Essays/linkedin/26-03-16 value proposition

<p>Week 3 of the Spinout Journey: What do you think is the value you bring to your customers and how do you validate your assumptions? </p> <p>Last week we focused on talking to people to try to understand who wants what you plan on doing. Next step is to focus on what value do you add to what people are trying to achieve. </p> <p>This is often referred to as "The Value Proposition". </p> <p>Value goes way beyond money and saving costs. In deep tech, value is often associated with doing something that was simply not possible to do before. </p> <p>Take, for example, a breakthrough technology such as nanopore sequencing. It is true that costs went down, but the real impact was that suddenly people could sequence genomes much faster than before, and with much less need for infrastructure. It enabled a new approach to research and medicine. </p> <p>Not all ideas and products will yield the same impact, but nonetheless they all share a common thread: they deliver value to their users. </p> <p>And the key of this week is to understand what is that you can do that your users perceive as valuable. </p> <p>I learned how important it is to deeply listen the hard way. When I started, many companies around me were focusing on measuring nanoparticle size. I understood this was a critical parameter, and focused on explaining we could measure it with extreme accuracy using a relatively simple instrument: better results, lower cost. </p> <p>However, what I failed to understand is that size was not a critical parameter for my users. Ballpark estimates were fine, what they really needed was a way to measure other quantities: aggregation, loading, and concentration. They were using devices designed for other purposes because there was none that would give them a straight answer, and I misunderstood them. </p> <p>The hard lesson I learned is that we must ask questions and actively listen to what people say. It is incredibly common to dismiss the answers with the attitude of "I know better". And that's how you lose an opportunity. </p> <p>It is easy to talk about "validating my assumptions", but it is hard to overcome your own biases. </p> <p>I have seen people with deep domain expertise falling very easily into this trap: If 10 people tell me the opposite of what I believe, I will ask the 11th person for confirmation and neglect all the others. </p> <p>When you hear someone saying "they don't know what they want", it's because they didn't learn to listen with intent. </p> <p>Ask open ended questions, anchor them to a moment such as: "last time you tried to do this, how did it go?". Don't ask for statistics such as "how often does this fail" since this leads to detachment from the emotional side, better "last time this happen, how did you proceed?". </p> <p>Be open to contradicting your thoughts, don't be afraid of going back to redesign your approach. </p> <p>The scope of this week is that you can formulate a simple sentence: "This is what value do I bring to my users." And the only way to can formulate this statement is if you talk to people. </p> <p>This week there'll be an intermediate post about the "problem/solution framework". </p> <p>Comment or follow me to stay in the loop.</p>