Goldilocks Value Statements

One of the problems with value statements — aside from the fact that many founders have trouble getting out of the technical weeds at all to think about them — is that you have to articulate your value in a way that is high-level enough to resonate with business leaders and engineering managers but not so high level to be completely generic.

I was talking to Karthik Ranganathan of Yugabyte as we were recording a podcast this morning, and he said originally they tried to describe Yugabyte by saying “we simplify the cloud.” It was too vague. Yes, we know that the cloud is complicated and everyone wants it to be simpler, but something like is so non-specific that it can’t address the actual pain points that a user would encounter. Also, Yugabyte doesn’t simplify everything related to the cloud — only problems related to making a transactional database scalable and highly available. So someone who wants the cloud simplified would probably be disappointed.

On the other hand, if you get into the weeds too much, it can become confusing.

How do you figure out what value to focus on, then?

Start by identifying the exact pain point you solve. That is what you want to focus on in your value statements. Don’t try to go any higher-level or deeper than the pain point you solve.

You might provide a number of advantages to users: Maybe you both decrease the time from build to deployment and reduce the number of CVEs in production. Figure out which of those metrics your ideal customers actually care the most about and/or which one is most important compared to what customers perceive as the alternatives to using your product.

Once you’ve figured those things out, make sure that the value statement you come up with addresses the pain point directly. In the example from the podcast this morning, Yugabyte now talks more explicitly about the pain users were encountering because they felt like they had to choose between rich information in a SQL database and the scalability and availability of a NoSQL database.

Need help figuring out the right mix of high-level value and technical features? That’s a big part of any positioning workshop.

Emily Omier