👋 Hi, I’m Mike and I’m obsessed with product discovery, measured in dollars. This newsletter is a deep dive into the People-to-Prospect Funnel™, as discussed in Episode 033 of the Nascent podcast (Spotify, Apple, YouTube).
Yes, eight billion people are blocking you from connecting with the few special people who could become your startup’s first customers. As a founder, you want to solve a problem with your startup. Inherently, that problem does not apply to most people in the world. This creates a sorting challenge: how can founders quickly distinguish and discard Blockers who will never become customers from the People in Pain who might? To this end, Nascent includes a tool called the People-to-Prospect Funnel™.
At the top of the funnel are Blockers. There are eight billion people in the world, and almost all of them are Blockers — the problem that you want to solve doesn’t apply to them. As a founder searching for People in Pain™, you’re essentially searching for a needle in a haystack. Blockers are that hay. If they weren’t in the way, your life would be so much easier.
The next layer down are Distractions, because they make you feel like you’re getting closer to your goal when they’re actually side-tracking you. Distractions do not have the problem that you want to address, but they tell you to build a solution anyway. They’re insidious because they’re never gonna pay you. All of their encouragement is just a false signal.
The next layer down are People in Pain, and then Prospects, and finally Customers.
An easy way to see the People-to-Prospect Funnel in action is at a food cart pod. People paying the chefs are customers, by definition. At the busiest carts you can see a line of prospects waiting, cash in hand, ready to pay.
Here’s what you cannot easily identify: the People in Pain. Buried in the crowd of people walking by on the street might be a few hungry People in Pain. They don’t realize that there’s a chef nearby — they have a problem that a chef could solve and just need to be made aware of the nearby solution.
The funnel distinguishes the visible from the invisible. At the bottom, customers and prospects can be identified by their actions. But the top of the funnel is hidden. In that crowd on the street, there’s no easy way to distinguish between Blockers, Distractions and People in Pain. It’s tedious, but the best way to sort them is by speaking with them and analyzing the interviews. Episode 028 presents a case study that details how Nascent runs this analysis.
I’ve worked with lots of founders who are open to getting feedback from anybody about their startup idea. This approach of spray and pray does more harm than good. As a founder, you want to quickly identify Blockers and Distractions and discard them. At best, they can suggest questions to ask People in Pain, but they can’t provide relevant first-hand data.
What does it mean for someone to be a Person in Pain™ as opposed to a Blocker or a Distraction? I find bank accounts to be a useful metaphor to make sense of this.
People in Pain have a bank account in the currency of the problem that you want to solve with your startup, whereas Blockers and Distractions don’t.
People in Pain have a bank account in the currency of the problem that you want to solve with your startup, whereas Blockers and Distractions don’t. For some People in Pain, the bank account is empty. It has $0 in it, but at least the problem is relevant to them.
For Blockers and Distractions, it’s not that their bank account is empty. It’s that they don’t have an account to begin with. The problem that you want to solve doesn’t apply to them.
As a founder searching for a signal about the viability of your startup idea, you want to figure out whether an interviewee is a Blocker or Distraction without a bank account, as opposed to a Person in Pain who has one.
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 is the second of three deep dives 📬 from Episode 033 🎧: Yes, talking about “customers” harms most founders. Instead, identify “bank accounts” of Pain. The previous deep dive discussed why every customer begins as a Person in Pain. The last one covers how much Pain is in their bank account.