How to turn a Vitamin into a Painkiller

Five ways to turn a vitam into a painkiller, with examples from Calm, PayPal, Vanta, Deel and Gong

You think your product is a ‘vitamin,’ a 'nice to have.’ Is that a death sentence?

Absolutely not! Vanta, Deel, Calm, Gong, and even PayPal all started as nice-to-haves. Now they're painkillers worth billions. Each.

They didn’t change their products – they found their customers’ pain, and drew attention to it.

Here’s how:

1. Poke at the pain (Calm):  Meditation is a vitamin for most people. We know it’s good for us, but it’s easy to ignore. So, Calm built an onboarding flow that surfaces the pain people already feel: anxiety, burnout, sleep deprivation. Multiple-choice questions written in actual customer language, bring those feelings to the surface – so meditation stops feeling like a chore, and starts to look like relief.
   

   

2. Find the segment that’s truly suffering (PayPal): In the early days, big ecommerce sites already accepted credit cards – they didn’t need PayPal. But our salespeople noticed they could sell to consumer electronics and sporting goods merchants. Why? They had high fraud rates eating into low margins – an expensive pain that PayPal’s superior fraud models solved.
   

3. Pivot to a bigger pain (Deel): Deel started out as yet another payroll tool for remote workers. But after spending time with customers, they realized the bigger hassle wasn’t paying someone in another country, it was the tax and legal risk. So, they pivoted from a payroll tool to an Employer of Record service, taking on the legal risk themselves.
   

   
   

   

   
   

4. Position against the pain / risk (Vanta): Vanta automates compliance, which is at the bottom of the priority list for most founders. Instead of trying to make compliance exciting, they poke at the risk:‘Don’t let a SOC 2 audit be the reason you lose your biggest deal.’Turns a "nice-to-have" security certificate into a "painkiller" for a salesperson's quota.
   

   

5. Highlight the cost of doing nothing (Gong): Gong makes sales coaching software, but sales coaching was never seen as mission-critical. At least not until Gong started asking prospects a simple question: "How much are your best sales reps bringing in that your bottom 20% aren't?" The difference is lost revenue. That calculation moved sales coaching from fuzzy nice-to-have to must-have with a number attached.
   

Bottom line:

There's no such thing as a "vitamin" product. Only pain you haven't found yet.

Simple next step

Who are your “bite your hand off” customers – the easiest ones to sell to? And what’s so horribly wrong in their lives that they’re willing to do business with your random little startup? That’s your pain. Go kill it!

I hope this helps.