Katelyn Bourgoin – Painkiller Course
Get the Painkiller Course for $475 $12
The Size is 2.22 GB and is Released in 2025
Key Takeaways
- Knowing what pains your customers before you launch is the only way to steer clear of products that go nowhere.
- This shift off product-centric to customer-centric thinking pushes you toward solutions that solve burning problems, not nice-to-have additions.
- Proper customer research interviewing, data analysis can help shatter the feedback loop of guessing and cramming in product features.
- Actionable, meaningful metrics, not vanity metrics, drive better decisions and product improvements.
- Using research and validation frameworks to be confident in the products you launch into the world.
- Our Painkiller course helps founders, product teams, and entrepreneurs get to product-market fit and build for the long-term with hands-on tools.
When Katelyn Bourgoin says “painkiller,” she means something that solves a powerful and legitimate issue for its users. In her book, Bourgoin notes that painkillers are distinguishable from “vitamins” in that people need them, not just want them. The painkiller method assists creators, entrepreneurs, and groups identify what consumers truly desire, transforming it simpler to create products that individuals purchase. The concept aligns with data and user interviews, not just what’s trendy in a conference room. A lot of teams employ this concept to inform their product roadmaps, establish objectives, and hone their marketing. Up next, discover what makes the painkiller approach tick and how to identify genuine pain points in any market.
The Founder’s Dilemma
The founder’s dilemma is about the hard tradeoffs of startup building, especially when it comes to marketing advice for new clients. Founders confront significant decisions regarding control, equity, and growth, which can impact their marketing strategy. Figuring out where product launches fit into this dilemma is crucial for navigating the crowded market.
The Silent Launch
- Low visibility means fewer people know about your product.
- No buzz or hype hurts early momentum.
- Lack of feedback hides flaws, leading to missed improvements.
- Sales frequently remain flat because nobody knows it exists.
Lacking early feedback, a lot of founders are missing signals that could help them shape a stronger product. A silent launch creates a chasm between what customers desire and what the startup delivers, making it effortless to develop irrelevant features.
Being visible and having traction is important. They assist in demonstrating demand and draw in buyers, partners or investors. To not launch in a hole, founders can release betas early, run pre-launch campaigns, or assemble waitlists. Early involvement reveals actual needs, rendering launches less bumpy and more effective.
The “Vitamin” Trap
A ‘vitamin’ is delightful, but not pressing. A ‘painkiller’ remedies an urgent issue. Most customers select painkillers because they repair what ails immediately. Vitamins, by contrast, get left out when money or time is scarce.
When a product isn’t urgent, users bypass purchasing it or forget it altogether. Founders blow time and money on features people aren’t using. Missed opportunities pile up and the business grinds to a halt. To make that shift, founders must instead query what keeps customers awake at night and redouble efforts to alleviate those pains.
If you don’t need a product, it’s time to hear more. Chatting up users, hunting for pain points, and testing new ideas can transform a vitamin into a painkiller—something people need, not just want.
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The Guesswork Cycle
Basing on guesses means deciding without evidence. That can result in features no one cares about. The product deviates from what the market really desires, sapping time and capital.
No research, founders keep assuming. Errors accumulate. The company founder gets bogged down, pursuing the wrong objectives. Hearing from actual customers, conducting customer interviews and trying out ideas in limited tests reduce wasted work.
To escape the loop, founders can sketch out actual ache points prior to programming. Easy surveys, open conversations, and monitoring feedback keep product teams grounded, creating what customers really require.
Who is Katelyn Bourgoin?
Katelyn Bourgoin is a highly sought-after founder and strategist known for her actionable, no-BS take on buyer psychology. She assists brands—from bootstrapped startups to Fortune 500 firms—in discovering product-market fit and launching products that address actual customer pain points. With a background in entrepreneurship and marketing, she’s developed a reputation for translating complex sales cycle concepts into something digestible for a worldwide audience.
The Strategist
- Customer-First Mindset: Every strategy Katelyn builds starts with the buyer. She searches for what people actually need, not simply what brands desire to sell.
- She examines how markets shift and finds gaps others miss. That is, watching statistics, but not losing the human side of the narrative.
- Data-Driven Launches: Katelyn helps teams use facts, not just guesses, to launch new products.
- Sustainable Growth: Her advice leads to real growth—repeat buyers, lasting demand, and better word-of-mouth.
Her work with both startups and global brands demonstrates that she’s able to customize her approach to different contexts. By providing marketing advice, she helps teams identify trends early and act quickly, frequently resulting in lucrative launches.
The Researcher
Katelyn spends hours delving into research—surveys, user interviews and market data. She’s about discovering the ‘why’ behind what buyers do, not just the ‘what.’ She researches cognitive biases such as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, Veblen Goods, and Framing to demonstrate how these influence purchase decisions. Her newsletter, Why We Buy, with over 63,343 readers, provides sharp, actionable insights on these topics.
She’s constructed frameworks that allow founders to peer beyond superficial responses and collect genuine insights. For her, deep research isn’t a stage, it’s the road to a story that sells.
The Educator
You’ll find Katelyn’s passion for teaching in her workshops, courses, and online content. She distills hard concepts—e.g. The Dunning-Kruger Effect or Picture Superiority Effect—into bite-sized advice anyone can implement. Her Twitter feed, @KateBour, is ripe with punchy advice and sampling.
Her students report that her courses are accessible and packed with practical examples. They love her personable voice and how she demystifies buyer psychology in a way that’s less scary and more enjoyable.
The Painkiller Course Explained
Katelyn Bourgoin’s Painkiller course is designed for entrepreneurs seeking hard, practical answers on product-market fit. This customer-focused program emphasizes effective messaging rather than just shipping and praying. It strives to provide actionable marketing advice and real buyer insights for anyone aiming to create products that genuinely address customer pain points.
1. The Core Philosophy
It’s the premise that you succeed by understanding what’s most painful to your customers. If you don’t know their biggest pains, you’re guessing. The Painkiller course guides you away from product-first thinking towards a customer-first approach. It emphasizes that cultivating empathy — truly viewing them through the lens of buyer psychology advice — helps you create products people desire. When you understand the pain points, you can design offers that are difficult to resist, enhancing your next marketing campaign with compelling messaging that resonates.
2. The Research Framework
This course teaches you a research plan that helps you learn what your audience really wants, and it does it step-by-step. You learn how to interview customers, collect feedback, and find trends in their comments, which is crucial for effective marketing advice. There are tools — surveys, checklists, and templates are included — that make it a cinch to acquire these skills quickly. It’s about leveraging reality, not speculation, to determine what to construct for your online business. That way, you don’t waste your time on features nobody gives a damn about.
Each lesson is loaded with examples demonstrating how these techniques work in practice. For example, you could employ a survey to identify a frequent complaint or a basic spreadsheet to plot customer feedback, providing juicy buyer insights. These techniques assist you in identifying which pains are deserving of the primary solution.
3. The Interview Method
The Painkiller course devotes a significant amount of time to the craft of interviews, emphasizing the importance of effective messaging. You figure out how to inquire the right way so people open up, which is crucial for understanding customer pain points. The key is open-ended questions—these garner you more than a yes or no. You learn tricks to keep things organic, so your presentations don’t sound canned. Good listening is crucial here—when you listen, people trust you and open up, providing juicy buyer insights that you won’t achieve through surveys or data alone.
4. The Synthesis Process
Once you collect all your notes, the course guides you through transforming that raw information into potent, lucid concepts. It’s all about discovering what problems are the most important and making them YOURS. You learn to collaborate, exchange feedback, and adjust your thinking along the way. This collaboration not only helps you identify blind spots, it makes your end product vision more robust.
That process results in a plan based on actual needs, not crazy speculations.
5. The Validation Blueprint
The final giant leap — trying your ideas out in the real world. The course provides you with a validation blueprint – a plan to validate if your product is solving the right problem. You learn to run fast experiments, seek honest input, and apply what you learn to improve your product every iteration. This loop creates your belief that you’re on to something valuable for your new client and not building for yourself.
Beyond The Obvious
Shallow data tends to overlook what motivates actual decisions in an online business. Understanding buyer psychology advice helps in pushing past easy explanations and examining how people really behave and think.
Misleading Metrics
Vanity metrics, like raw page views or total downloads, might sound impressive but seldom indicate whether they satisfy actual customer requirements. Actionable metrics, by contrast, reveal direct connections between customers activities and what the product provides. The table below compares some common misleading and actionable metrics:
| Misleading Metric | Actionable Metric |
|---|---|
| Page Views | Conversion Rate |
| Social Followers | Customer Retention Rate |
| Email Signups | Activation Rate |
| App Installs | Daily Active Users |
Vanity metrics fool teams into believing their product is effective when it just catches attention. For instance, a marketing-driven spike in signups doesn’t necessarily mean people are sticking with a product. Instead, centering on retention or activation can help teams observe whether they’re addressing an actual pain point. Calibrating these metrics with business objectives makes data actionable, unambiguous, and connected to what counts for scale.
Confirmation Bias
Fortunately, confirmation bias causes product teams to see what they want to see. When decision-makers solicit feedback just to reinforce their own ideas, they overlook signs that there are bigger issues at play. This can result in time losses and unmet market needs.
One path to bias is to embrace diverse input and trial ideas with actual users, not just early adopters. Teams can leverage open-ended interviews and experiments to observe how individuals respond to change. Having outsiders come in from other disciplines aids in identifying blind spots. It keeps teams honest and receptive to new information, keeping product development closer to real learning and further away from being right.
The “Why” Gap
It’s the gap between what people do and why they do it. A lot of products fail literally because teams track only what users click or buy, not what makes them act. If you don’t know why they choose your offering after a trigger event–like a life transition or new job–you risk overlooking what’s important.
Getting down to the why of decisions gets teams designing solutions aligned to actual needs. Even basic queries like ‘What made you sign up today?’ can expose pain or wants. Once you know why, you can tailor features, messages and prices that resonate with what people most care about. They appreciate items that seem special, suit where they’re at, and address sticky pains. Understanding how human memory functions, and its limitations, assists teams in designing products that are more user-friendly and memorable.
Real Founder Wins
Real founder wins come from a laser focus on what customers really need. Real product founders begin with listening, which involves talking to users, witnessing their friction, and discovering what keeps them up at night. As Katelyn Bourgoin’s work demonstrates, wins occur when founders cease guessing and begin asking. A founder who digs into why someone seeks a repair—say they’re stressed from daily chores or struggling with a work-related tool—gets closer to the true ache. They conduct interviews, unearth buyer sagas, and gather real buyer insights to find out what motivates folks to buy. This kind of research builds better products and keeps a founder from creating something nobody desires.
A 4-time founder, who’s seen wins and fails, knows half the battle is solving a real problem. Courses like Bourgoin’s train founders to detect such “trigger events”—those brief windows of opportunity when a customer transitions from “maybe later” to “I need this now.” For instance, a time-strapped parent might shop for apps when work pressure gets heavy. By mapping these moments, founders can mold products that fit actual needs, not just nice to haves, thus enhancing their marketing strategy.
Viewing the space from the buyer’s perspective is crucial. Most founders get stuck thinking about competitors the wrong way. Instead, they should be asking, ‘What else could my customer choose instead of my product?’ Maybe it’s a dumb habit or an ancient tool, not some other startup. When founders see the big picture, they can build products that differentiate for the right reasons, leading to effective messaging.
Course grads frequently report how these techniques caused dramatic increases in product momentum and more powerful launches. More founders now employ customer interviews to craft what they build. Key outcomes from these real founder wins include significant improvements in their next marketing campaign and a better understanding of customer pain points.
- Faster product traction after direct customer research
- Clear proof of demand before launching
- Items designed to accommodate actual pain points, not just what’s cool
- Smarter choices by knowing what buyers really want
- Less spent on things people don’t give a damn about
Who Should Enroll?
Katelyn Bourgoin’s Painkiller course is an invaluable resource for entrepreneurs aiming to understand buyer psychology and create effective messaging that addresses customer pain points, ultimately helping them build products that real buyers actually need.
Early-Stage Founders
Early-stage founders generally encounter hard decisions and uncertainties regarding what their customers actually desire. This course helps founders build this foundation by teaching them how to collect and leverage customer insights. Learning to identify what constitutes a genuine pain point can prevent founders from spending time and resources on ideas that don’t align with the market.
Building on customer research early can help avoid costly mistakes, like launching a product that people ignore. Painkiller provides founders hands-on tactics for conducting interviews, interpreting feedback, and identifying trends in buyers’ comments. These steps get founders a bit closer to product-market fit before they out of steam or capital.
Product Teams
For product teams, collaborating is difficult if each member has a separate vision of what the customer desires. The Painkiller course helps teams aligned on customer pain. When your team is armed with the same facts and actual stories from buyers, it’s much simpler to reach consensus around what features are important.
Knowing how to map product functionality to actual customer needs prevents teams from creating stuff no one uses. The course provides teams tools to communicate, iterate, and validate ideas more quickly, resulting in better products and more victories over time.
Aspiring Entrepreneurs
Future founders can leverage this course to position themselves for success. Painkiller provides them the fundamentals for identifying genuine issues worth paying to fix. By acquiring skills in buyer psychology and customer research, entrepreneurs are able to plan smarter launches and sidestep building products that miss the mark.
It teaches how to leverage stories and simple language to communicate why a product is important. This assists founders in engaging with their crowd and establishing credibility. Understanding why folks purchase and how to communicate with them can accelerate your journey to a robust, sustainable enterprise.
Conclusion
Katelyn Bourgoin’s Painkiller course decomposes actual actions that assist founders to abandon speculation and begin addressing genuine buyer discomfort. The course demonstrates how to identify what customers want, not just what looks good on paper. Actual founders have experienced victories, such as more precise offers and more defined victories for their purchasers. The course suits anyone looking to eliminate guesswork and view direct outcomes. Every lesson clings to actionable advice from Katelyn’s field work. For makers looking to scale with less strain, this course provides the toolkit. To see how these concepts can help your own work, check out the Painkiller course. Tiny shifts can ignite massive change.
