Designing Your Offering

In this section, we will cover:

• Using surveys to determine the most important dimension to your customer
• Competitive positioning
• Developing your value proposition, including your customer, industry, your promise of value, and how you will achieve it

Customer v. End User

Often, your customer will be different from the end user, and many early startups make the mistake of optimizing a solution for the end user. Keep in mind that your customer is whoever is paying for the offering, though the person who obtains value from what you develop may be different. Here are a few examples:

• Educational products — the school is the customer while students are often the end users
• Public transportation — governments pay for the solution while commuters are the most common end user
• Corporate products — the business buyer will be the customer while it is usually another person in the organization is the end user

In all of these scenarios, you need to appeal to both the customer and the end user, though optimizing to the needs of the customer is most important.

Brainstorming Solutions

Refer to your list of the top priorities of your target customer, the person with the biggest burning need in this area. Spend some time coming up with lots of potential ways to provide a solution that optimizes against just those top priorities. This is where it is important to really consider the full breadth of options, and to not just continue with your pre-conceived notion of how the problem may be solved.

Consider the following to prompt the breadth of potential solutions:

• What products do this? Why aspects are helpful to my customers and which are unnecessary? What is missing from these that my customer cares more about than the customers of this product?
• What services support customers with this problem? Are there forums, blogs, softwares, trainings, platforms, apps, consultants, etc. who provide solutions? What are the pros and cons of each? Where are the gaps for the customers I have identified as lacking a solution?

Remember - the existence of competition does NOT mean that there is not an opportunity! In fact, competition shows that there is a real need. Your job is to find a way to better meet the needs of your customers, while seeing what opportunities that your competitors have not learned to meet - including specific customers, marketing channels, scaling challenges, and more.

Value Proposition

What to do:

• Clearly identify your specific customer
• Use numbers in the benefit, such as "30% less water usage"
• Under promise, over deliver
• Keep it short and simple (just one sentence)

What NOT to do:

• Try to have everyone as your customer
• Framing your industry narrowly as your specific product type
• Having a vague benefit like "better quality"
• Listing too many features that muddles the confidence in your ability to deliver

Outline for writing a value proposition statement:
For (target audience),
our company is the brand of (industry or other frame of reference or type of product/service)
that delivers (quantified primary benefit / promise)
through (key attributes / strategy).