Essay · About a 3 minute read

Candy, Vitamins, or Painkillers for Startups

David Cummings · David Cummings on Startups Free Beginner

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.

  • Painkillers solve an urgent, pressing problem people will pay to make go away; vitamins are nice improvements that are easy to postpone.
  • Candy can win big as a fad but is unpredictable, so know which of the three you are actually selling before you set strategy.
  • If you cannot clearly call your product a painkiller, that is a signal to keep digging into the problem, not to keep polishing the solution.
Open on davidcummings.org ↗

The question it answers

  1. How do I know if the job I'm solving is a painkiller people will pay for or just a vitamin they'd like?

Read with it

  1. The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past... momtestbook.com Book · ~130 pages The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick
  2. Ash Maurya, author of Running Lean, argues you can always find how a customer solves a job today, and that existing workaround... LEANFoundry Article · About a 10 minute read Find Better Problems Worth Solving with the Customer Forces Canvas Ash Maurya
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →