👋 Hi, I’m Mike and I’m obsessed with product discovery, measured in dollars. This newsletter is a deep dive into monetizing Pain, as discussed in Episode 032 of the Nascent podcast (Spotify, Apple, YouTube).
Nascent enables founders to generate a value for a startup idea by analyzing customer discovery interviews using a 3-step process that delivers a dollar-based metric. Specifically, Nascent has founders run each recorded conversation through these steps:
Characterize interviewee’s emotions as hurting, fine or joyous using the Yardstick of Pain™, as detailed in Episode 027 and Episode 028.
Convert emotions to a dollar-based signal. We use behavioral economics and psychology to get an initial signal. (The focus of Episode 032.)
Measure effort in dollars — Go from the rough signal to a specific dollar-based measurement, as detailed in future posts.
In Episode 31, we discussed how every product is a Pain-relief device that helps People in Pain get closer to feeling fine. From that perspective the value of a product is determined by how a Person in Pain feels initially. Nascent uses an interviewee’s “origin” on the Yardstick to assign a dollar-value for their Pain:
Hurting means the Person has $1 of Pain.
Fine means the Person has $0 of Pain.
Joyous means the Person has −$1 of Pain.
This assignment of dollars to feelings reflects the emotional journey of a Person in Pain going from origin (their current Pain) to destination (feeling fine).
A person with an origin at fine has $0 of Pain because they have nowhere to go. They’re already at the end of their journey. They have no need for Pain relief, no need for a product. In other words, how much might they pay your startup? Zero dollars.
Even worse is a person who feels joyous. This person needs to go backwards to get to fine. A product would provide them with negative Pain relief. It would take away their joy. So if you want them as customers for your startup, you’re going to have to pay them. How much might you have to pay them? Let’s simplify and call it −$1.
And then there are people who are hurting. Special people with meaningful Pain, who have the potential to go on the journey from hurting to fine. They might pay some amount of money to feel better. They present an opportunity for your startup to deliver Pain relief. Maybe that’s 10¢; maybe it’s $10M. At this point, let’s not worry about exactly how much they would pay and instead capture the positive signal. So we’re just going to simplify and call it $1 of Pain.
The benefit of this mapping is that it enables founders to make better decisions faster. By monetizing emotions, we can more clearly identify who’ll pay our startup and why. People with $1 of Pain might become customers, but People with $0 of Pain or −$1 of Pain are valuable counter examples of who will not become customers.
Founders today disregard and overlook interviewees who won’t become customers. I think that’s a huge waste — there’s tremendous utility in assigning null values and understanding why those values are null. As founders, we naturally focus on finding customers to pay our startup. Nascent takes a more holistic perspective: identifying people who will not become customers also allows us to create valuable knowledge and make progress in vetting our startup idea.
The most common outcome in entrepreneurship is that founders waste a year before recognizing that a startup idea will not meaningfully get customers. This dollar-based signal enables founders to be decisive in days about whether to invest more time. If a founder runs batches of discovery interviews and only finds People with $0 of Pain, then the Estimated Revenue Next Year (ERNY) for the startup is $0. The value of the startup idea is $0. By contrast, the more dollars of Pain a founder can identify, the higher the ERNY value and the more reason for the founder to keep investing time in the startup idea.
Mike supports founders of pivoting startups who want to avoid wasting another year on a bad idea. I offer personalized workshops that train your team to reliably analyze discovery interviews. 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 032.3 📬, a deep dive into converting interviews into dollars discussed in Ep032 🎧 (18 mins). The deep dives are 032.1: why people who feel fine won’t buy and 032.2: what drives a purchase.