š Hi, Iām Mike and Iām obsessed with product discovery, measured in dollars. This newsletter is a deep dive into People in Painā¢, as discussed in Episode 033 of the Nascent podcast (Spotify, Apple, YouTube).
Startups with no customers face different challenges than startups with customers. So founders need different ways of seeing the world, depending on the state of their startup. For founders of startups with paying customers, it makes sense to call their audience ācustomersā. By definition, the term, ācustomersā is inherently wrong for startups with no customers. So how should those founders talk about their audience?
Anyone who has ever been a customer of anything ever, started as a Person in Painā¢.
Customers are downstream. Startups only have customers after they have a product and someone has paid for it. Founders with just an idea need to focus upstream, earlier in the process. They need a signal about who could become their startupās first customers, and that signal comes from People in Pain.
Iāve gotten pushback that terms like āpotential customersā and āprospectsā are sufficient to describe this upstream audience, but I disagree.
In my experience, founders who start by saying āpotential customersā often drop the word āpotential,ā which leads to the exact problem weāre trying to avoid.
As for āprospectsā ā these are people who, by definition, have already shown some indication that they might become customers. For instance, imagine a pod of food carts. Somebody who walks into the pod is a prospect. Just the fact that they walked in stands in contrast to everyone else out on the street who walks by.
Prospects are great, but theyāre still too downstream for a founder with just an idea. With Nascent, Iām trying to take a step back and look at the people on the street walking by a business. How can we identify which of them might walk in and become a prospect, as opposed to everyone else who never would?
When all we have is an idea about a problem to solve, itās crucial to identify who might care about that problem. Thatās who weāre talking about when we say People in Pain.
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 033 š§: Yes, talking about ācustomersā harms most founders. Instead, identify ābank accountsā of Pain. The next deep dive covers how to find People in Pain among everyone else whoās in your way. The last post covers how much Pain is in their bank account.