That quote doesn't quite hold water: the Vitamin industry is a multi-billion dollar one. Maybe it doesn't quite compare with Bayer, but it's still quite profitable.

Actually I'd suggest the Vitamin industry is the easier/better of the two, you don't actually have to prove the vitamins work in order to sell them.

Yes, I don't think you can take that quote too literally, or the intent is lost.

Figuratively, of course, it means people will pay handsomely and hurriedly for you to take their pain away, but it is difficult to get them to pay for potential small improvements.

I don't think that's true at all. The trouble is the aspirin is free. Node, jQuery, Python, pick-your-language-or-framework, almost all are free. The point of the article is that if you want to make a pain killer, it better be vicodin not aspirin. And even then, if it's a large enough problem, likely someone who can offer it for free will make slightly-less-good-but-free vicodin.

I think for infrastructure as a business to work you need to find a sweet spot of: 1.) a serious pain point 2.) for a large number of customers who do not have the resources to solve it themselves, and 3.) that is hard enough to solve that it can't be solved by a quickly hacked together product. In particular to 3, one example I can think of is a problem requiring a very complicated but powerful user interface.

Oh, and then you actually need to solve it, track down the customers and convince them to pay for it. Overall it's a tough needle to thread.

I dunno, both aspirin and vitamins seem like technologies to me. Try pain relief and a healthy body.

Sell pain relief instead.