029: No, don't use legendary founders' recipe for success.
You can't mimic their intuition. Instead, replicate it with measurement.
👋 Hi, I’m Mike. This is the companion newsletter for my podcast (Spotify, Apple, YouTube).
The recipe for success that works for legendary founders won’t work for you because it relies on their intuition. It’s unfortunate that founders look to advice from Paul Graham, Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel because these legends cannot explain their innate sense for spotting good startup ideas. As for the rest of us, we can’t mimic intuition — repeat founders and pivoting founders have learned this the hard way. The good news is we can replicate intuition with measurement.
Reid Hoffman says to jump off a cliff and assemble the plane on the way down. This advice works for him because he has an innate sense for whether the plane will fly. The rest of us don’t so Hoffman’s advice is a recipe for disaster.
Peter Thiel lists seven questions every business must answer, including “Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see?” He recognizes finding a high-value opportunity is critical but Thiel doesn’t explain how to know when you have one.
Paul Graham has “an internal compass” for recognizing good startup ideas — but he never articulated how it works:
I seem to have some sort of internal compass that helps me out. Maybe I could come up with some heuristics for recognizing genuinely interesting ideas. That’s important enough to write a whole essay about and I don’t know the answer. I probably should write something about that, but I don’t know.
If your first attempt at a startup failed, the bug was likely with your intuition, not your ability or effort. For normal founders without an innate sense for good startup ideas, Nascent is a toolkit, strategy and measurement system to overcome this challenge. Specifically, Nascent offers you frameworks for understanding startups with no customers along with discrete, actionable steps for evaluating a startup idea. The legendary founders get to skip this and barely realize it. The rest of us need to vet startup ideas explicitly. And if we don’t, then we’ll likely waste a year on a bad idea.
Why is this so hard? The most challenging type of business to create is a startup discovering a new type of customer with an unmet need. And the most challenging moment for that customer-breakthrough startup is before the startup has customers. A founder of a customer-breakthrough startup needs to create knowledge about (1) the problem, (2) the people with a problem and (3) the technology solution. And at the beginning, when a startup has no customers, the founder has the least amount of knowledge so they face the biggest challenge.
Ultimately, a successful customer-breakthrough startup will be based on knowledge that comes from customers. Founders of startups with no customers face a Catch-22: How can they get customers so they can create knowledge to get more customers? This question is insidious and misleading because most startups will never meaningfully get customers and kick off that virtuous cycle. The better question is: What are the chances of the startup ever getting customers? To answer this, the legendary founders leverage their intuition. The rest of us need to begin by identifying People in Pain™.
Anyone who’s ever been a customer of anything ever, always began as a Person in Pain. The first and most crucial step is searching for People in Pain who emotionally resonate with the problem that the startup will solve. Founders need to search for these People in Pain who are hurting as the first signal that the startup might someday have customers. The catch is that customers are visible (you can see them paying money) whereas People in Pain are invisible (you cannot see their feelings). Most people in this world are Blockers who will never care about the startup. However, if you’re lucky, somewhere buried in the Blockers are a few People in Pain. Your job as a founder is to find a few of those hidden People in Pain before you waste a year.
Want to put this into practice? Your first step is to record one conversation with someone who might benefit from your startup and categorize the Pain. In the coming posts, I’ll detail how to take these inputs and turn them into Estimated Revenue Next Year, Nascent’s metric for evaluating a startup idea with no customers.
Mike supports founders of pivoting startups who want to quickly decide a new direction using structure, not intuition. Book a call with me to protect your remaining runway by calculating Estimated Revenue Next Year for your pivot ideas.
For the past 10 years, I’ve been building Nascent as the strategy for startups with no customers. As of 2026, I’m publishing Nascent, a few ideas at a time, in regular podcast episodes. This is the companion newsletter that summarizes the podcast. For a deeper dive, check out the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.