I had to look up the painkiller v.s. vitamin distinction - I hadn't heard that one before. Evidently it's common startup folklore these days but I think it was first popularized by Don Dodge in 2006, here's the post via the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20060329104930/https://dondodge....
This seems like a terrible analogy, as a vitamin is something you can't live without, while pain killers mask the problem. I'd think one would want to be a vitamin and not a pain killer, but the opposite suggestion is being made. Maybe that's why this hasn't stood the test of time.
They are talking about vitamin supplements, not literal vitamins that you need in order to live. Vitamin supplements do not survive in a budget reduction spreadsheet - they're easy to let go of for a while. On the other hand, if you're in pain, you need painkillers, and you're not going to be thinking about your budget, you're just going to go get some to get rid of the pain, even if it's just a temporary fix (and even better for the business if it's just a temporary fix - recurring revenue!).
That's the whole thing, the whole "solve a real problem" thing they keep talking about for startups.
You don't need vitamin supplements. You don't need to waste money on vitamin pills. You just need to eat food, and ideally avoid wacky diets like only eating meat or only eating plants or anything like that.
Eat a balanced diet, go outside sometimes, and you'll be fine.
One single cherry tomato contains enough vitamin C to last you for a week. If you take a vitamin C tablet too, you're just making your pee more expensive.
Some people really do need to supplement things because of idiosyncratic metabolic issues (particularly for B12) or just not having access to enough (RDAs for vitamin D are a joke and normal Western diets can easily be out of whack in terms of omega fatty acid balance).
Vitamin C is presumably not saving any meaningful number of people from scurvy in the developed world, but it does seem to be at least a darn good placebo. There's more to health than avoiding deficiency diseases; and we're talking about typically pennies per day here anyway. A small amount compared to the food it's supplementing.
I had to look up the painkiller v.s. vitamin distinction - I hadn't heard that one before. Evidently it's common startup folklore these days but I think it was first popularized by Don Dodge in 2006, here's the post via the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20060329104930/https://dondodge....
This seems like a terrible analogy, as a vitamin is something you can't live without, while pain killers mask the problem. I'd think one would want to be a vitamin and not a pain killer, but the opposite suggestion is being made. Maybe that's why this hasn't stood the test of time.
> a vitamin is something you can't live without
They are talking about vitamin supplements, not literal vitamins that you need in order to live. Vitamin supplements do not survive in a budget reduction spreadsheet - they're easy to let go of for a while. On the other hand, if you're in pain, you need painkillers, and you're not going to be thinking about your budget, you're just going to go get some to get rid of the pain, even if it's just a temporary fix (and even better for the business if it's just a temporary fix - recurring revenue!).
That's the whole thing, the whole "solve a real problem" thing they keep talking about for startups.
You don't need vitamin supplements. You don't need to waste money on vitamin pills. You just need to eat food, and ideally avoid wacky diets like only eating meat or only eating plants or anything like that.
Eat a balanced diet, go outside sometimes, and you'll be fine.
One single cherry tomato contains enough vitamin C to last you for a week. If you take a vitamin C tablet too, you're just making your pee more expensive.
Some people really do need to supplement things because of idiosyncratic metabolic issues (particularly for B12) or just not having access to enough (RDAs for vitamin D are a joke and normal Western diets can easily be out of whack in terms of omega fatty acid balance).
Vitamin C is presumably not saving any meaningful number of people from scurvy in the developed world, but it does seem to be at least a darn good placebo. There's more to health than avoiding deficiency diseases; and we're talking about typically pennies per day here anyway. A small amount compared to the food it's supplementing.
Reposting because the previous version had a font rendering issue in light mode