031.3: Yes, their Pain is your opportunity.
The more hurting people you find, the bigger the opportunity.
👋 Hi, I’m Mike and I’m obsessed with startups with no customers. This newsletter 031.3 📬 is a deep dive into Pain as a signal of opportunity, as discussed in Episode 031 of the Nascent podcast 🎧 (Spotify, Apple, YouTube).
Yes, the opportunity for your startup’s success is based in other People’s Pain. Identifying People in Pain™ is the first and most important step to creating a viable startup so the more hurting people you find, the bigger the opportunity for your startup.
To do this, founders run discovery interviews. Most importantly, the interviewee needs to discuss their emotional state the last time they faced the problem you want to solve. Nascent has a tool called the Yardstick of Pain™ that founders use to analyze the raw transcript from an interview. Specifically, founders categorize an interviewee’s emotions as either hurting, fine or joyous. This is how they felt about the problem previously and how they expect to feel when they encounter the problem again. It’s both historical and predictive.
The Yardstick also shows how a product is a Pain-relief device, like an arrow that moves a Person in Pain along the Yardstick. The origin of the arrow is their current Pain — the experience they described in the interview.
So your goal as a founder is to run discovery interviews and you’re hoping to find an opportunity to deliver Pain relief. Through this lens, the Yardstick of Pain lets you identify which interviewees present an opportunity.
People who are joyous have nowhere to go. They will never be customers.
Technically, if someone is fine, you can try to get them to joyous, but that’s extremely hard. My favorite example of this is the movie Gladiator where Russell Crowe is in a battle at the Colosseum. After he slays the other fighters he shouts “Are you not entertained?!” And that’s the thing — getting people to feel “entertained,” to move from fine to joyous is incredibly difficult. By comparison, it’s easier, not easy, but easier to take people who are hurting and move them closer to feeling fine.
The best problems for your startup to solve belong to accessible, empowered People who have frequent, expensive, excruciating Pain. A good example of somebody who is accessible is a little kid. You can walk around town, bump into one and ask, “Hey, do you want some ice cream?” Of course the answer is yes but the problem is that a child has no power — they would have to get money from their parents. By contrast, billionaires have all the power in the world. They could buy ice cream or anything else they want. But they’re not accessible. Most people in the world will never speak with a billionaire.
So, as a founder, you’re searching for special people who are both empowered to spend money and accessible to you. And if you can find these rare, special people then you want to see if they have frequent, expensive, excruciating Pain. The problem has to happen to these People often — hopefully in the last few days or weeks. It needs to be really costly. And it has to have that emotional resonance, which we categorize as hurting on the Yardstick of Pain.
The more people you can find with these unique traits, the more reason you have to invest time in your startup. And if all the people you speak with are fine or joyous, then that’s also a useful signal it’s probably not worth investing a lot more time in this specific startup idea.
Mike supports founders of pivoting startups who want to avoid wasting another year on a bad idea. Book a call with me at NascentIdea.com.
For the past 10 years, I’ve been building Nascent as the strategy for quantifying product discovery. As of 2026, I’m publishing Nascent, a few ideas at a time, in regular newsletter posts and podcast episodes. This is Post 031.3 📬, a deep dive into the concept that other people’s pain is your opportunity, discussed in Ep031 🎧 (15 mins). Read the rest of the deep dives: 031.1: products imply hidden pain and 031.2: money is a metric for pain.