Painkiller vs vitamin

In business you can categorise products on the scale between vitamins and painkillers.

Vitamins

These are nice to haves, you don’t need them, you want them, but can go without them. These apps are nice to have but you don’t need them, you don’t feel an immediate urge to go out and get them. They make life better, but if you take them away you go to a state that you are still comfortable with. Vitamins are usually associated with long sales cycles and high churn - trying to sell something people don’t really need. From the viewpoint of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs - it is easier to sell vitamins once they have all the painkillers they need.

Painkillers

These are solutions to direct and current problems. If you take them away the pain comes back. These are easier to sell and market as you can target people directly with these problems - and the bigger the pain the faster the sale. These ideas don’t tend to be flashy cool ideas - they solve real, hard problems for example an analytics tool to measure and optimise resource utilisation.

Demand

To bring in an extra dimension let’s think about demand. This is the ultimate driver for business success. It is assumed that there is always higher demand for painkillers than vitamins, but there are plenty of examples of successful vitamin companies. For example the video games industry - we can go without video games - yet the industry is massive. There is a demand for the vitamin of entertainment.