Find a Burning Problem—Painkillers > Vitamins and the B2B / B2C Split

The digital landscape is a vast desert, littered with the sun-bleached bones of promising startups. Most founders' “research” consists of brainstorming with a large-language model and scrolling through the same Reddit r/startups threads as everyone else. This is armchair archaeology, digging where everyone else is digging. The chapter examines how real companies navigated the path from discovering a pain point to building a profitable business around it. The chapter looks at founders who resisted the siren song of vitamins and built empires by solving grimy, high-value problems. A business is a system for solving a validated, painful problem in exchange for money. The chapter shows what a real business opportunity looks like, and provides a checklist of non-negotiable items. The strategies for winning in B2B and B2C are fundamentally incompatible.