I dug out Marc Andreessen's blog comment in 2007. Its immensely helpful as I was validating an idea for a project with a prototype.

I was told to validate and find pain points. However, I realized, people may be so accustomed to the current crappy solutions that they are OK to live with it. If there are free options (that works terribly), cheapos may just aggregate them. More work? Sure, but beats paying.

Perhaps its due to no other paid option that is far lower priced but offers similar value.

Conversely, instead of pain, something out of this world and offers significantly more value would get people excited and pay to try like in Dropbox or Whatsapp. Is this is a case of users having problems but don't know they exist?

How do we then go identify whats thrilling and exciting (since they are usually in a new form/ market) and go about validating and building them?

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"giving people something new that they can do that they find exciting and useful is a more predictable path to success than solving a pain point.

The pain point theory is deeply ingrained in the entrepreneurial mindset at this point but the problem with it is that if people have lived with some form of pain for a long time, they can probably live with it going forward, at least for quite a while. And it can be hard to get them to bite off the effort required to end the pain.

Give them something they're thrilled about, though, and at least in this day and age, they'll usually go for it.

I've heard this described as "aspirin vs vitamins" -- aspirin solves a pain point, whereas vitamins make something better. I'm talking more about a third category -- say, "Oreos" :-)"