Painkillers, not vitamins: what makes software a must-have
For software to become what the industry calls a must-have, or a killer app, it has to close a fundamental pain of a business or a person. The rule is simple: sell painkillers, not vitamins. Vitamins are useful, but you can live without them. Without a painkiller you cannot.
All successful IT products hit one of three economic pains.
Pain 1: "We are losing money, or not earning enough"
Revenue. A business will pay any reasonable price for software that helps it earn more. The software finds new customers, raises sales conversion, retains the existing base, automates marketing. Salesforce and Bitrix24 are the classic cases: a CRM that stops leads being lost and closes more deals. Shopify is another: launch online sales quickly and start earning.
Pain 2: "We spend too many resources"
Costs and efficiency, the other side of the coin. If software lets the same work be done by fewer people or faster, it becomes critical. It replaces manual labour with algorithms and cuts the time spent on routine. 1C and SAP automate accounting so that a company does not keep an army of bookkeepers; UiPath’s RPA robots move data from one table to another instead of people.
Pain 3: "Everything is too complex and chaotic"
Organisational chaos. When a business grows, processes break: people lose tasks, deadlines slip, management does not know what the team is doing. This is the pain of control and transparency, and the software answer is a single source of truth where everything is structured and visible. Asana, Jira and Notion turn the chaos into cards, tables and knowledge bases.
Four hidden factors
Closing a basic pain gets a product into the market. Four further properties are what make it impossible to remove.
- 01An instant "aha" moment (time-to-value). The user has to feel the value in the first minutes, ideally seconds. If setting the product up means reading a hundred pages of documentation, it is doomed. In Zoom one button creates a call; in Dropbox you drag a file into a folder.
- 02Lower cognitive load. The best software takes the hard thinking off the user. It does not just present an interface; it suggests the next step, or does it itself with AI.
- 03Network effect. The value grows with every new user. Slack or Telegram are useless if you are the only one there. When the whole team or the customers move in, the product becomes irreplaceable: all your working relationships live inside it.
- 04Seamless fit into habits. Successful software embeds itself into the tools people already use. It does not force the user to rebuild their working day; it quietly extends it through extensions, plugins and APIs.
How we use this
This is the checklist behind the technical and market review every product passes before it enters the Digict LTD catalog. Which pain does it close, and for whom? How long until the first value? Does it get stronger with every user, and does it fit the tools the buyer already runs? A product that answers those questions is a painkiller, and painkillers sell.