Lesson 5 – Designing Your Value Proposition

Watch this interview

George and Jeroen discuss why it’George and Jeroen discuss why it’s important to create a compelling value proposition to your customers.s important to narrow your focus to a specific customer segment.

2) Review background for this lesson’s exercise

This lesson, you will be designing a value proposition. Before we start, we need these ingredients that you’ve been working on:

Simply put, who will be your first 10 to 50 customers?

• You know your initial solution (although it’s not built yet)
• Your beachhead market for this initial solution is clear (Lesson 4)
• You have talked to a few potential customers about the need or problem your solution is aimed for
• You’ve watched this video on What is Value in a Value Proposition?

Time required:  10 minutes, depending on your reading speed

“A value proposition is a concise statement of the benefits that a company is delivering to customers who buy its products or services.“

3) Do these exercises

First, add Lesson 5 slides to your Journey Scrapbook

Good luck!

What are value propositions?

A value proposition is a concise statement of the benefits that a company is delivering to customers who buy its products or services. Value propositions are all about communication. They are basically the way to explain to your potential customer what you can do for them.

Why is it hard?

Writing good value propositions is basically a language game. You need to understand your customer’s language. Your doctor explains what’s wrong with you in a different way than talking to a fellow doctor. Startup founders don’t usually initially know the right words. This is trial and error process.

Key question: What’s in it for them?

Engineers have the tendency to be overly focused on the technical aspects of their product. Visionary founders talk about the change they want to be in the world.

Your customers likely don’t care about the change in the world. They want to be helped with their needs and problems. So, what is in it for them?

Exercise 01: Keep it simple, customer focused

First, start out with making a 10 second pitch about your startup.

This guide shows you how to get there. This guide focuses on the outcome and the problem of the customers.

Write down, what is your ~10 second pitch?

Exercise 02: Expand it into a brochure

This guide shows you how to build your value proposition

Making a brochure where you focus on the features, benefits and catchy oneliners is the best way to experiment with ways of proposing value.

Make three flyers using the above guide (template included)