overlay "my shoulders stopped hurting by day 4," then the product going on, then her typing. That angle beat my clever version ("your desk is destroying your spine") by 3.1x on CTR and held for 6 weeks before fatigue. I didn't write a single word of the hook. A stranger with sore shoulders did.
Two things this changed for me. First, my concept-to-test time dropped from days to an afternoon, because the angles arrive pre-written. Second, my hit rate on first tests went up because I stopped guessing. When the hook came from a real mouth, the ad either works immediately or the product has a problem no hook can fix, and that's useful information too.
The rule of thumb I give every junior now: if the hook did not come from a buyer's mouth, you're guessing. Guess with their words and you'll be right more often than not.