We’re frequently asked in our comment section about: vitamin or painkiller. Truth is we’ve been delaying this article for a while until we had enough information & facts to allow us to enlighten our readers. Hopefully by the end of this article you’ll have no doubts about this subject.
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One way to evaluate your product is to consider how well it solves the pain for the customer. Vitamins promise indirect, long-term benefits that address general health or minor problems. They are nice to have, but they won’t wreck your day if you forget to take them.
While more of a necessity than vitamins, they rarely solve the underlying issues. Finally, cures make the problems go away entirely. Customers’ willingness to pay depends directly on their need for your product.
They’re often willing to pay significantly more for cures than vitamins. But cures are also harder to establish and defend. If you expect to get significant traction, your solution should be a painkiller at least.
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At D&P, we believe our total brand experience approach can help brands pivot and transform in creative and commercial ways.
Start With Introspection
The value was that you could get more relevant readers to your content. Our business grew but it was always an uphill battle because we had to convince people why content marketing matters and why they should pay dollars to get more readers to it.
We were always busy explaining how content marketing can build brand loyalty, increase referrals, etc. We were spending so much time convincing people why they should buy our product that eventually it became clear – we were building a vitamin. After much research, we discovered that their greatest challenge is customer acquisition – every company in the world needs more customers.
So, that’s exactly what we started focusing on – solving the real pain of any business: helping them get more customers.
Are People Ready To Pay For It?
“Would I pay money for this?” is a simple question that many entrepreneurs don’t ask. Coming up with business ideas is easy.
That’s the scary thought – it’s really easy to come up with plausible business ideas that can waste years of your time, all because a person wasn’t courageous enough to be go out to ask for money and determine the true value of what they have built. Market validation is often approached incorrectly. It’s the ultimate validation that you are building a painkiller and not a vitamin.
How Else Can I Tell A Vitamin From A Painkiller?
Here are a few questions you can ask to determine if you are building a vitamin or a painkiller:
· Is My Sales Cycle Is Short?
As a rule of thumb, if you are solving a real pain, customers will be pushing really hard to onboard your product. Dive into trends and keyword tools. If yes, you are onto something big.
Retention is arguably the number one metric you should be looking at in early days. But those are exceptions. I hope internalizing this “vitamin vs. Painkiller” framework can help shift the odds in your favour, even by a little.