Is a startup a painkiller or vitamins?

Vitamins promote health slowly and gradually: they keep you healthy over time, protecting you from disease.

The painkiller stops the pain syndrome instantly: the pills help you, solve the problem here and now. The best companies do the same.

Painkillers are startups that solve serious problems quickly and effectively. The client is “hurt”, he urgently needs a solution.

He doesn’t care what the pill looks like, whether it has a nice logo, whether it works in two months or three.

Google is a painkiller: without 24/7 availability and the ability to quickly find out anything, we would have a hard time.

Think about how your company can become a painkiller. Offer a product or service that solves a problem today, not a vitamin that will at best show up some time later.

How to make money on the “pain” of the client

A suitable trouble point for a future company is when enough consumers recognize the existence of “pain” and are willing to pay for a solution. So your startup will be in demand.

If you don’t find and respond to pain to capitalize on, everything else—from design and development to marketing and product testing—is in vain. People won’t pay for a result if it doesn’t solve their problems.
Going to a specific plan
You have an understanding in which specific market and in which specific area you plan to launch a startup. So the next step is to flesh out the problem—to develop and test a response to the problem that your company will be solving.

How to check if your idea will live and earn

Find a group of potential clients
Conduct a survey among them: best in person, but also by e-mail
Evaluate the results
To better understand the issue, try to keep the focus group participants as honest as possible with you.

Don’t sell them a product idea, ask open-ended questions instead. It is important to frame the questions in such a way that respondents can answer freely and without pressure.

Sample questions:

What is the biggest difficulty in problem X?
Tell us about problem X. What happened last time, how did you encounter this problem?
Why was this experience so unpleasant?
What actions did you take to solve the problem?
What solutions do you use to solve the problem? What do you dislike about them? How should they be changed?
Where to find consumers for feedback

Use all available resources. Look for people on mailing lists, forums and message boards, social media and micro-networking sites like Reddit, The Question, Quora, Meetup.com. You can go to a coffee shop and offer coffee in exchange for someone’s opinion.

Do not invite friends and family to the focus group. Their opinion may be biased, and out of courtesy to you, they will not be able to answer questions sincerely.
Before launching a product or service, be sure to find the problem,
which your company will deal with.