Don't try to sell vitamins

Products and services can loosely be broken down into ‘vitamins’ (things that people know that they should have, but have no urgent need for) and ‘painkillers’ (things that people have an urgent need for).

It’s far easier to sell painkillers than vitamins. Also vitamins are the first things to get cut when budgets tighten.

Companies need certain things to function. Usually “boring” things like accounting software, CRMs, project management tools. Sometimes companies buy things like fun Slack bots that socially match up employees with each other to meet for lunch or remind them to take a break, but these things are not essential to their core business.

A lot of startup founders start out as employees and their ideas are built around experiences where they have gone ‘wouldn’t it be nice if I had…‘. Most successful startup founders have a deeper understanding of what businesses need and build their ideas around ‘We would have saved $XXX at previous employer if we had only had …‘.

There’s a market for vitamins and it’s certainly not impossible to sell them, it’s just a lot harder.