Chapter 1 Worksheet and Examples

Introduction Video:

Go Zero To 1 — Play Book: Download Here

Starting a business, creating a new product is often frantic, there is so much to do and often there are few doing the work of many.

You will likely never feel organized and have your plan and execution work flawlessly with no turns in the road or surprises. What you can do is create a roadmap built around a vision that has been tested and proven.

To help you stay organized, we’ve built a simple tool where you’ll build and document all the data you’ll be collecting from talking to customers and running customer acquisition experiments.

This tool is will help you organize your business and development so that you can execute quick experiments that prove your traction channels. We’re going to use this tool throughout the course as a playbook for getting traction.

Getting traction is the best way prove to yourself and others that you are on the right path, there is demand and that people will actually pay for your product or service.

It is super important that you use this to track who your customer is, all of your experiment designs, and experiment results. If you don’t keep track of your data, then you can’t possibly know what’s working and what’s not working.

Now that we have that out of the way, it’s time to figure out who the buyer of your product is!

Who is the decision maker that actually hands you a check at the end of the day.

For the purposes of this course, we’ll quickly come up with a hypothesis for who that might be.

What is her name? What is her role? What problem does she need solved? What benefit is she searching for?

The trick to creating a great value proposition statement is to stick with simple and easy to understand language.

The best language are the exact words that your customer’s use to describe their problem and ideal solution.

We’ll talk about how to extract that information from your customers in a later chapter so for now, let’s make a hypothesis.

Perhaps one of my favorite examples of this is from Unbounce.com

They use very simple easy to understand language to immediately describe the value their product creates.

If you’re really stuck here, I suggest you download the PDF of Alexander O’sterwalder’s Value proposition design workbook.

Download the First 100 or so pages PDF version here: Value Prop Design Book

Order the full version on amazon here: Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want (Strategyzer)” _blank”=”” target=”_blank”> Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want (Strategyzer)

The most common place that people get stuck is with narrowing down who exactly purchases the product. Too often, I’ve worked with teams that didn’t realize they were trying to sell their product or service to 5 different customer archetypes instead of one OR that they were not selling to the decision maker.

The steps laid out in the Value Proposition Design book will help you focus on who the most important customers are by ranking the customer’s jobs, pains, and gains with your products/services, how they relieve those pains, and how they create those gains.

It only takes 1 to 2 hours to get through the Value Proposition Design workshop so if you’re feeling unsure about what customer you’d like to go after first, take the time now! It’ll save you a lot of wasted time going after the wrong person or company. Again this is time well spent. You will waste hours, days, weeks or months if you are dedicating time and resources chasing the wrong customer. The earlier you can commit to your target market the better.

If you have doubt, use the resources that are readily available and proven to work….

Once you’ve worked through who your customer is and what their desired benefits are from your solution, it’s time to move on to mapping out how they decide to buy your product.

REMEMBER: It’s ok if you’re unsure about some of the answers here. At this point we probably don’t know what we don’t know! The point is to create a hypothesis and execute experiments quickly so that we can learn. With that in mind, I like to lean towards speed vs. thinking too much. Just get your ideas on paper and move on!

Conclusion: