Vitamin or Pain Killer? Start-up Thoughts.

Many products fall into the vitamin category. Things like productivity tools, content aggregators, mashups, utilities, collaboration applications, measurement and monitoring tools, in fact anything that is a tool, development or otherwise, is by definition a vitamin.

Pain killer products are products that solve for a specific pain point. Sometimes the pain is measurable in terms of ROI, winning sales that could not be won before, or satisfying a regulatory requirement.

There is another set of products that are "vitamins" (nice to have) until you feel the pain. Then they become "pain killers" (got to have it). There are actually lots of products that fall into this category.

via Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing.

Don describes a helpful taxonomy for start-ups to think about their product. Depeding on where your product sits, your business has to think about the impacts on (business) functions: marketing, communication and sales efforts - what do you communicate and how? I have also come across the term 'enabler' instead of vitamin as well but I like the image. Flow Ventures proposes a method to find out whether you have a pain killer or vitamin.

The third category sparks a very interesting question as well: what are the events that might change the clients' perception of your products from vitamin to painkiller?