Yes, a rare Pain can still be worth solving.

The interplay between severity and frequency determines value.

👋 Hi, I’m Mike and I’m obsessed with product discovery, measured in dollars. This newsletter is a deep dive into how severity and frequency interact, as discussed in Episode 034 of the Nascent podcast (Spotify, Apple, YouTube).

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Here’s a problem: tornadoes are devastating but rare.

Here’s the challenge: Is a Pain that rare really worth solving?

In Episode 034, Bill Albert, PhD and I evaluated a low-value problem: the struggles of a boat owner who can’t easily host a cocktail party. One reason this problem is low value: it rarely happens. This prompted Bill to provide a counterexample: “Tornadoes for most places are very rare occurrences but when they do come, they’re bad. So you don’t always have to have a problem that is frequent.” If the severity is high enough, a Pain can still be worth solving even when it rarely happens.

So how do you judge severity? Bill looks at the ramifications if the event happened. Losing your home or people you love. There are emotional costs as well as financial costs so, as Bill put it, “It is our perception of the data. It is not the truth on the ground.”

Moreover, perceived costs vary significantly between business and consumer use cases. For businesses, there’s less of an emotional component and their costs are largely quantifiable: a team wasting hours on a task, lost sales, missed revenue. That makes it easier to calculate an ROI. By contrast, consumers carry psychological costs on top of the financial ones. For many people, their home is worth more than the land and the wood.

I’d build on Bill’s framing in two ways.

First, a tornado brings two pairs of severity and frequency. One pair is the event itself: how often does a tornado strike, and what does it cost when it destroys your house? The other pair is the fear: how often do you worry about tornadoes, and what do you spend on that worry? The two pairs can diverge wildly. Think of car crashes versus plane crashes: car crashes are far more common, yet people fear flying more.

Second, push hard on quantification. If a founder told me severity is high because losing your house is painful, I’d push them to quantify: what’s the average cost of a house? Are we talking about trailer parks? Are we talking about mansions? And a disaster doesn’t just take the roof over your head; it destroys all your stuff, too. Each of those losses has a price.

Each pair then becomes dollars of Pain per year. That puts a rare catastrophe and an everyday worry on the same dollar-based scale, so a founder can compare and decide which Pain, if either, is worth solving.

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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.

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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 is the third and last deep dive 📬 from Episode 034 🎧: An interview on how to find valuable Pain with Bill Albert from Greenlight Idea Lab. The previous deep dives covered Bill Albert’s five criteria for Pain worth solving, and Drinkworks scored against them.