Probably high server costs and being a vitamin and not a painkiller killed it.
Also, people are not too happy about giving away their browser history data to server-side powered browsers.
That being said, it's still sad to see startups fail. Hopefully they'll have better luck with their new direction. Fingers crossed!
First of all the analogy fails in the real world. The vitamin market is huge. People pay lots of money to buy vitamins.
Second, the transition is not clear. It’s hard to draw a line line and say now this vitamin turned into a painkiller.
Third, I believe almost no product is a real painkiller. We in the West at least live in sheer abundance. Almost none of our problems is really painful. For example: was Facebook a painkiller? Hardly. Was the iPhone a painkiller? Not until you considered using it.
I’m not saying the analogy is useless. But I don’t think that vitamins can’t be super successful.
I think that with Mighty it's just the combination of being an expensive product (mainly to operate, but to some extent for the end customer as well) + privacy concerns + most people don't suffer that much from slow browsers and instead willing to pay $20/30 a month to solve it.
Pretty niche market, I think. But might be mistaken...
> For example: was Facebook a painkiller? Hardly.
I don’t know. People without pain do take painkillers. And they can have a really hard time stopping. In that sense, I would argue that Facebook is a lot like a painkiller for a lot of people!
Nice, you’ve explained by demonstration better than I could why this is a trash analogy and only confuses issues, does not clarify them. Consider stopping using it.
Yeah but this one falls apart the moment you simply try to figure out what facet is trying to be conveyed. Just say what you fucking mean. The general painkiller > vitamin argument is generally bunk/false dichotomy - therefore you’re not saving any time with the analogy.
Once you start having a meta discussion about the analogy itself, perhaps that should be a sign.
When I was able to add everyone on Facebook I was able to keep track of everyone, and also connect to all the XMPP networks.
Currently it doesn't serve this purpose because it's no longer a universal messenger, so I don't go on it
Heroin is.
The vitamin vs pain killer metaphor is about building a company with a defensible business model.
So, the metaphor is about arriving at an honest answer to this question: would the “quality of life” of your first customer improve significantly if they switched to your product?
If you answer is no, you have two options:
1. either make changes to your product to make it more attractive to your target customers or;
2. keep the product as-is but change your positioning so that the product can be marketed to a different set of target customers to which the answer to the question is yes.
In B2B people buy painkillers because then they don’t have to do that painful part of their job. They rarely buy vitamins (although some do) because those might require them to do more.
It’s fundamentally about outsourcing/automating your own functions.
Also in the real world, people who sell vitamins lie a lot, and some people believe some really stupid things about vitamins. So the ultimate vitamins are antivirus products, I suppose: Sometimes needed, often a waste of money, and actively harmful more often than the naïve would suspect.
Being a project with no customer base killed it.
I remember it being discussed 6 months or a year ago on HN and while it was a popular topic, it was not being discussed kindly.
It's something that should have never made it past the stage of cool demo.