Learn how to build a value proposition slide that actually works. Start with who you're solving for and why you can do it, then focus on one urgent pain point. Show the before and after, then validate it by talking to customers with a simple demo and asking if they'd buy.
Chapters
Part of giving a pitch is describing the problem that you're solving for your customers and the solution that you're building to solve that problem. Another word for that is the value proposition. And so part of when you're creating this value proposition and talking about it, it's absolutely critical that you first identify the who. Who are you solving this problem for and how did you discover this problem? And so there's a number of different ways to come to this conclusion. Some of the founders that come and visit us actually saying, I visited 200 potential customers and this is a distillation of everything I learned from these folks and here are the three problems we're going to solve for them. Another way people come with the, you know, develop this insight about the problem they want to solve is that they actually lived in a particular industry or lived the problem themselves. They worked at a particular company where one process was super manual or it was outdated or difficult to do or too slow. And they said, you know what, I'm going to build software for this particular audience to solve this problem. Other people might have been in a small business themselves and actually lived and breathed the problem at their own company previously and decided to build a tool for themselves. And so there are a number of different ways to kind of do discovery, but we always want to kind of peel into that because we're getting into the why. Why are you starting this company? Why are you the right person to do this? What did you learn that made you want to do this? Why do you have to spend the next six to seven years of your life on that? And so that's the, that's the who and the why, and then the what is, okay, what have you actually built or what do you plan on building that's gonna solve this problem for your particular audience? So it's a combination of the problem of identifying the user base that you're going after and then identifying a solution, a narrow enough one, that you can tackle it in the early stage of your company that you're gonna build first and then build the rest of your company on top of. Very often a founder, especially first time founders, will try to create an expansive product. You know, it's very easy to sit around a table with a cup of coffee and your co founders and imagine the 200 things that your product could build and just go on and on and on ad nauseam. But when you're first starting a company, it's super important to narrow the problem set that you're going after to the most urgent, the most critical problem so that you know you can actually charge money from these customers and that they will bite on it and then you use that to build the solution down the road further. So when you talk about the value proposition and particularly the problem solving and the solution, it's very important that you do that in the context of the actual customer pain. And customer pain can take a number of different shapes. Customer pain can be lost time, customer pain can be lost revenue. Customer pain can be very high cost of certain processes. Any of those are pains. And what you want to be able to describe with your solution is how you address those specifically. Are you saving them money? Are you generating net new revenue? Are you making it easier to hire people? Are you speeding up a clunky, old fashioned paper driven process? But you very much need to paint the before and after picture of the customer, the problem and the solution, and how the solution addresses the problem set. One of the most important things to do, of course, is to validate your value prop. Now, generally speaking, founders will create their initial problem solution description based on research, based on data, based on talking to customers. But once you've decided to go forward with an idea, we strongly encourage founders to then go and validate that again with your target audience. And this means, you know, sometimes this can mean something as simple as a presentation or a demo that's nothing more than some screens on pieces of paper or a mock up on a screen. But being able to say, hey, here's the problem, I think you have, I heard you. Here's how we're thinking of addressing it. Do you think this would be something you'd be interested in purchasing? Would you be interested in learning more about this? What have I missed? Can you give me any other feedback? So closing the loop on your initial research, building the value proposition, and then closing the loop with your potential customers is a super important step.
