Thread

Vitamin vs painkiller discussion thread

Hacker News Free Intermediate

A long comment thread of founders and operators arguing through the vitamin versus painkiller framing with their own real examples and counterexamples, including honest pushback that plenty of vitamins, like coffee, do fine commercially anyway. It is a useful antidote to treating the metaphor as a rigid rule rather than a rough heuristic. Read the top comments for the nuance a short essay would flatten.

  • The vitamin versus painkiller split is a heuristic, not a guarantee of success or failure.
  • Some genuine vitamins, habitual or pleasurable products, build huge businesses anyway.
  • Real founders' counterexamples are more useful here than the clean version of the rule.
Open on news.ycombinator.com ↗

The question it answers

  1. How do I tell the difference between a nice-to-have problem and one people will actually change their behavior to fix?

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