The painkiller vs vitamin metaphor is not serving us, here’s why.

“So, are you making a painkiller or a vitamin?” I hear this question asked often in discussion, when people share their product or idea they’ve been working on. It’s become something of a Startup 101. Supposedly, your painkiller product provides relief to an immediate problem, while your vitamin gives you long-term benefits and could become part of your customers lives for good. Google ‘painkiller vs vitamin’ and you’ll see hundreds of articles and videos discussing the topic and repeating this idea.

This isn’t one of those posts. I’m here to tell you that this metaphor is flawed and misleading. In fact, if what you’re making is either a painkiller or a vitamin, you just might be wasting your time.

Art of the metaphor

Words and metaphors have an immense power. They are the cornerstone of our thinking and culture (this is a metaphor). Metaphors paint the picture, set the scene (also a metaphor). They create boundaries, rules and conditions for our thinking on a given topic (some more metaphors!). A metaphor creates a world for us, a world within which we then operate. Accepting this world, we also accept blindspots and biases that come with the metaphor.

So let’s discuss the blindspots and biases of the Vitamin vs. Painkiller metaphor.