[alexpopescu]

That's a very interesting subcategorization of game changers.

What I find quite interesting about thinking only in terms of hooks and painkillers is that this categorization might trick you.

A series of hooks could prove to be only distractions. A features that users think it's awesome is not necessarily "signing the deal". They might be an eye catcher, a conversation started, but in the end you might find that not enough users actually care about it.

As for painkillers, well, I think that those could be anything from game changers to distractions (include too many painkillers and you'll get MS Office :-).

Once again, this is only to say that I think I'd be thinking in terms of hooks and painkillers only after making sure that the feature is a game changer. And not vice versa.

ps: by the way I feel I disagree with some of the hooks you've listed. But that part of the discussion would fit better in a different context :-).

[nostrademons]

I don't think you should have a series of Hooks. The Hook's value is to get people's attention: it's often not actually that useful in ordinary usage, just like PageRank is far from the complete Google ranking algorithm and people usually don't care about the satellite imagery on Google Maps when they just want to get from place to place. But they made people stand up and think "Wow" when the product came out, and that's what convinced them to try using the Painkillers. Oftentimes the Hook is quietly retired once the product gains market acceptance.

By definition, if something is a Distraction, it's not a Painkiller. :-) This relates to the common marketing wisdom that your product should be an "aspirin", not a "vitamin". You should solve something that's painful to the user, not just an "Oh hey, this looks shiny."

[alexpopescu]

When talking about painkillers I think we should also think about how many have that pain. If it's too little, then that painkiller can be a distraction. So while I fully agree with you that a distraction is not a painkiller, the opposite is not always true.

Plus I think painkillers could definitely be just showstoppers.

Once again, I find this subcategorization working great as a refinement applied to the @coffeemug's model. The only point is not to start with it directly.