''' Is your AI startup a vitamin or a painkiller?
I’ve seen hundreds of pitches from AI founders. They’re brilliant, passionate, and they’ve built some truly impressive tech. But I always come back to that one question. Because if you’re building a vitamin, you’re building a “nice-to-have.” You’re a feature, a supplement, something that adds a little value but doesn’t solve a burning, five-alarm-fire of a problem. And in the brutal world of startups, “nice-to-have” is a death sentence.
Painkillers, on the other hand, are indispensable. They solve a problem that keeps a customer up at night. They’re the first thing a company pays for and the last thing they’ll cut when budgets get tight. When you’re a painkiller, you’re not just a line item on a spreadsheet; you’re a critical part of your customer’s workflow. That’s how you build a moat around your business. That’s how you attract the best talent. And that’s how you get acquired for a life-changing amount of money.
I learned this lesson the hard way. With my first company, MovieLaLa, we were definitely a vitamin. We had a cool app that let you discover new movies and see what your friends were watching. It was fun, it was engaging, but it wasn’t essential. We had millions of users, but we struggled to monetize. We were a vitamin, and we were running out of time. It wasn’t until we pivoted to a B2B model and started providing our data to movie studios that we found our painkiller. We were solving a real problem for them: how to market their movies more effectively. That’s when things really took off, and we were eventually acquired by Gfycat.
My second company, RemoteTeam, was a painkiller from day one. We built it to solve our own problem: managing a remote team across different time zones. We knew the pain of trying to coordinate payroll, compliance, and HR for a distributed workforce. So we built a platform to automate it all. We were our own first customer, and we knew we were onto something when other startups started asking if they could use our software. We were solving a massive pain point for a rapidly growing market, and that’s why Gusto acquired us.
So how do you make the leap from vitamin to painkiller? It’s not about building more features. It’s about a fundamental shift in your mindset and your strategy. Here’s the framework I use when I’m advising the AI startups I invest in:
The Painkiller Framework
1. Find the Burning Problem
Don’t start with the tech. Start with the customer. Who are you building for? What is the single biggest problem they face in their work or their life? You need to be obsessed with this problem. You should be able to describe it in excruciating detail. If you can’t, you haven’t done your homework. Go talk to your customers. Shadow them for a day. Live their pain.
I once invested in an AI company that was building a tool to help lawyers with legal research. They had some incredibly sophisticated NLP models, but they were struggling to get traction. I told them to get out of the building and go talk to their users. They spent a month sitting in law firms, watching lawyers work. They discovered that the real pain wasn’t finding relevant case law; it was summarizing it. So they pivoted their product to focus on automated summarization, and their sales took off.
2. Quantify the Pain
Once you’ve identified the pain, you need to quantify it. How much time is it costing your customers? How much money are they losing? How much of a risk is it to their business? You need to be able to put a number on it. This is what will make your solution a no-brainer. If you can show a customer that you can save them $1 million a year, the price of your software becomes a rounding error.
When we were building RemoteTeam, we calculated that the average startup was spending 20 hours a month on manual HR and payroll tasks for their remote employees. That’s 240 hours a year. At an average loaded cost of $100/hour for a startup employee, that’s $24,000 a year in wasted time. Our platform could do it all in a few clicks for a fraction of the cost. That was a powerful value proposition.
3. Build the Minimum Viable Painkiller
Don’t try to boil the ocean. Don’t build a Swiss Army knife. Build a scalpel. Your first product should do one thing, and it should do it better than anyone else. It should be a targeted solution to the burning problem you’ve identified. All of your engineering resources should be focused on making that one thing as simple, as elegant, and as effective as possible.
One of the most common mistakes I see AI startups make is that they try to do too much. They have a cool new model, and they want to apply it to every problem under the sun. That’s a recipe for disaster. You’ll end up with a product that’s a mile wide and an inch deep. It will be a vitamin, not a painkiller. Focus is your friend. Nail the one thing that matters most to your customers, and you can always expand from there.
4. Become the Talent Magnet
When you’re building a painkiller, something magical happens. You become a magnet for talent. The best engineers, the best product managers, the best salespeople—they don’t want to work on vitamins. They want to work on problems that matter. They want to build things that people love and can’t live without. They want to be part of a company that’s changing the world, even in a small way.
At both RemoteTeam and MovieLaLa, we were able to attract incredible talent because we had a clear mission and we were solving a real problem. We weren’t just another social media app or a "nice-to-have" feature. We were building something that people needed. That’s a powerful recruiting tool. It’s more powerful than any salary or stock option package. The best people want to work on the best problems. If you have a burning problem to solve, you’ll have your pick of the best talent.
This is especially true in the world of AI. The top AI talent is a scarce resource. They can work anywhere they want. They’re not interested in building another photo-sharing app with a "smart" filter. They want to work on the hard problems. They want to build things that push the boundaries of what’s possible. If you can offer them that, you’ll have a huge advantage in the war for talent.
The Investor’s Perspective
As an investor, this is what I look for in an AI startup. I want to see a team that is obsessed with a problem, not with a technology. I want to see a clear, quantifiable value proposition. I want to see a focused product that solves a real pain point. And I want to see a team that can attract and retain the best talent.
When a founder comes to me with a pitch deck, I’m not just looking at the tech. I’m looking for the story. I’m looking for the “why.” Why are you building this? Who are you building it for? What is the pain you’re solving? If you can’t answer those questions in a clear and compelling way, I’m not interested. But if you can show me that you’ve found a real painkiller, then you have my attention.
I’ve been fortunate to invest in some amazing AI companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Scale AI, and Hugging Face. And they all have one thing in common: they’re all painkillers. They’re all solving massive, fundamental problems. They’re all building things that are indispensable to their customers. And they’re all magnets for the best talent in the world.
So, I’ll ask you again: is your AI startup a vitamin or a painkiller? If it’s a vitamin, it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Go find a real problem. Go find a burning pain. And go build a painkiller. Your future depends on it. ''' '''
The Hard Lessons from the Trenches
Let me tell you a little more about MovieLaLa. We were a bunch of movie lovers who thought it would be cool to have an app to track what you watch and get recommendations. We spent months building a beautiful interface, a slick recommendation engine, and all the social features you could imagine. We launched, and people liked it. We got a ton of downloads, and the press called us the “Goodreads for movies.” We were a vitamin, and we were proud of it.
But then reality hit. Our user growth stalled. Our engagement was okay, but not great. And we had no idea how to make money. We tried a few things—affiliate links to buy movie tickets, premium features—but nothing really moved the needle. We were burning through cash, and I was starting to panic. I remember one board meeting where one of my investors looked me in the eye and said, “Sahin, you’ve built a beautiful vitamin. But the world is full of vitamins. You need to find a painkiller.”
That was a wake-up call. We went back to the drawing board. We started talking to movie studios, and we discovered that they had a massive problem. They were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing, but they had no idea what was working. They were flying blind. That’s when we had our “aha” moment. We had all this data on what people were watching and what they were excited about. We could use that data to help studios market their movies more effectively. We pivoted the company, and it was the best decision we ever made. We were no longer a vitamin for consumers; we were a painkiller for businesses.
With RemoteTeam, we didn’t make the same mistake. We started with the pain. My co-founder and I were running a remote team, and we were drowning in administrative work. We were using a dozen different tools to manage payroll, benefits, compliance, and it was a nightmare. We knew there had to be a better way. So we built it. We were our own first customer, and we felt the pain every single day. That’s why we were so passionate about solving it. We weren’t just building a product; we were scratching our own itch. And it turned out that there were a lot of other people with the same itch.
The Art of Finding Pain
So how do you find these burning problems? You have to become a student of pain. You have to be insatiably curious about what’s broken in the world. Here are a few places to look:
- Your own life: What are the things that frustrate you every day? What are the workarounds and hacks you’ve created to deal with broken processes? That’s where RemoteTeam came from. We were our own first customer.
- Your customers’ lives: Talk to your customers. But don’t just ask them what they want. That’s a recipe for building incremental improvements. Instead, ask them about their problems. Ask them what keeps them up at night. Ask them what they would pay anything to solve.
- The news: What are the big macro trends that are changing the world? The rise of remote work, the aging of the population, the shift to a subscription economy—these are all massive trends that are creating new problems and new opportunities. RemoteTeam was a direct response to the rise of remote work.
The Power of a Number
When you’re quantifying the pain, don’t be afraid to be bold. Don’t be afraid to put a big, scary number on it. The bigger the number, the more urgent the problem. And the more valuable your solution will be.
I once invested in a company that was building a tool to help e-commerce companies reduce shopping cart abandonment. They had a cool piece of tech, but they were struggling to sell it. I asked them how they were quantifying the pain. They said, “Well, we can help you increase your conversion rate by 2%.” That’s a vitamin. It’s a nice-to-have.
I told them to go back and do their homework. They came back a few weeks later with a new pitch. They said, “The average e-commerce company loses $1 million a year to shopping cart abandonment. Our tool can help you recover $200,000 of that.” That’s a painkiller. It’s a no-brainer. They started closing deals left and right.
The Scalpel vs. the Swiss Army Knife
When you’re building your minimum viable painkiller, you have to be ruthless about focus. You have to say no to a hundred good ideas to say yes to the one great idea. You’re not building a Swiss Army knife. You’re building a scalpel.
A Swiss Army knife has a lot of tools, but none of them are very good. It’s a classic vitamin. A scalpel has one tool, but it’s incredibly sharp and precise. It’s a classic painkiller.
I once saw a startup that was building an “all-in-one” platform for small businesses. It had CRM, project management, invoicing, and a dozen other features. It was a classic Swiss Army knife. And it was a total failure. The product was bloated, confusing, and buggy. It tried to do everything, but it did nothing well. They would have been much better off picking one of those features and building the best damn invoicing tool on the market.
The Unfair Advantage in the War for Talent
When you’re building a painkiller, you have an unfair advantage in the war for talent. You can’t compete with Google and Facebook on salary and perks. But you can compete on purpose. You can offer people a chance to work on something that matters. You can offer them a chance to be part of a team that’s solving a real problem.
I’ve seen this time and time again. The best people are not motivated by money. They’re motivated by meaning. They want to know that their work is making a difference. If you can offer them that, you’ll be able to attract and retain the best talent in the world. And in the end, that’s the only thing that matters.
What I Look for in a Founding Team
When I’m evaluating a founding team, I’m looking for a few key things. First, I’m looking for a team that is obsessed with the problem, not the solution. I want to see that they’ve spent a lot of time with customers and that they have a deep understanding of the pain they’re solving. Second, I’m looking for a team that has a unique insight into the problem. What do they know that no one else knows? What’s their unfair advantage? Third, I’m looking for a team that is relentlessly resourceful. Startups are hard. Things will go wrong. I want to see a team that can figure things out and find a way to win.
But most of all, I’m looking for a team that has a fire in their belly. I’m looking for a team that is so passionate about solving this problem that they’ll run through walls to make it happen. Because in the end, that’s what it takes to build a great company. It’s not about the tech. It’s not about the market. It’s about the people. And it’s about the pain. '''
Frequently Asked Questions
Do all experts agree with this view?
No, and that's fine. The best ideas in business are often contrarian. I share my perspective based on my experience and data, but I encourage you to seek out opposing viewpoints and form your own conclusions.
What experience informs this perspective?
This perspective comes from over a decade of building companies in Silicon Valley, two successful exits (RemoteTeam to Gusto, MovieLaLa to Gfycat), and investing in 200+ startups including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Scale AI. I write about what I've lived.
How can I apply this thinking to my own situation?
Start by identifying the core principle behind the opinion, not the specific example. Then ask yourself: does this principle apply to my context? If yes, test it in a small, low-risk way before going all in.