Use the Value Proposition Canvas to check that your offer answers your customer's real pains and gains.
Get a blank sheet of paper and draw a vertical line through the centre so you have two columns. Write "customer profile" at the top of the right-hand column and "value map" at the top of the left-hand one. You fill in the right-hand column before the left, so your starting point is the customer rather than the products you already sell.
Plenty of business owners work the other way round. They add features that interest them and hope buyers will want them. The Value Proposition Canvas is built to spot this early by placing what customers want next to what the business provides. It comes from Alexander Osterwalder and his colleagues at Strategyzer, a consultancy, who describe it in their book Value Proposition Design.
Take Farah (an invented example), who runs an online shop selling modest workwear. For most of last year she kept adding things: a fresh collection every month, a loyalty points scheme, gift wrapping and a style quiz on her website. Her sales did not move. When she finally went back over a few months of messages from customers, the same two worries kept appearing: whether the clothes would fit, and whether they would arrive before Monday. None of the new features dealt with either one.
Each canvas is split into two halves. The customer profile is the right-hand half, and it holds three things.
Jobs describe the progress your customer wants to make. You first came across the term in Lesson 3.2. Two of the jobs Farah's buyers are trying to get done are "look professional at work while dressing in a way that fits my faith" and "get dressed quickly on a weekday morning without second-guessing the outfit".
Pains cover anything that annoys, worries or blocks the customer before, during or after the job, whether that is a bad outcome, an obstacle or a risk. Farah's buyers are afraid of ordering the wrong size and dread the hassle of returns. They have been caught out by fabric that looks fine in photos but is too warm for the walk from the MRT, by sleeves that turn out too short, and by a parcel arriving after the event it was bought for.
Gains are the results and benefits the customer hopes for. Some are basic expectations and some go further than the basic job. Many people write down only the second kind. The canvas counts the basic expectations as gains too, because failing to meet one loses you the sale just as surely as leaving a pain unrelieved. On Farah's list, the item matching its photo is a basic expectation. Next-day delivery in Singapore and a colleague asking where the blouse is from both go beyond the basic job.
Fill this half with the words your customers actually use, taken from their messages, reviews and conversations with you. Farah built her version from what buyers had written to her.
The value map sits on the left and has three parts that match the customer side. Products and services are what you sell. Pain relievers are the ways your offer eases a pain. Gain creators are the ways it produces a gain.
Go down the customer profile one line at a time. Beside each pain, write what in your offer relieves it. Beside each gain, write what in your offer creates it.
Farah answers the sizing worry in three ways: a size chart with each item's measurements in centimetres, the model's height shown on every photo, and an exchange policy that is easy to understand. For the heat problem, she states the fabric and whether each item is lined. She can create the next-day delivery gain by sending orders by courier on the same day if they come in before a cut-off time. She cannot promise that a colleague will ask about the blouse, but photos of real customers wearing her clothes in real offices help buyers picture it happening.
A pain or gain with nothing written beside it is a gap. Treat your gaps as a list of fixes to make. Many of them cost little. A size chart, for example, takes about an afternoon (a rough estimate).
Next, run the canvas backwards. Take each thing you offer and find the pain it relieves or the gain it creates. Some items will connect to nothing.
When Farah did this, the style quiz and the gift wrapping matched nothing her buyers had mentioned. Both took her time and money, and buyers noticed no value from either.
Most owners find this backwards check the hardest part, because the features left unconnected are often the ones they enjoyed building. A feature that eases no pain and creates no gain costs you something and gives the customer nothing, however proud of it you are.
Even so, don't cut an unconnected feature straight away, because customers you haven't spoken to may value it. Stop putting it first when you describe your business, and be cautious about building more features like it.
The activity below asks you to fill in a canvas for your own business. The customer side will take longer than you expect, so start there. Wherever you can, use words from real messages, reviews and conversations instead of writing down pains you assume your customers have.
Fill in a canvas for your target customer with at least five pains and five gains. Link each one to something you offer, or mark it as a gap.
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