Solve Real Pain or Die Trying: Why Your Brilliant Idea Might Be Total Rubbish

Let's start with a hard truth: no one actually cares about your startup idea. (Harsh, I know. Your mum might care, but she's contractually obligated to). What people care about is whether you're solving their problems or just adding to the noise. After watching my own meticulously crafted luxury candle business go up in flames—and not in the way candles are supposed to—I've become rather obsessed with the distinction between products people need versus products people can easily live without. Welcome to the Painkiller vs Vitamin debate, where we separate the must-haves from the nice-to-haves, and potentially save you from the special kind of humiliation that comes with building something nobody wants.

The Brutal Difference Between Painkillers and Vitamins

When your head is pounding like a drum solo at 3 AM, you don't "consider" taking a painkiller—you scramble for it like it's the last taxi in a rainstorm. That's the power of solving actual pain. Vitamins, meanwhile, are those things we know we "should" take but regularly forget about for weeks on end with seemingly no consequences. See the difference?

In business terms, painkillers solve urgent, obvious problems. They stop bleeding, figuratively speaking. Vitamins make vague promises about "optimising" something or "enhancing" an experience that's already perfectly adequate. One is a necessity; the other is a luxury that's first to go when budgets tighten.

The vitamin business can certainly work—just look at the actual vitamin industry, worth billions despite questionable efficacy. But it's a marketing game that requires deep pockets and considerable expertise. For most founders, especially first-timers with limited resources (raising my hand sheepishly), building a painkiller is the saner path. It's easier to sell something that stops pain than something that might, possibly, potentially make things marginally better in some abstract future.

The Self-Delusion Test: Are You Lying to Yourself?

Here's where things get uncomfortable. Most founders (myself included, in my candle-making era) have a remarkable capacity for self-delusion. We convince ourselves our vitamins are actually painkillers through a series of increasingly elaborate mental gymnastics.

I once convinced myself that people "needed" my hand-poured candles to "transform their living space into a sanctuary of wellbeing." In reality, nobody was lying awake at night, riddled with anxiety about their sub-optimal home fragrance situation. It was a nice-to-have product in a market already saturated with nice-to-haves.

To avoid this trap, run your idea through this brutally honest self-assessment:

• If your product disappeared tomorrow, would anyone actively notice and be genuinely inconvenienced? Be ruthlessly honest.
• Are customers already spending money to solve this problem, or are you trying to convince them they have a problem they weren't aware of?
• Does your solution reduce measurable negative consequences (lost money, time, stress, embarrassment, etc.)?
• When you explain your product, do people immediately understand the value, or do you need to educate them about why they should care?
• Would someone use your product even if it were ugly, slightly inconvenient, or not particularly "delightful" to use?

If you answered "no" to most of these, congratulations—you've invented a vitamin. That doesn't mean you should bin the idea entirely, but you should be clear-eyed about the uphill battle ahead.

Converting Vitamins to Painkillers: The Alchemist's Challenge

Perhaps you've realised your brilliant idea is more vitamin than painkiller, but you're still madly in love with it. Fair enough—we've all been there. There might be a way to transmute your vitamin into something more essential, but it requires an almost pathological level of customer empathy.

The secret lies in identifying the pain points adjacent to your solution. Understanding that customer pain points fall into four main categories—Service, Product, Process, and Emotional—can help you reframe your approach. This isn't about repackaging the same product; it's about fundamentally rethinking what problem you're actually solving.

Take Slack, for instance. Team communication tools existed before, but Slack positioned itself as the solution to the painful reality of communication chaos—the endless email threads, the lost information, the confusion about who's doing what. They addressed the very real problem where 52% of employees toggle between 6 or more apps in a typical work week, causing work notifications to create anxiety levels comparable to encountering spiders or bugs. They didn't sell "a slightly better messaging app"; they sold "the end of email hell." That's turning a vitamin into a painkiller.

To attempt this transformation, consider these approaches:

• Study your potential customers like an anthropologist observing a strange new tribe. What makes them swear under their breath? What tasks do they perpetually procrastinate on?
• Find the moments of frustration adjacent to your product area and solve those instead of trying to "enhance" something that's already working adequately.
• Narrow your target market to a specific segment that experiences more acute pain than the general population.
• Combine your solution with something that addresses a genuine pain point, creating a "vitamin-infused painkiller."
• Be honest about whether you're solving a real problem or just creating a "solution" in search of a problem.

The Hidden Curse of Vitamin Businesses: Lukewarm Enthusiasm

The most insidious aspect of building a vitamin isn't immediate failure—it's the slow, soul-crushing experience of lukewarm customer enthusiasm. People will tell you they "like" your product. They'll say it's "interesting" and "cool." They might even buy it once.

Then they forget it exists.

This creates a particularly cruel form of entrepreneurial purgatory. Your business doesn't fail quickly (which would at least be merciful); instead, it lingers in a state of "almost working" that keeps you investing more time and money. You'll find yourself in endless cycles of minor product tweaks, marketing adjustments, and increasingly desperate attempts to increase engagement.

I spent months adjusting candle scents, redesigning packaging, and tweaking my website, all while ignoring the fundamental reality: nobody needed what I was selling. People were perfectly happy with their existing candle options or—even worse—completely indifferent to home fragrance altogether.

Painkillers, by contrast, create their own demand. When you solve a genuine problem, customers don't just use your product—they tell others about it with evangelical fervour. They become salespeople for your solution because you've rescued them from something genuinely unpleasant. Research shows that successful tech companies eventually become distribution-centric rather than product-centric, because word-of-mouth and customer advocacy drive growth more effectively than feature improvements. You'll never need to beg people to care.

The Pragmatic Path Forward: Making the Hard Choice

So where does this leave us? If you've done the soul-searching and concluded your idea is more vitamin than painkiller, you have three practical options:

• Pivot to find the real pain point. Use your current idea as a starting point, but be willing to dramatically transform it based on customer insights about what actually hurts.
• Commit to the vitamin path with eyes wide open. This means accepting you'll need exceptional marketing, significant capital, and the patience for a longer road to meaningful traction.
• Abandon the idea and find a real problem to solve. This feels like failure, but it's actually the fastest path to success—better to kill a weak idea early than waste years of your life trying to force it to work.
• Partner with painkiller providers. Find businesses already solving real pain and offer your vitamin as an enhancement to their core offering.
• Test ruthlessly before committing. Create minimal versions of your solution and measure not what people say, but what they do. Are they willing to pay? Do they come back? Do they tell others?

The choice ultimately depends on your resources, risk tolerance, and how emotionally attached you are to your specific solution. But if you're a first-time founder with limited runway (as most of us are), focusing on painkillers dramatically improves your odds of building something that matters.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Successful Products

Here's the thing about great products that we don't talk about enough: they often emerge from founders' personal pain. The most convincing painkillers come from people who have felt the headache themselves, not from those who intellectually decided a market looked profitable.

When I reflect on my failed business versus the tools I'm building now, the difference is stark. I started a candle company because I thought it would be a good business, not because I had experienced some profound candle-related suffering. Now I'm building tools to help entrepreneurs avoid the exact pitfalls that destroyed my business—addressing pain I've personally experienced in excruciating detail.

The question isn't just "is this a painkiller or vitamin?" but "do I intimately understand the pain I'm claiming to solve?" If you're guessing about the problem rather than living it, you're already at a disadvantage against founders who wake up feeling the pain point every morning.

This doesn't mean you can only build solutions for problems you've experienced. But it does mean you need to develop almost supernatural levels of empathy for your users if you're solving unfamiliar problems. Customer research reveals that one unstructured 2-hour conversation can provide more valuable insights than typical structured interviews, because it helps you understand that solving problems is often an emotionally-invested process reflecting personal values. You need to understand their pain better than they understand it themselves.

After all, the best painkillers don't just mask symptoms—they address root causes in ways that feel almost magical to those suffering. That kind of solution rarely comes from market research alone.

The Final Verdict: Choose Your Battle Wisely

Starting a business is hard enough when everything goes right. Why stack the deck against yourself by trying to sell something nobody urgently needs? The entrepreneurial journey is a marathon through difficult terrain—make sure you're at least running in the right direction.

Remember: customers don't care about your clever solution; they care about their problems. Build something that makes their pain stop, and they'll beat a path to your door. Create another "nice-to-have" in a world already drowning in options, and you'll join the ranks of founders with great products that nobody actually buys.

In the end, the painkiller versus vitamin framework isn't just about product validation—it's about respect for your own time and energy. Life is too short and building a business is too hard to spend years trying to convince people they should want something they can easily live without. Find real pain, solve it effectively, and you'll have something truly valuable: a business that matters to people who are eager to pay for the relief you provide.