👋 Hi, I’m Mike and I’m obsessed with product discovery, measured in dollars. This is the summary newsletter 📬 for Episode 034 of the Nascent podcast 🎧 (Spotify, Apple, YouTube).
Here’s a problem: imagine someone owns a boat and their friends are coming over for cocktails, but there’s minimal counter space and no bar stocked with spirits. The boat owner struggles to make drinks.
Here’s the challenge: Is it worth building a product to solve this problem?
In this episode, I interviewed Bill Albert, the founder of Greenlight Idea Lab, who helps vet ideas for new business creation. Bill ran UX testing on Drinkworks, a Keurig-style cocktail machine, and the boat party was the client’s answer when he asked what problem it solved. Its failure shifted his focus from usability and user experience to the initial challenge: how to identify a problem worth building a business on?
To evaluate a problem, Bill has developed a five-part framework for analyzing opportunities for new product creation:
Severity — how bad is it when the problem happens?
Frequency — how often does the problem happen?
Prevalence — how many people have the problem?
No other options — can people already solve the problem in some other way?
Urgency — how quickly do they need it solved?
Bill recommends that for a product to solve a valuable problem, the problem must meet most, if not all of these criteria. In other words, the best opportunities for new product creation are a severe Pain that happens a lot of the time, to a lot of people, who have no other way to solve it and need it solved today.
A startup idea that clears all five criteria is rare, but that’s the point.
A startup idea that clears all five criteria is rare, but that’s the point. Bill developed these criteria to avoid building the next Drinkworks. At its core, the Pain is the foundation of the project — if these five qualities of the problem are not robust, then the project will likely fail. By contrast, it’s much easier to change other aspects of the project, such as the product design or value proposition.
In many ways, Nascent is an extension of Bill’s approach. First, Nascent uses severity and frequency to calculate dollars of Pain. An interviewee who looked for alternatives but could find no other options to solve the problem is a strong indication of a person who is Hurting. For each interviewee, Nascent combines severity and frequency into a single dollar amount of Pain. In Nascent’s prioritization scheme, urgency is secondary since it’s crucial to unlock sales but is separate from the value of the problem itself. Only after a founder consistently finds the same type of People in Pain can they determine the prevalence (i.e., market size) of the problem.
So, is the party-on-a-boat problem worth solving? By Bill’s five criteria, it fails every one. By Nascent’s math, I’d expect its ERNY value (Estimated Revenue Next Year) to land near $0. Predictably, Drinkworks shut down within a year of launch.
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 newsletter summarizes podcast Ep034 🎧 and three deep dives 📬 follow it: Bill Albert’s five criteria for Pain worth solving, Drinkworks scored against them, and why a rare Pain can still be worth solving. For the full version, check out the podcast on Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube.