A method for finding out if you have a painkiller or a vitamin(flowventures.com)
flowventures.com
A method for finding out if you have a painkiller or a vitamin
http://www.flowventures.com/blog/index.php/2009/03/15/a-method-for-finding-out-if-you-have-a-painkiller-or-a-vitamin/
6 comments
Can we please stop using those silly names? "Painkiller vs Vitamin" is patently stupid. How about just calling the article "Tips for organizing your start-up" or something honest? If you can't get upvotes without a shitty title, you've written a shitty article.
I was pretty excited for some reason, thinking that this was a method of determining whether you're getting a placebo or the real thing during double-blind medical testing.
Really mis-leading title. I was actually interested in what an article true a title like this had to say. I thought there might be a fun experiment I could perform at home to prove the point.
Good article, but much more applicable for enterprise products vs. consumer. The problem VCs have is that most of the time they need to figure out patterns by which to determine the potential of an early stage company, but most of the great companies don't fall into any pattern. Only after the fact, when looking back, can you see a pattern (other than founders, which is why they put such an emphasis on team, cause team does matter and team is more easy to recognize than product fit). By this criteria, twitter would be vitamin, facebook would be (be honest, has it been a burning desire for you to connect with long lost friends or have a social graph? not until you had it did you realize you needed it). So if your product fails these criteria, it's not the end of the world. But it is useful especially for products targeting enterprise customers.
The last time this stupid analogy was used, I wrote this post:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499929
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499929
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Flagged as misleading. Really gives zero idea what the link is about.