Before Brunson lets you commit to a market, he asks whether the people in it are irrationally passionate.1
Not interested. Not curious.
Irrationally passionate — the kind of people who bring the topic up when nobody asked, who'd rather talk about it than almost anything else.
And he starts by turning the question on you: are you irrationally passionate about your topic? Do you always bring it up, even when no one else seems to care?2
That's the first filter. If you're not that person about your subject, the market probably isn't there either — because the passion you're looking for in the market is the passion you'd need in yourself to sustain it.
Brunson gives four things to look for that reveal whether a market is irrationally passionate.3
Communities. Are there forums, message boards, Facebook groups, subreddits, YouTube channels, podcasts, blogs — places where people gather specifically to geek out on this?
Vocabulary. Does the market have its own language? Internet marketers say "autoresponder" and "squeeze page." Biohackers say "ketones" and "blood panels." A private vocabulary is a sign of a real subculture.
Events. Are there conferences, seminars, summits, meetups? A market used to gathering is a market you can gather.
Other experts. Are there already established gurus and celebrities selling here? Counterintuitively, you want this — you don't want to be the first celebrity in a market.
That last sign inverts the usual instinct, and it's the sharpest part of the test.
You'd think an empty market — no existing experts — is opportunity. Brunson says it's usually a warning. If nobody has built a following here, it may be because there's no passion to build one on.4
Established experts prove three things at once: there's demand, people pay, and a subculture exists to sell into.
Their presence is validation, not obstruction. The empty market you thought was opportunity is often just a market nobody could make work.
This sits in productive tension with the whole create-a-niche, blue-ocean thrust of the surrounding chapters. There, competition is bloody water to avoid. Here, existing experts are proof of life. The resolution: you want a passionate submarket (proven by existing experts) and a clear niche within it (created by you). Competition at the submarket level is validation; competition at the niche level is a fight.
Of the four signs, vocabulary is the most diagnostic and the least obvious, so it's worth isolating.
A private vocabulary means the group has spent enough time together to invent language. You don't develop jargon for something you're casually interested in. Jargon is what happens when a community discusses a thing so much that ordinary words become insufficient.
So vocabulary is a proxy for accumulated collective attention. "Ketones," "split testing," "EDC" (everyday carry), "TBR" (to-be-read pile) — each one is fossil evidence of a community that talked enough to need shorthand.
And it's hard to fake. You can astroturf a forum or buy event attendance, but a genuine private vocabulary emerges only from real sustained passion. When you find one, you've found a market that was passionate before you arrived and will be after — which is exactly what you want to build on.
Underneath the four signs, the test is screening for one thing: markets where demand is intrinsic rather than manufactured.
An irrationally passionate market wants the thing already. You don't have to convince them to care; they arrive caring. Your job is positioning and delivery, not demand-creation, which is a vastly easier job.
A merely-interested market is the opposite. The demand has to be built, sustained, re-lit constantly, and it collapses the moment you stop pushing. That's a much harder business and most people underestimate how much harder.
Brunson's whole system — the movements, the identities, the causes — works far better on top of pre-existing passion than as a substitute for it. The test is where he checks that the passion is there to build on.
Two failure modes the four signs don't catch.
Passionate but broke. A market can be irrationally passionate and unable to pay — teenage gamers, hobbyists with no disposable income. All four signs light up; the wallet doesn't. This is why the willing-and-able test exists as a separate check.
Passionate but saturated at every level. Some markets are so passionate that even the niches are crowded — every angle already has a celebrity. The passion is real and so is the competition, all the way down. The test tells you the market's alive; it doesn't tell you there's room.
So passing the passion test is necessary and not sufficient. It screens out dead markets. It doesn't screen out broke ones or full ones, and Brunson runs those as separate filters for exactly that reason.
You're deciding whether a market is worth building in.
First, check yourself. Are you the person who won't shut up about this topic? If you have to manufacture your own interest, sustaining a business on it will be brutal, and the market probably lacks the passion too.
Then hunt for the four signs. Search for the communities — are there active groups, and are they active, not ghost towns? Listen for the vocabulary — does the market have words outsiders wouldn't know? Look for events. And look for existing experts, wanting to find them rather than fearing them.
Weight vocabulary and community activity most heavily. Events can be organized and experts can be fooled, but a living private vocabulary and a genuinely active community are the hardest signals to fake and the best evidence of real passion.
Then run the other two filters separately: is this passionate market also able to pay, and is there still a clear niche within it? Passion alone gets you a lively audience that might be broke or over-served. You need all three.
An irrationally passionate market has active communities, its own vocabulary, real events, and established experts. The people bring the topic up unprompted and organize their lives partly around it. Demand is intrinsic — they arrive caring.
A merely interested market has scattered casual attention, no special language, no gatherings, and no one who's built a following. People will engage when it's free and convenient and forget it otherwise. Demand must be manufactured and re-manufactured constantly.
The four signs distinguish these reliably. What they don't tell you is whether the passionate market can pay or has room left — those are the next two questions.
Asserted from experience, the four signs offered as heuristics without data.5 They're plausible and match common marketing wisdom about community and demand, but they're Brunson's framing, not measured findings.
Tension: the "want existing experts" sign contradicts the surrounding create-a-niche, avoid-competition thrust. The resolution (passionate submarket, clear niche) is coherent but Brunson never states it cleanly, leaving two chapters that appear to give opposite advice about competition.
Second tension: passion and payment are independent, and the test only checks passion. A market can pass every sign and still be broke, which is why the willing-and-able test is mandatory alongside it. The passion test alone will lead the credulous into vibrant, penniless markets.
Open question: can the four signs distinguish genuine passion from manufactured passion — a market that looks alive because a few operators have astroturfed communities and coined vocabulary? Vocabulary is hard to fake at scale, but the test has no explicit fraud check.
Convergence with the vault's creator-economy corpus is strong — the emphasis on communities, subcultures, and pre-existing passion echoes the audience-first thinking in the Koe and Moses material, which similarly treats an engaged niche as the foundational asset.
The productive tension is internal to Brunson: the passion test wants existing experts, the niche-creation chapters want empty water. Read charitably, he's saying validate the submarket by its crowd and create the niche in its clearing — but the two chapters, taken at face value, point in opposite directions, and a careless reader could take either as the rule.
To Mass Movement Mechanics. An irrationally passionate market is, in Hoffer's terms, a population primed for a movement — people already emotionally invested, already organized into communities, already speaking a shared language. Brunson's four signs are, read through Hoffer, a checklist for movement-readiness.
The insight neither reaches alone: the same features that mark a good market to sell into mark a population ripe for a leader to capture. Communities, shared vocabulary, gatherings, existing authority figures — these are Hoffer's preconditions for mass mobilization and Brunson's preconditions for a profitable niche. The market researcher and the movement-builder are scouting for the identical thing, which is why Brunson's business system and his cult-ure system share a foundation: both need a passionate, organized population to work on.
To Status Signaling. A private vocabulary is a status marker — knowing the jargon signals membership, and using it correctly signals depth. The status corpus explains why communities develop specialized language: it lets members display insider status and detect outsiders.
Held with the passion test: the vocabulary that proves a market is passionate is also the mechanism its members use to signal status to each other, which means a passionate market is one where status is actively traded. That's doubly valuable to an operator — the passion proves demand, and the status-trading means members will pay for things that signal deeper insider standing. The jargon isn't just evidence the market is alive; it's evidence the market has a status economy you can sell into.
Sharpest implication. The counterintuitive core is that existing competition is a good sign at the market level — empty markets are usually empty because there's no passion to build on, and established experts prove demand, payment, and a subculture all at once. The test screens for intrinsic demand, the kind you don't have to manufacture, which is the difference between an easy business and a brutal one. But passing it is necessary, not sufficient: it can't tell you whether the passionate market can pay or has room, which is why it must run alongside the willing-and-able and niche-clearance checks.
Generative questions.
Can the four signs distinguish organic passion from astroturfed passion, in an era where communities and vocabulary can be manufactured — and if not, how does an operator avoid building on a faked market?
If the features of a good market and a movement-ready population are identical, does choosing a market to serve unavoidably mean choosing a population to potentially exploit — and is there any version of market selection that isn't also target selection?