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Comment by baxtr | Hacker News Reader

I love the vitamin vs painkiller discussion. The basic premise is: don’t build a vitamin, build a painkiller because it’s solves a real problem and people will be willing to pay for it.

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.

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Analogies always fall apart somewhere under scrutiny. This one is still useful though to compare. Vitamins are successful because there’s a lot of awareness and marketing (sometimes deceitful) about the benefits of vitamins. If you’re going to build a vitamin product be prepared to spend a lot in marketing and/or have a killer user experience with tangible results to be able to rely on word of mouth.

> Analogies always fall apart somewhere under scrutiny.

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.

I never had heard this analogy before and understood it immediately. If it didn’t click with you that’s fine, that doesn’t mean is not useful.

It’s not that it doesn’t click - it’s just another stupid thing like Myers-Briggs personality types - and it’s just a shit analogy. Go ahead and categorize businesses by vitamins, pain killers and candy if it’s makes you happy. I believe reading anything into these distinctions is open to the free interpretation and is just astrology for the tech bro crowd. And no one actually agrees on the categorizations for anything less trivial than Candy Crush - as evidenced down thread. The software businesses that are cleanly categorized by this are the exception not the rule.

Once you start having a meta discussion about the analogy itself, perhaps that should be a sign.

Imagine the misery people went through for centuries prior to the discovery of pain killers. If you’ve ever had a tooth ache, I’m sure you can attest to the efficacy of pain killers as a medical invention. They are an enormously important piece in the quality of life that most of us enjoy today.

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.

> First of all the analogy fails in the real world. The vitamin market is huge. People pay lots of money to buy vitamins.

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.

I like the analogy. I never heard it before now, but I instantly understood what I think it meant: build something that is harder to live without. I have nothing to back this up but I’d think most people think of a vitamin as easier to live without than a painkiller.

> 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!

> 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.

The reason it’s breaking down is you’re using it out of context — at least in my understanding. It is primarily a B2B analogy, and you’re talking about consumer tech.

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.

Vitamins can def be super successful, as you mentioned. Agreed.

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...

My pain point was that my friends were fragmented among MSN, AIM, Skype, Google etc. and I had to pay for texts so I always used online messaging instead

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

>I believe almost no product is a real painkiller.

Heroin is.

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