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For the past few months, I have been rethinking the "Vitamin vs Painkiller" framework in venture capital.
It sounds perfect in theory - people pay more readily to avoid pain than to experience joy.
Yet, the most successful tech companies have been built not by fixing customers' problems but by delighting them with an unimaginably better experience.
Yet, the most successful tech companies have been built not by fixing customers' problems but by delighting them with an unimaginably better experience.
The life-altering startups of the past decade - Uber, Airbnb, Whatsapp, Instagram - didn't solve deeply felt pain for their customers. Hotels, taxis and text messages worked pretty well for most people.
I know much less about enterprise software, but I imagine this to be true even for the likes of Slack and Dropbox. Email worked fine for communication and people were happy enough with shared servers before these startups came along.
Yet the framework is a holy cow in the venture industry. We talk endlessly about customer pain, and often use it as a crutch when we can't imagine the future the founder has in mind. I certainly tend to over-index on this variable, even priding myself in my ability to suss it out
I started re-evaluating this a few months ago when my colleagues @alokgoyal1971 and @namanlahoty were doing diligence on an enterprise software company that solved no one's problem. Instead, the company offered magic - answers to questions you did not ask.
I repeatedly asked Alok and Naman how the founders would sell a product nobody's asking for.
The penny only dropped for me when the founders showed a demo - this was not about fixing someone's problems, but rather blowing them away with a fundamentally new experience.
The penny only dropped for me when the founders showed a demo - this was not about fixing someone's problems, but rather blowing them away with a fundamentally new experience.
I have somewhat changed my mental model since, to focus less on the depth of the problem and more on the "space for delight". It's fine if the customer can't articulate their needs. If tech can help create a 10x better experience for a huge number of customers, it may be enough.
