We can divide products/services into 2 categories: glitter and aspirin.
Glitter products are “non-essentials”, users and companies that buy them can live without it.
Aspiring products are essentials if users/companies do not have them, they will increase costs and reduce revenue.
Glitter
We have many more glitter products for end-users than for companies.
Social networks, games, and streaming services can be considered glitter products as you can live without them.
When a company needs to cut costs they are the first services to be removed.
Aspirin
you need to take your aspirin for your headaches
Aspirin products much like aspirin medicine are needed to make you and your company operate.
Let's see some aspirin in a software startup.
If you are a software startup you need to have a cloud infrastructure to run your servers and applications, usually AWS.
You also need to store your code somewhere, usually GitHub.
You also need to run automated tasks like lint, test, and deploy using a CI/CD, usually CircleCI or GitHub Actions.
Dichotomy
Some products can be seen as glitter to some users and as aspirin to another.
Instagram is mostly glitter to most users, but for sellers and digital influencers, they are aspirin as most of their business happens inside Instagram.
Mixing both
At Feedback House we have many modules to help business manage their teams.
We have some modules that we consider glitter and some that is aspirin.
Aspirin modules are easier to sell as the company needs it, but we usually make upsell by adding glitter modules to the service package.
What about your startup product, is it glitter or an aspirin product?