Elevator Pitch You already know that getting your value proposition right is critical to your business model. You can have the best features, the most perfectly executed presentation, the most stunning price, but no one will ever know of it if they don’t get past your high-level value proposition. But how do you craft such a quality statement?

Continuously looking to perfect your value proposition, you would consult lengthy articles only to find that there’s a jungle of advise out there. What you need is applicable templates from entrepreneurs and investors who have successfully given and taken thousands of pitches, right? So I’ve put together 7 proven templates that are designed to help you to create a clear, compelling value proposition in minutes.

You can download the Value Proposition templates and samples via Slideshare.

Geoff Moore’s Value Positioning Statement

Perhaps the most popular, in the seminal book Crossing the Chasm, Geoff Moore suggests a template for creating your value positioning. In addition to the below he introduces a second statement focused on competitive positioning or differentiation (see for your self).

Template

For  ____________ (target customer)

who ____________  (statement of the need or opportunity)

our (product/service name) is  ____________  (product category)

that (statement of benefit) ____________ .

Sample(s)

For non-technical marketers

who struggle to find return on investment in social media

our product is a web-based analytics software that translates engagement metrics into actionable revenue metrics.

Venture Hacks’ High-Concept Pitch

According to one Miss Snark, high-concept is a term borrowed from the movies (consider “Jaws in Space” = Alien). In Pitching Hacks Nivi and Navel of Venture Hacks share several examples of this technique applied to that of startups.

Template

[Proven industry example] for/of [new domain].

Sample(s)

Flickr for video.

Friendster for dogs.

The Firefox of media players.

Steve Blank’s XYZ

Steve Blank writes that Value Proposition is a ten-dollar phrase describing a company’s product or service. It’s the “what are you building and selling?” He suggests the following format for creating a value proposition statement that other people understand.

Template

“We help X do Y doing Z”.

Sample(s)

We help non-technical marketers discover return on investment in social media by turning engagement metrics into revenue metrics.

Vlaskovits & Cooper’s CPS

In their Cheat Guide to Customer Development, Cooper and Vlaskovits use what they call a Customer-Problem-Solution presentation.

Template

Customer: ____________ (who your customer is).

Problem: ____________(what problem you’re solving for the customer).

Solution: ____________ (what is your solution for the problem).  

Sample(s)

Customer: I believe my best customers are small and medium-sized business (SMB) markets.

Problem: Who cannot easily measure campaign ROI because existing solutions are too expensive, complicated to deploy, display a dizzying array of non-actionable charts.

Solution: Low cost, easy to deploy analytics system designed for non-technical marketers who need actionable metrics.

Dave McClure’s Elevator Ride

In his How to Pitch a VC presentation Dave McClure presents a 3-step check list for creating positioning statements.

Template

  • Short, simple, memorable; what, how, why.
  • 3 keywords or phrases
  • KISS (no expert jargon)

Sample(s)

  • “Mint.com is the free, easy way to manage your money online.”

David Cowan’s Pitchcraft

Although a more elaborative one David Cowan shares some useful guidelines in Practicing the Art of Pitchcraft. I’ve put together a summary.

Template

  1. Highlight the enormity of the problem you are tackling.
  2. Tell the audience up front what your company sells.
  3. Distill the differentiation down to one, easy-to-comprehend sentence.
  4. Establish credibility by sharing the pedigree of the entrepreneurs, customers, or the investors.

Sample(s)

One person dies of melanoma every 62 minutes.

We offer a dermatoscope app for iPhone that enables people to easily diagnose their skin,

leveraging patented pattern recognition technology trusted by the World Health Organization.

The VAD approach

In a previous blog post on value propositions I set out to learn from Guy Kawasaki. On his blog I found that he takes a verb-application-differentiator approach in describing the startups that he’s working with.

Template

[verb; application; differentiator]

Sample(s)

Share PowerPoint and Keynote slides including audio (Slideshare).

Create and write blogs via email (Posterous).

Make VOIP calls easily and cheaply (JaJah).

Eric Sink’s Value Positioning

Eric Sink writes that marketing is somewhat like an iceberg – the part sticking out of the water is highly visible. For this he suggest the following format for positioning.

Template

Superlative (“why choose this product”).

Label (“what is this product”).

Qualifiers (“who should choose this product”).

Sample(s)

The easiest operating system for netbook PC’s.

The most secure payment gateway for mobile e-commerce.

The bottom line

Dear child has many names; elevator speeches, high-concept pitches, value positioning, unique selling proposition, positioning statement etc. Value Proposition is not just telling people about your product. Value Proposition is also an important technique for describing your Minimum Viable Product and testing what product to build.

Whether you’re battling investors in the elevator, optimizing conversion rate on your website, or attending dinner parties, crafting a clear, compelling value proposition is not easy. It takes trial and error. But the take-away is worth it as you will start getting meetings and converting more customers. What is your value proposition? What approach do you use?

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This deck includes the early websites of Facebook (still with the The), 37signals, LinkedIn (not that bad in fact), eBay (without the pictures I’m afraid), Twitter (probably the first sketch), and more. Note that some may miss CSS and therefore may not display identical to the original.

If “preach what you teach” still holds, this better be a minimum viable blog post. As far as I put the slide deck together in under 1o minutes, did the research for it during a quick train trip this morning, and publish this as soon as possible (even if it’s a bad time to post), it would need iterations.

Do you think these can be considered MVP’s? Why? Why not?

Do you like what you see? Feel free to subscribe or follow me on Twitter.

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This post originally ran on ArcticStartup.

Norwegian Startup Ecosystem - ArcticStartup

As inventors of the object-oriented programming language and the modern GSM technology, you would expect Norway to have the perfect ingredients for a vibrant startup scene. If you, however, search this or any other notable tech blog for news on early-stage Norwegian startups, you would find next to nothing.

While Nordic and Baltic startups seems to thrive, why don’t we see any ventures emerging out of Norway, several Nordic and European professionals questioned me. After talking to a handful of entrepreneurs, investors, and scholars about why this is the case, I discovered seven symptoms of the Norwegian start-up ecosystem that might explain why Norway’s tech innovation is lagging behind that of its neighbors.

Found and lost

Called “black gold” the Norwegian oil imperium is the usual suspect and by long the cliché. But it is still the most used argument in explaining why Norway lags behind its Nordic counterparts. As Finnish Travelling Salesman (Kristoffer Lawson) reports from his visit to Norway in autumn 2010: “Software is not at Norway’s heart”. That needs a closer look.

As mentioned above, Norwegian researchers developed the object-oriented programming language back in 1960, which was later used for creating Java and many of today’s popular web application frameworks. In fact, oil & energy industry is still dependent on specialized software to work its magic. Similarly, this industry needs communication systems and infrastructure. That is why today many Norwegian software developers work and have their customers in this space.

The problem, however, is that this space is pretty much owned by large service providers and consulting companies, and much of supply and demand exists inside of Norway. Although the oil & energy industry might not have a direct impact on tech startup scene, it plays a substantial role on the industry structure that makes up the startup ecosystem.

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Egg Incubator

Corporations want to build the next Facebook or Groupon as much as you, I, and the guy in the garage. While corporations might have an advantage in resources and capital to do so, they do at the same time meet with hurdles that independent startups don’t.

Over the past years I’ve been fortunate enough to learn from corporate new- business analysis, product roll-outs, and early-stage M&A assessments at the one side, and from founding or helping raw startups at the other side. Unfortunately, there is a pattern – the methods often provided by the former are rather diminishing in successfully incubating new ventures.

Aside from knowing your customer development and Lean Startups basics, I share here lessons learned that you should know if you want your corporation to innovate like a startup.

Rehabilitate from analysis paralysis

While a challenge with corporate business planning is that it often is comprised with mountains of information, at an early startup there is a minimal quantifiable track record. Doing what they do best, corporations cram such information about existing products and markets to that of the startup. Unfortunately, executives and managers have founding teams develop detailed financial estimates and market analysis way too early. Secondary data may be fine for known-, but not for unknown conditions, which most often is the case of new startups. The answer lies not with your $500 Gartner or Forrester report. Rather, it is time to un-MBA and get out of the building.

Learn like your kids would

With time, grown-ups gradually stop learning. Kids, however, learn all the time. Kids experience their environment and make assumptions which are tested against reality, again and over again. Essentially, for companies that are adopting new technologies in fast pacing and quickly changing markets the learning process is no different. Emerging entrepreneurial methods such as Lean Startup and Customer Development assume that startups are children, and not smaller versions of mature companies. Startups need their own methods and tools, which means it is time for hands to get dirty.

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Startup Software at Opera Software HQ

As of yesterday about 20 talented developers will be gathered for the next couple of weeks at Opera Software’s premises in Oslo to build and launch new applications. Startup Summer is one of its kind hackathon in Norway encouraging companies to take on Lean Startup techniques.

The contestants are mainly graduate students from The Norwegian School of Science and Technology, Informatics at the University of Oslo, and various university colleges, but also existing entrepreneurs and freelancers. During the period all teams will have access to mentors as well as being able consult Opera personnel. In the end of the event and August 12. the teams will demo their products to investors and advisors (ping me if you’re interested).

Here’s an overview of the Startup Summer teams. Expect landing pages as their products will evolve hour by hour.

Kasseapp.no
KasseApp develop next-generation cash register. By running a ‘Kasseapp’ on an Android tablet and connect to a cloud, they create an elegant solution for store employees. The prototype launched this summer, so stay with www.kasseapp.no.

Hoopla Tickets
Cultural events are more important than the tickets! We develop a ticket distribution system that makes it easy and efficient to sell tickets anywhere. You create great cultural experiences, we help you communicate them. Free of charge for the organizer.

Utfylt.no
Filling out the tax returns is for many the least most fun in running a business. Utfylt.no helps small businesses record all their tax reporting; ask you a few questions, and complete your tax returns ready for submission.

Classmate
“We are tired of bad IT tools for students! Therefore, we create social tools that help students choose courses and plan their studies”. Classmate provides a social student calendar and rating of classes among other features.

Nearbite
Near Bite is a mobile-based tax map of eateries and restaurants nearby. Join beta@nearbite.me and be first with our iPhone app in Oslo.

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startup bootstrapping

Bootstrapping your startup brings along a trade-off in communications and marketing. You have two messages to communicate: one about your service offering, the other about the product that you are building. How do you prioritize what to communicate? Are you a service or product company?

This was and still is a question that we deal with at Lingo Social each day. Recently I had coffee with friend and founder of Mobilskole.no discussing what seemed to be a bootstrapper’s marketing “dilemma”. We arrived at the following.

As you make money from providing services and use profits to fund product development, you need to balance your communications efforts between the two. The more aligned your services and product messaging are, the better are chances for healthy synergies. That means ensuring that your consulting gigs leads to product sales and vice versa. Pretty obvious, but easier said than done.

At Lingo Social we went from communicating the whole digital agency package; Internet and search marketing, mobile apps, web design, analysis and strategic planning, to focus on social media marketing and management. Even better, all those former service offerings can be communicated in context of social media. For an example, inter-linking all your social media channels would have an effect on search engine optimization, and web design and apps development would integrate social networks. Following we would certainly propose to clients social SaaS rather then just building apps on an hourly basis.

Nevertheless, as founders’ skill-set in a startup varies, so does their value propositions. When you are only a few founders in communicating your services, potential customers often tune in on your personal qualifications rather than the company’s. Each member of the founding team is best at what they do, and consequently this is usually what they are best at communicating. That in fact is your startups’s DNA.

Aligning service and product offerings along with leveraging founders’ strengths have not only allowed the company to put marketing efforts in one bucket, but also increased learning about customers’ needs which in turn enables us to build a better product. As a result consulting gradually starts to work as (paid) marketing and sales.

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