Nascent 🪺 Podcast

Nascent is a strategy for startups with no customers -- a methodology for founders to decide within days (not years!) whether their idea is an opportunity worth pursuing. nascentidea.com

Nascent 🪺 Podcast is a technology podcast hosted by Mike Vladimer, with 29 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Mike Vladimer hosts Nascent 🪺 Podcast, a technology show with 29 episodes published.

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  Episode #32

  032: Yes, we can value startup ideas in dollars. Behavioral economics and psychology are the key.

  Aug 10, 202618 min

  How valuable is your startup idea? Nascent is a measurement strategy for startups with no customers. This episode presents a crucial step in valuing an idea: connecting the emotions revealed in customer discovery interviews to willingness to pay, measured in dollars. To do this, Nascent applies concepts from behavioral economics and psychology: status quo bias, loss aversion and drive reduction theory. These concepts map to Nascent's Yardstick of Pain™ and allow founders to assign a value of $1, $0 and -$1 to interviewees. This quantification scheme enables founders to be decisive about their startup idea in days, instead of years. In this episode: (00:00) Measuring public companies vs startups with no customers (05:00) Behavioral economics: prospect theory, status quo bias and loss aversion (06:30) Kahneman's value function maps onto the Yardstick of Pain (07:57) Psychology: drive reduction theory; primary and secondary drives (11:19) Nascent's three-step process for monetizing pain (12:11) Mapping emotions to dollars: $1, $0 and -$1 (14:27) People who are fine or joyous are valuable counterexamples Are you new to the Nascent podcast ? This post provides context and a starting point. Let's connect: Newsletter: https://nascentstartups.com Miro board with visuals and frameworks: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVGhU2Xoo=/ Work with Mike: https://nascentidea.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikevladimer YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NascentIdea Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5BtFtYF6nVUkLu7d7VVnSY Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nascent-startups-podcast/id1728760830 Twitter: https://x.com/NascentIdea Reach Mike at Podcast@NascentIdea.com Links and sources: Nascent Ep031 : Yes, every product is a Pain-relief device. Only "hurting" people might pay money for products. Nascent Ep027 : No, don't interpret discovery interviews by feel. Nascent Ep028 : Yes, the easiest way to analyze discovery interviews is with the Yardstick of Pain. Nascent Ep019 : The next 100 episodes on Nascent methodology. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374533555 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky on prospect theory: https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/nehring/teaching/econ106/readings/kahneman-tversky-prospect-theory-B.pdf Drive reduction theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_reduction_theory_(learning_theory) Alphabet 2025 full-year results: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204426000012/googexhibit991q42025.htm Alphabet reaches a $4 trillion market capitalization: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/12/alphabet-4-trillion-market-cap.html Spirit Airlines 2025 results: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1498710/000095010325003231/dp226099_ex9902.htm Spirit Airlines market capitalization: https://companiesmarketcap.com/spirit-airlines/marketcap/ Nascent frameworks referenced: People in Pain™ — The first signal a startup might have a customer. Every customer starts as a Person in Pain. Yardstick of Pain™ — A three-bucket emotional scale (hurting, fine, joyous) that founders use to categorize interviewees. Introduced in Ep027 . ERNY value — Estimated Revenue Next Year from the ground up with no customers today, calculated by analyzing recorded discovery interviews. Introduced in Ep019 . Quantified Pain Graph (QPG) — A data visualization where interviewees are plotted on the x-axis and their pain in dollars on the y-axis. Coming in a future episode.

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  Episode #31

  031: Yes, every product is a Pain-relief device. Only "hurting" people might pay money for products.

  Jul 12, 202615 min

  Founders want customers, but ironically, the best way to get customers is by seeing the world in reverse. What kind of people are customers BEFORE they buy? Why do people pay money in the first place? Answering these questions will help you avoid the most common problem in startups: founders wasting a year on a bad startup idea. Nascent's perspective is that every product is a pain relief device: a Person in Pain who is hurting decides to pay money to get pain relief from a product. The money and the product are visible, but the pain is invisible. Here in Episode 31, we explore WHY categorizing emotions with the Yardstick of Pain™ (hurting, fine, joyous) predicts who might pay your startup. The big ideas for founders in this episode are (1) products imply hidden pain, (2) money is a metric for pain, and (3) pain is the signal of opportunity for your startup. In this episode: (00:00) Every product is a pain relief device (01:59) Entrepreneurs lack a useful definition of money (02:54) Wikipedia and Jobs to be Done (JTBD) don't explain why customers pay (04:19) Founders succeed by leveraging the relationship between pain, money and products (05:51) Examples of how products imply hidden pain (08:21) Nascent's definition of "money" (09:57) Search for accessible, empowered people with frequent, expensive, excruciating pain (11:40) Current pain determines the size of the opportunity Are you new to the Nascent podcast ? This post provides context and a starting point. Let's connect: Newsletter: https://nascentstartups.com Miro board with visuals and frameworks: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVGhU2Xoo=/ Work with Mike: https://nascentidea.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikevladimer YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NascentIdea Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5BtFtYF6nVUkLu7d7VVnSY Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nascent-startups-podcast/id1728760830 Twitter: https://x.com/NascentIdea Reach Mike at Podcast@NascentIdea.com Links and sources: Nascent Ep027 : No, don't interpret discovery interviews by feel. Nascent Ep022 : Yes, search for People in Pain. But they're invisible. Wikipedia's definition of money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money Clayton Christensen on Jobs to Be Done (JTBD): Competing Against Luck https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062435612 Nascent frameworks referenced: People in Pain™ — The first signal a startup might have a customer. Every customer starts as a Person in Pain. Yardstick of Pain™ — A three-bucket emotional scale (hurting, fine, joyous) that founders use to categorize interviewees. Introduced in Ep027 . "Money" as defined by Nascent — Money is a metric for pain, and money is liquid pain relief. Introduced this episode.

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  Episode #30

  030: Yes, founders trick themselves. Unless they measure reliability.

  Jun 15, 202617 min

  When founders analyze discovery interviews, they trick themselves. Entrepreneurs today are like medieval bakers judging an oven by feel and then despairing when the bread comes out burnt or raw. Baking got reliable when thermometers replaced the guesswork, and founders need that same upgrade for their interview analysis. Good news! Entrepreneurs can leverage tools from other fields. Specifically, this episode introduces "content analysis" and a metric called Krippendorff's Alpha, which let founders measure the reliability of their analysis. This episode also details how Mike measured the reliability of Nascent using Krippendorff's Alpha and the opportunity that it revealed: founders do not have an innate ability to analyze interviews, but it's a skill that founders can learn. Specifically, before training, founders' analysis was essentially random (K-alpha = 0.1). But after founders learned how to use Nascent to analyze interviews, their analysis became reliable (K-alpha = 0.8). In this episode: (00:00) An exciting unlock in entrepreneurship (03:47) Content analysis meets customer discovery (05:44) Analyzing discovery interviews is a type of data transformation (06:53) Content analysis and Krippendorff's Alpha to measure the reliability of data transformation (10:34) Measuring K-alpha for Nascent (the jump from 0.1 to 0.8) (13:55) Analyzing interviews reliably isn't innate, but a learnable skill Are you new to the Nascent podcast ? Start with Episode 019 Let's connect: Newsletter: https://nascentstartups.com Work with Mike: https://nascentidea.com Miro board with visuals and frameworks: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVGhU2Xoo=/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikevladimer YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nascentidea Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5BtFtYF6nVUkLu7d7VVnSY Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nascent-startups-podcast/id1728760830 Twitter: https://x.com/NascentIdea Reach Mike at Podcast@NascentIdea.com Links and sources: Nascent Episode 028 : Yes, the easiest way to analyze discovery interviews is with the Yardstick of Pain. Nascent Episode 027: No, don't interpret discovery interviews by feel. Nascent Episode 022 : Yes, search for People in Pain. But they're invisible. Thinking, Fast and Slow⁠ by Daniel Kahneman Calculator for Krippendorff's Alpha Nascent frameworks referenced: Yardstick of Pain™ — A three-bucket emotional scale (hurting, fine, joyous) that founders apply to categorize the emotions of interviewees. Introduced in Episode 027. People in Pain™ — The first signal a startup might have a customer. Every customer starts as a Person in Pain. Defined in Episode 022. ERNY™ (Estimated Revenue Next Year) — A metric for startups with no customers: Estimated Revenue Next Year from the ground up with no customers today, calculated only using discovery interviews. See Episode 019. Tools from content analysis: Content analysis — A research technique for making replicable and valid inferences from texts (Klaus Krippendorff). The field that lets founders make reliable inferences from discovery interviews. Krippendorff's Alpha (K-alpha) — A metric for inter-rater reliability that ranges from 0 (completely random) to 1 (perfect agreement). Many thanks to Paul Tepper for letting me know about content analysis and providing feedback on how I’m applying it to Nascent.

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  Episode #29

  029: No, don't use legendary founders' recipe for success. You can't mimic their intuition.

  Jun 8, 202615 minS0

  <p><br></p><p>Advice from legendary entrepreneurs doesn't work for the rest of us because the legends have an innate sense for good startup ideas that they can't explain. We can't mimic their intuition but we can copy it with a measurement system.</p><p><br></p><p>In this episode:</p><p>(00:00) What legendary founders see</p><p>(03:19) What founders need, but not how to achieve it</p><p>(06:09) The signal is People in Pain — and it's invisible</p><p>(09:44) The People-to-Prospect Funnel makes the invisible visible</p><p>(12:01) Yardstick of Pain to ERNY Value: from signal to nu...

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  Episode #28

  028: Yes, the easiest way to analyze discovery interviews is with the Yardstick of Pain.

  Jun 1, 202616 minS0

  <p>When founders run discovery interviews, they don't know what they're searching for, so they don't know if they found it. Here's the most important quality to extract from an interview: Is there any evidence that the interviewee might care about your startup idea? To determine this, founders can apply Nascent's Yardstick of Pain™ as the first step to identifying people who might become customers.</p><p><br></p><p>Previously in Episode 27, Mike introduced the Yardstick of Pain™ -- a three-part scale (hurting, fine, joyous). Here in Episode 28, Mike applies it in a case study where a founder wanted to p...

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