How do I know if the job I'm solving is a painkiller people will pay for or just a vitamin they'd like?
Watch for what they're already doing about it: a painkiller job has people spending money, cobbling together workarounds, or losing sleep, while a vitamin job gets nods and no action. If nobody has a current, ugly workaround for the struggle, the job probably isn't urgent enough to build a business on yet. As a starting point, ask what they tried before you showed up, and how much it cost them in time or money when it failed.
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✍️ Essay
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This is the short, canonical piece that popularized the painkiller versus vitamin test, from a founder who has actually built and funded companies. It gives you a clean three way sort (candy, vitamin, painkiller) so you can be honest about where your idea really sits before you build. Treat it as a starting lens, not a verdict: it tells you the question to keep asking, which is whether people are in enough pain to pay now.
The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past behaviour, not your idea, so you can't be lied to. If a founder reads one thing before talking to a single customer, it's this.
Ash Maurya, author of Running Lean, argues you can always find how a customer solves a job today, and that existing workaround is your evidence. The piece gives you the switching forces (push, pull, inertia, friction) to read whether the pain is urgent enough that someone would actually change and pay. It is a concrete, interview ready way to separate a real painkiller from a vitamin.
