Value Proposition Design is a ‘must have’ for anyone creating a new venture. It captures the core issues around understanding and finding customer problems and designing and validating potential solutions.
If you’ve never founded a company, rest assured it never happens as elegantly and smoothly as articles in ‘Inc.’ and other business magazines or case studies suggest.
Unfortunately, as you hire more people, the casual, informal ‘do what it takes’ culture, which worked so well at less than 40 people, becomes chaotic and less effective.
The Value Proposition Canvas functions like a plug-in to the Business Model Canvas and zooms into the value proposition and customer segment to describe the interactions between customers and product more explicitly and in more detail.
Visionary CEOs are not ‘just’ great at assuring world-class execution of a tested and successful business model: they are also world-class innovators.
My imagination ran 24/7, and to me, every problem was a challenge to solve and new product to create. It wasn’t until I started teaching that I realized that not everyone’s head worked the same way.
Visionary CEOs are product- and business-model-centric and extremely customer focused.
On Day One, a start-up is a faith-based initiative built on guesses.
At 19, I joined the Air Force during the Vietnam War.
Persuading employees to let go of old values and beliefs and adopt new ones can be challenging.
Any dispassionate observer would recognize that on Day One, a start-up has no customers, and unless the founder is a true domain expert, he or she can only guess about the customer, problem, and business model.
Startups have finite time and resources to find product/market fit before they run out of money. Therefore startups trade off certainty for speed, adopting ‘good enough decision making’ and iterating and pivoting as they fail, learn, and discover their business model.
We now understand the distinction between startups – who search for a business model – versus existing companies – that execute a business plan.
Schools reward their students for a combination of intelligence, perseverance, and hard work – in the classroom and on the playing fields. But these metrics don’t help kids understand that great grades are not a pass for a great life.
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