š Hi, Iām Mike and Iām obsessed with product discovery, measured in dollars. This newsletter is a deep dive into Bill Albertās five criteria for Pain worth solving, as discussed in Episode 034 of the Nascent podcast (Spotify, Apple, YouTube).
I recently interviewed Bill Albert from Greenlight Idea Lab. Over the past 25 years, heās worked in UX and product and honed his approach for new product creation. Billās approach is to judge an opportunity to create a new product by the problems that the product would solve. He specifically evaluates five dimensions:
Severity. How bad is the Pain? What does it cost the person if the problem goes unsolved? In addition to time and money, are there psychological costs too?
Frequency. How often does the Pain occur? Every day? Once a year?
Prevalence. How many people in the target audience experience the Pain?
No alternatives. How have people already tried to solve it? How much effort have they put into finding other options?
Urgency. How quickly do they need it solved?
Products fail when the Pain they solve doesnāt meet these criteria. For instance, if thereās a severe, frequent Pain but only a handful of people then the market is probably too small to be worthwhile. Overall, Bill treats a problem that satisfies only one or two of these five criteria as a warning sign. Instead, he only recommends moving forward with projects where most of the bars are cleared.
Clearing five bars might sound daunting, but thatās the point of vetting the problem before building the product. Pain is the foundation of a new product, whereas the value proposition, the design and even the solution itself can change after a project starts. Itās too easy to spend a year building out an idea that nobody cares about.
Nascent takes a structured, order-of-operations approach when analyzing these criteria. Per the Chain of Success, we start by evaluating the criteria most likely to fail so that we minimize wasted work. We also insist on firsthand data from discovery interviews to avoid tricking ourselves.
1. Severity comes first. Nascent focuses on emotional severity, i.e., people with a ābank accountā of Pain. In other words, can the founder find people for whom the problem even applies? And then for those People with bank accounts of Pain, how many feel negatively about the problem, i.e., are these people āFineā or actually āHurtingā?
2. Frequency comes second. Like severity, frequency is articulated by the interviewee. Whether itās once a year or daily directly impacts the value of the problem. Founders can combine severity and frequency to calculate Pain in dollars per year for each interviewee.
3. No alternatives is a signal of Hurting. When someone looked for a solution but couldnāt find one, thatās a strong sign that theyāre Hurting. A Person in Pain seeking a solution is far more likely to become a customer than someone resigned to living with the problem.
4. Urgency is downstream. Urgency is crucial to unlock a sale in a specific moment in time. However, the perspective of Nascent is that this is separate from the value of the problem itself. If a founder can find People in Pain who experienced severe, frequent Pain in the past, then they can seek out similar people going through that experience in the moment. For example, if a founder wanted to solve problems for high school seniors, they might interview college students who previously had the problem. That college-student data could inform the search for Pain among high schoolers.
5. Prevalence comes last. Prevalence is a projection that canāt be determined directly from firsthand data. Only after a founder consistently finds the same type of People in Pain can they estimate how many similar people might exist in the world, i.e., the market size of people with the problem.
Bill triangulates across these five criteria. Nascent distills those inputs to calculate a single metric, the ERNY value (Estimated Revenue Next Year), for the value of solving the problem.
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 is the first of three deep dives š¬ from Episode 034 š§: An interview on how to find valuable Pain with Bill Albert from Greenlight Idea Lab. The next deep dive scores Drinkworks against the five criteria. The last one covers why a rare Pain can still be worth solving.