š Hi, Iām Mike and Iām obsessed with product discovery, measured in dollars. This newsletter is a deep dive into the Drinkworks story, as discussed in Episode 034 of the Nascent podcast (Spotify, Apple, YouTube).
Making a cocktail at home takes work: First, you need the right ingredients. And then the skill to mix it all together. Wouldnāt it be easier to just press a button?
Solving this problem was the idea behind Drinkworks: an automated cocktail machine, like a Keurig coffee maker, but with cocktail pods instead of coffee pods.
In Episode 034, Bill Albert, PhD told me how he ran UX testing for this product. From a usability standpoint, Drinkworks was a success: there were only a couple of buttons and people found it easy to use. The catch: participants kept asking why theyād use it. In other words, Drinkworks did a great job of solving a problem that people didnāt care about.
Bill asked his client āWhat problem does this solve?ā He got an answer he never forgot:
āImagine you own a boat, and youāre having people over on your boat for cocktails. And because itās a boat, you donāt have a lot of counter space, you donāt have a bar with all of your spirits, etcetera, and you wanna serve them a cocktail. What do you do? Thereās the problem.ā
This revealed that Drinkworks was a product in search of a problem, and for most people the problem didnāt exist. That experience drove Bill to develop five criteria for vetting whether a problem is worth solving -- we applied them to Drinkworks:
Severity: very low. If people on a boat canāt drink cocktails the consequences are minor.
Frequency: low. Unless someone lives on their boat, it doesnāt happen very often.
Prevalence: very low. Most people donāt own a boat, much less one big enough to host a cocktail party.
Alternatives: plenty. Do it yourself with a few bottles of spirits, some club soda and a bag of limes.
Urgency: none. Nobody needs this problem solved today.
For me, severity alone would have been enough to stop the project. People who host parties at home told Bill that using a pod felt like cheating. Hosts said they preferred to hand-make cocktails, so the product removed exactly the effort the host wanted to show off. We can evaluate this through the Yardstick of Pain and see that cocktail preparation makes hosts feel Joyous, as opposed to Hurting. The perspective of Nascent is that a founderās first step is to identify people who are Hurting; only then do the remaining factors of frequency, prevalence, alternatives and urgency begin to matter.
Drinkworks shut down a few years after launch ā both Billās framework and Nascent would have mitigated that wasted time and effort.
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 second 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 previous deep dive covered Bill Albertās five criteria for Pain worth solving. The last one covers why a rare Pain can still be worth solving.