Value Proposition
Writing Your Value Proposition
Your value proposition (“value prop”) is a sentence of two that describes the value your product or service brings to your customer segment. It is the distillation of your business into its essence—it’s your reason for existing and how you will measure whether or not you are succeeding.
Here are some questions to answer in order to craft your unique value prop:
- What problem or opportunity have you observed or experienced that you would like to solve/fill?
- Who is especially frustrated by this problem or who would benefit from this need being filled? What about this problem specifically frustrates them? What about these people makes them especially susceptible to this problem?
- How are these people dealing with this problem now? Are they ignoring it? What other “solutions” currently exist for the problem?
- What could be improved about those “solutions” and what have you noticed about the people using these less-than-perfect solutions?
- How does your proposed solution address those drawbacks and make it a must-have for people in Question #2?
- How will you help potential customers overcome those hurdles and make it super easy for people to adopt your solution?
The answers to these questions should be compelling for your target customers. If they’re not, now you can go back to the drawing board equipped with the key point(s) you need to address and/or improve on.
When you’re happy with the answers, you can combine parts of them into a Value Prop Statement like this:
“My customer has a problem, and it is that __________________. Current methods used to solve this problem include _____________, but are _______ (characterize problems with the current method). Our solution solves this problem by _____________________ _. We will succeed because we are the only __________________ _.”