The oldest line in venture is that you want to sell a painkiller, not a vitamin. It’s good advice, and almost useless as stated, because every founder thinks their problem is a migraine and the market keeps deciding it was a vitamin. The question is how to tell the difference before the market does it for you.
This article is one in a series. The series discusses the method we use to judge whether a business plan is fundable. We have developed a multipart weighted scorecard, based partly on research into best practices and partly on my experience in the startup and venture space: five startups, two exits, startup investing, and founding a startup accelerator. There will be one article for each scoring category, plus one on red flags.
There’s a selfish reason for doing it in the open: we are building the methodology into a managed AI agent that evaluates plans against real investor decisions, and writing each part out is how we find where it’s wrong. If you’re raising funding for a startup, you get the rubric we would use to grade you. If you think we have weighted something badly, tell us. That’s the most useful note we can get.
Problem and urgency carry heavy weight in our scorecard, and at the earliest stages they carry more weight than almost anything except the team, because at the pre-seed stage the problem is most of what you have to judge. There is no traction to speak of, and the product will change. What you can assess is whether the thing the company attacks is a real problem that real people will pay real money to make go away. Get that wrong, and nothing downstream will save you, because a great team building a great solution to a problem nobody urgently has is the most expensive way to be wrong in this business.
The test: acute, frequent, expensive
Painkiller versus vitamin is a metaphor, and metaphors don’t score. So here is the test I use to turn it into something I can actually grade, and I’ll flag it now as my own hardening of a cliché, which makes it the first place to push back if you disagree.
A problem worth funding tends to be at least two of the following three things. 1 Acute: when it happens, it hurts enough that the person feels it and wants it fixed now, not eventually. 2 Frequent: it recurs often enough to stay top of mind, rather than surfacing once a year and being forgotten. 3 Expensive: it costs real money, time, or risk, so the math of paying to solve it is obvious to the buyer without a spreadsheet. The best problems tick all three boxes.
Run a few problems through it, and the test earns its keep. A tool that saves an analyst two minutes on a task they do twice a year is none of the three, and no quality of execution makes that fundable. A compliance failure that carries a seven-figure fine is acute and expensive even if it’s rare, and that is enough. A reconciliation that a finance team grinds through every single day is frequent and expensive, and that recurrence is why the category gets funded again and again. The best problems, the ones that build durable companies, are acute and frequent and expensive at once: they hurt, they keep hurting, and the hurt has a dollar figure on it.
The vitamin fails the test on all three counts and usually reveals itself in the pitch. It is described as something that would be “nice to have,” that “improves” or “optimizes” or “streamlines,” verbs that quietly admit nothing is actually on fire. “Improvement” is hard to sell because the customer’s current state is tolerable, and "tolerable" is a powerful competitor that costs nothing and requires no decision.
Whose problem, and how do you know
A problem statement is a claim, and the rule that runs through this whole rubric applies here too: we score the evidence, not the assertion. “Companies struggle with X” is a vitamin-grade sentence until the founder can tell me which companies, how the struggle shows up in their week, and what they do about it today. The strongest evidence on this dimension isn’t a market statistic. It is a specific account of a specific buyer’s specific pain, told with enough texture that I believe the founder has actually sat with the person who has it.
The most common failure is the problem invented from a solution. A founder has built, or wants to build, a clever thing and reasons backward to the problem it would solve. The tell is that the problem is described in the abstract, in the language of markets and trends, never in the voice of a person who has it. Founders who started from a real, lived problem talk about it differently. They name the person, they quote what the person said, they describe the ugly workaround the person uses now. That texture is hard to fake and easy to spot, and its absence is itself a signal.
The “today” question
Urgency is the second half of the dimension, and it has a sharp diagnostic question: What does the customer do about this problem today? Every real problem already has a solution, even if the solution is a spreadsheet, an intern, gritted teeth, or ignoring it. If the founder can’t describe the current workaround, they probably haven’t found a real problem, because a real problem always provokes some response. And if the current workaround is “nothing, they live with it,” that is the quiet evidence of a vitamin: the pain is not sharp enough to have already forced a response. The existence and the awfulness of the current workaround is, paradoxically, some of the best evidence that a problem is worth solving. People don’t build painful workarounds for problems they don’t have.
Current view, subject to change
The “what do they do today” diagnostic I trust completely. It has never once led me wrong; it costs one question, and it cuts straight through a founder’s conviction to the customer’s actual behavior.
The acute-frequent-expensive test is the part I’m holding loosely, and deliberately flagging. It is clean enough to be suspicious, and “at least two of three” is a threshold I picked by feel, not from data. Some genuinely great companies attacked problems that were expensive but rare, or frequent but mild, and a rigid two-of-three rule would have under-scored them at the start. As we run real plans through the agent, I’ll be watching to see whether the problems we score low on this test actually fail in the market. If founders who flunked it went on to build real businesses at a rate that embarrasses the rule, the test is too crude, and I’ll revise the threshold or the three axes themselves. That would change my mind.
What I hold most firmly: the surest sign of a vitamin is a founder who can describe their solution in vivid detail and their customer’s pain only in the abstract. Start from the pain. The solution is the easy part.