1.1 The Painkiller Test
Most founders are building vitamins and calling them painkillers. That’s the whole problem. A vitamin is something people want when they remember to take it. A painkiller is something people reach for at 2am because they can’t sleep without it.
At this stage, you don’t have the runway, the team, or the brand to sell vitamins. You need a product that solves a problem so specific and so painful that people are already trying to fix it badly before you showed up.
Here’s how you tell which one you’re building right now. Ask yourself three diagnostic questions. If you can’t answer all three with real evidence, you’re probably building a vitamin.
The Three Diagnostic Questions
1. Have they tried to solve this before and failed?
If your target customer hasn’t already attempted a solution, the pain probably isn’t bad enough to drive purchasing behavior. Real pain creates action, even imperfect action. Andre Heckle Jr built ListKit to $200K MRR by solving a problem his customers were already burning money on: unverified leads from Apollo. These weren’t people who vaguely wanted better data. They were actively running cold email campaigns, getting burned by bad emails, and paying for it. The pain had a dollar figure attached before ListKit existed.
2. Are they actively complaining about it publicly?
If you can’t find threads, posts, or communities where people are venting about this exact problem, you need to go look harder before you build anything else. Anish found his first customers for Save Wise inside a Facebook group called Rakuten Stacks, where people were manually hunting for credit card stacking opportunities and complaining about how long it took. The complaint was already public. The audience was already assembled. He just had to show up.
3. Are they already paying for an inferior solution?
This is the most important question. If people are spending money on a worse version of what you’re building, you have proof of willingness to pay. That’s the whole game at this stage. Ericos built Kaching Bundles to $4.5M ARR by targeting Shopify merchants who were already trying to increase average order value, just doing it with clunky workarounds or expensive custom dev work. They weren’t waiting for a solution. They were using a bad one and hating it.
If your answers to those three questions are vague, you’re not ready to start acquiring customers. You’re still doing product discovery and just haven’t admitted it yet.
The distinction that matters here is must-have versus nice-to-have. A must-have product stops your customer’s day if it breaks. A nice-to-have product gets cancelled when budgets tighten. Joseph built Super Demo to $3M ARR because sales teams had a specific, active problem: their Loom recordings went out of date and buyers weren’t watching them. Demo quality directly impacted close rates. That’s not a nice-to-have. That’s a revenue problem, which means it’s always budget-approved.
Nick built BlockToPin to $16K MRR around a painfully specific workflow problem: creating Pinterest pins manually takes 5 to 10 minutes each, and the platform rewards you for posting 5 to 10 per day. The math on that manual workload is brutal enough that customers didn’t need convincing. They just needed a way out.
Here’s what you do today. Write down the three questions and answer each one with a link, a quote, or a real data point. Not your hypothesis. Evidence. If you can’t fill that in within an hour of searching Reddit, Facebook groups, and G2 reviews, you don’t have a painkiller yet.