We need more vitamin products

Everyone will tell you that your product should be a painkiller, not a vitamin.

But I love vitamin products - and I think we need more of them, not less.

The “vitamin vs painkiller” analogy is one commonly used in the world of start-ups.

• A vitamin product is perceived as a nice-to-have, just like a vitamin is an enhancement to your diet, but is not necessarily essential.

• Conversely, a painkiller solves an immediate and pressing problem, for which the customer is willing to use and pay for now to relieve the pain.

At the surface, it seems obvious why you would want to build a painkiller product: you get immediate attention and willingness to pay.

But painkillers exist because there is an underlying problem that needs solving. Painkillers provide solutions to problems, often without changing the nature and architecture of the problem itself. They rely on the problem to exist to have a purpose and be valuable.

Vitamin products, on the other hand, don’t offer an obvious or urgent justification as to why you would need them. Those who pay attention to vitamins are the ones interested in enhancing or augmenting what they already have. Vitamins do not exist to solve a problem, they exist to make a difference.

One example of this is Perplexity. Perplexity is not solving a “search problem”. We have search engines, and good ones. Perplexity is providing you with a vitamin for search and answers. The more you use it, the more efficient, proficient, and delighted you are in your day-to-day life. When you stop using it, you notice the difference instantly. You can still function without it, but not at your best.

Once vitamins are integrated in your daily life, they create a new baseline for health. In products, that translates to a new standard way of operating. In technological evolution, that translates to a new status quo.

Embracing vitamins often means being open to engaging with products you did not know you needed. Being open to the possibility of new products offering benefits you did not know were possible before you experienced them.

The thing with vitamins is that they require more foresight and patience to realize their value. The benefits of vitamins reveal themselves over time.

Some vitamins will give you superpowers you did not know you had, others will be excess nutrients or empty pills. You can only tell the difference once you try them, and try them for long enough to adjust to them and feel their effects. This is precisely where shifts happen.

While painkillers have their place, painkillers do not introduce new paradigms. Painkillers keep the foundation as is, and create solutions for it. Vitamins change the foundation all together.

I believe we need to think less about painkillers, and more about vitamins.

We need to think less about relieving the pain, and more about how to prevent the pain from happening in the first place.

In a paradigm of more vitamins, we change the narrative from “problem focused” to “benefit focused”. Instead of asking the question “what problem does it solve?”, we answer the question “what would make this better?”.

Perhaps in a world with more vitamins, we would need less painkillers.