Are you building a vitamin or a pain-killer?

Here’s a mistake I previously made which may kill your startup.

This is a hard but necessary lesson I learned back when I was building my previous startup Freed with my cofounder Kamil Debbagh.

To give you some context, Freed was a Chrome extension and mobile app that was aimed at helping you finally get meaningful work done by ending unwanted interruptions during your day and preventing the major social media platforms from wasting your time.

People quickly started to gain interest in what we were building. We had hundreds of people on our waiting list, and managed to gain interest from respectable actors such as Y Combinator, companies with 200+ employees, and Youtube influencers with tens of thousands of subscribers.

We quickly built an MVP, started onboarding a few dozens users, and began doing regular customer interviews to improve the product and understand what people were truly looking for.

The initial feedback was great. People were excited about what we were building and were asking us to keep them updated whenever new features would come out. More importantly, they’d usually tell us they’d be ready to pay for the product.

But as soon as we started to actually ask them to take out their credit card, we came across a handful of rejections such as: “I don’t feel ready to pay for this”, “I don’t think I’m the right person for this product”, “This shouldn’t be a paid product”…

We did manage to generate some MRR though, but it really felt like people were doing it to please us and were ready to churn at any moment.

Truth is, the problem was that we were more building a vitamin rather than a pain-killer. People WANTED what we were building, but they didn’t actually NEED it. It wasn’t core to whatever they were doing, and could very well keep living their lives without it.

So we came to the realisation: Although we may be able to build a “nice” business which could maybe generate a few hundred thousand dollars a year if we kept working on that product for a long time, we would never be able to turn this into a huge, scalable business.

Especially in the current economical context, consumers and companies will tend to reduce their burn rate as much as possible and only stick to what is really a “must-have” for them, not whatever is “nice-to-have”.

You don’t need vitamins to survive, but you won’t go far without painkillers.

So, whatever product you’re building, I ask you to reflect on this and be honest with yourself:

Are you building a vitamin or a pain-killer?