Week 2: Value Proposition

By now, you should have done interviews with lots of potential customers.
We’ll cover how to distill insights from these interviews and determine how best to address the customer needs and position yourself in the market.
First, gather your interview notes, and group them by customer segment.
You may want to add post-its for other considerations for each customer group, such as their market size.
Gather similar post-it notes within a customer segment, such as for the needs, where the customer has the need, or specific features that might address the need.
You may be able to see if the needs of customer segments have overlaps, but you should still be choosing one customer group for your target customer.
Overlaps will just give you the potential opportunity to grow down the road. If you’re having trouble choosing your target customer, see if there’s more information that would help you decide, and do more interviews if you need to.

As a group of high school students, we understand the world can seem overwhelming, especially for younger individuals.
As high schoolers lack experience in the job market, though some turn to babysitting and lawn mowing for a quick buck, teens want money with more substance.
They want experience for the future, and jobs that suit their interests.
Commisi is a web service that bridges start-up businesses with high schooler programmers looking for jobs and experience.
This is a rating-based system that allows high schoolers to contribute towards the company’s efforts, and gain experience doing so.
Our beachhead market consists of both motivated high school students and small but growing start-ups.
Eric is a high schooler, aged 16, and driven to do well.
He has good grades, but is looking for tech-related opportunity outside school, that both challenges and rewards him, to add to his resume.
We hope to revolutionize the job market with our service.

Next, you’re ready determine how best to meet the needs of your customer.
Make a list of the things that matter to your customer, the buyer of your product.
After you have this list, put them in order of how much they matter to the customer, and be disciplined.
You’ll solve mainly against just the top one to two customer priorities, and that’s it.
Ultimately, the customer priority will come first, but everyone has to get value.
This’ll have a few parts- the customer, industry, the promise, and your strategy.
First, your target customer, very clearly, without trying to be everything to everyone.
Quantify it, if possible, as to how much better you’ll be than how customers are solving their problem now in that one dimension that matters most to your target customer.
Customers are going to be skeptical of a new company, so this allows you to be able to delight them while also leaving a little bit of room for potential mishaps that happen with practically every startup.