đ Hi, Iâm Mike and Iâm obsessed with product discovery, measured in dollars. This is the summary newsletter đŹ for Episode 033 of the Nascent podcast đ§ (Spotify, Apple, YouTube).
I hate it when a founder says: âI talked to customers about my startup idea.â That sentence is so commonplace and so contradictory.
If your startup is just an idea, then how can it also have customers? When I push back that theyâre talking about customers their startup doesnât actually have, the founder often responds with something like âOh, come on, you know what I mean.â
Entrepreneurs need to stop talking about customers they donât have
For decades, founders have been encouraged to âfake it till you make itâ and talk about customers, whether they have them or not. Entrepreneurs need to stop talking about customers they donât have. A startup is a project thatâs fundamentally about creating new knowledge, whereas untruth is the antithesis of knowledge. By saying that your startup has something that it doesnât, youâre corrupting your knowledge-creation project.
Sloppy language leads to sloppy thinking, and this has consequences. The most common outcome for a startup is that the founder wastes a year pursuing an idea before deciding that it wonât get customers. One factor driving this unfortunate result is the loose definition of the word âcustomerâ.
For founders with just an idea, there is better language, that leads to better thinking, that ultimately drives better outcomes. Hereâs Nascentâs strategy to address this challenge.
First, founders with just an idea need an accurate name for their audience. Who is a customer before theyâre a customer, or even a prospect? They are a Person in Painâą. Anyone who has ever been a customer of anything ever began as a Person in Pain. Even prospects are too downstream. Instead, founders need to look further upstream for the first sign of a person that could become a customer. That sign comes from a person with emotional pain.
Second, People in Pain sit inside a funnel. As a founder, you want to solve a problem with your startup and you need to identify who that problem applies to. To that end, Nascentâs People-to-Prospect Funnelâą (detailed in Episode 025) maps the journey of everyone in the world down to your startupâs first customers, i.e., the few people who have that problem and pay you for a solution.
The funnel starts with all of the eight billion people in the world. Inherently, almost none of these people care about the problem that the startup wants to solve, so these people are Blockers. Theyâre in the way. Below them are Distractions who donât have the problem, but tell the founder to build the solution anyway. Then there are People in Pain â the first people that resonate with the problem. And then Prospects and finally Customers. The bottom of the funnel is visible: you can identify customers and prospects by their actions. The top three layers are hidden â founders canât easily distinguish between Blockers, Distractions and People in Pain.
Third, imagine people with bank accounts of Pain. In Episode 032, we discussed how to go from a personâs emotions to dollars ($) of Pain. To extend that framework, you can say that a Person in Pain holds an account in the currency of your startupâs problem. The status of that bank account can be positive (they have meaningful pain) or empty (theyâve experienced the problem, but theyâre indifferent) or even negative (what you believe is a problem, they actually consider a pleasure). These People in Pain with âbank accountsâ sit in contrast to Blockers and Distractions who have no bank accounts at all.
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, Iâve been building Nascent as the strategy for quantifying product discovery. As of 2026, Iâm publishing Nascent, a few ideas at a time, in regular newsletter posts and podcast episodes. This newsletter summarizes podcast Ep033 đ§ and three deep dives đŹ follow it: why every customer begins as a Person in Pain, how to find People in Pain among the eight billion people in your way, and how much Pain is in their bank account. For the full version, check out the podcast on Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube.