Painkiller, vitamin, candy, crack

The lean startup model has a huge emphasis on solving pain points. It is a customer centric model, where you go talk to the customer first, identify the biggest pain points and then offer a solution for that. While this is very helpful in de-risking your business in most cases, some businesses by default dont solve a pain point and yet see huge success.. take any gaming company for example. 

So when I was reading one of the many interesting papers/ books lying around at JFDI, I read about Painkiller, Vitamin, Candy and Crack. And I thought that was a very cool model!

A startup can now be a painkiller as mentioned before, or a candy (pure entertainment - people like consuming it even if it wastes time), a crack (people like consuming it with other people - social entertainment) or a vitamin (people know it’s good for them but never consume it).

Focussing on the pain point then is important to make sure you dont become a vitamin. But if you are looking at becoming a candy or crack - and the key metric there is people naturally enjoy using whatever you are building and are willing to waste time on it - then it is a different game altogether. The pain in that case is probably boredom.