š Hi, Iām Mike and Iām obsessed with product discovery, measured in dollars. This is the summary newsletter š¬ for Episode 033 of the Nascent podcast š§ (Spotify, Apple, YouTube).
I hate it when a founder says: āI talked to customers about my startup idea.ā 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 theyāre talking about customers their startup doesnāt actually have, the founder often responds with something like āOh, come on, you know what I mean.ā
Entrepreneurs need to stop talking about customers they donāt have
For decades, founders have been encouraged to āfake it till you make itā and talk about customers, whether they have them or not. Entrepreneurs need to stop talking about customers they donāt have. A startup is a project thatās fundamentally about creating new knowledge, whereas untruth is the antithesis of knowledge. By saying that your startup has something that it doesnāt, youāre 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 wonāt get customers. One factor driving this unfortunate result is the loose definition of the word ācustomerā.
For founders with just an idea, there is better language, that leads to better thinking, that ultimately drives better outcomes. Hereās Nascentās strategy to address this challenge.
First, founders with just an idea need an accurate name for their audience. Who is a customer before theyāre a customer, or even a prospect? They are a Person in Painā¢. 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, Nascentās People-to-Prospect Funnelā¢ (detailed in Episode 025) maps the journey of everyone in the world down to your startupās 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. Theyāre in the way. Below them are Distractions who donāt have the problem, but tell the founder to build the solution anyway. Then there are People in Pain ā 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 ā founders canāt 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 personās 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 startupās problem. The status of that bank account can be positive (they have meaningful pain) or empty (theyāve experienced the problem, but theyāre indifferent) or even negative (what you believe is a problem, they actually consider a pleasure). These People in Pain with ābank accountsā 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, Iāve been building Nascent as the strategy for quantifying product discovery. As of 2026, Iām publishing Nascent, a few ideas at a time, in regular newsletter posts and podcast episodes. This newsletter summarizes podcast Ep033 š§ and three deep dives š¬ 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.