Figure out if you're solving a vitamin problem or a painkiller problem
"Nice to have" and "can't function without it" both generate polite interest — only one generates paying customers reliably.
- Use it for
- Founders trying to honestly assess whether their idea addresses a must-have or a nice-to-have.
Both painkiller problems (something actively broken that people will pay to fix) and vitamin problems (something nice to have, an improvement rather than a fix) generate polite positive interest in conversation, which makes them easy to confuse — the real difference only shows up in willingness to pay and urgency, not in how positively people describe the problem. This prompt checks which one you're actually solving before assuming demand.
When not to use this
If you already have real payment or urgency signal from actual customers, that evidence settles the question directly — this first-principles check is for before you have that signal yet.
Did this work?
You have an honest, specific read on whether the problem you're solving is a painkiller or a vitamin — and if it's a vitamin, what that implies for how hard customer acquisition will actually be.
Tested on claude-opus-5. Evidence status is draft; it moves to battle-tested only on recorded runs, never by hand.