One of the first tasks a scipreneur will be faced with is defining what is it that they do. You have an idea, and you need to communicate it to others: funding bodies, customers, collaborators, and the tech transfer officer.

The value proposition is that one sentence that describes what value you deliver to your customers.

What makes it a challenge is that the only way to define and refine it is by knowing your target audience. I have seen countless pitches focusing on the idea of doing something cheaper than others. That's even how I started: "Electron microscopy resolution at optical microscopy costs."

And I completely missed the point. That value proposition was enough for investors who had an intuitive idea of what it meant. If you are one order of magnitude cheaper than the next best alternative, opportunities will present themselves. But for customers, that was a completely different reality.

Many already had optical microscopes available, and some had access to electron microscopes as part of a shared facility or through collaborations.

Making something cheaper was not enough value for someone to change their workflow.

After talking to tens of people, from PhDs to technicians and professors, and reading (or at least skimming through) hundreds of papers, it was clear that the bottleneck was on the information they could extract from the data they were generating. Many instruments could measure size, but none gave information on aggregation, material composition, and, for hollow particles, their loading ratio.

The value proposition radically changed, from being a cheap alternative to being the only instrument able to deliver answers to specific questions.

This is a bit of a cautionary tale on the challenges of developing a compelling value proposition for your customers. It takes many interactions with people and, mostly, a high degree of empathy with what people describe as their daily jobs.

What Makes A Good Value Proposition

Traditionally, there are 3 aspects of your customers you need to understand to be able to create value:

• Their job. What do they try to achieve, not just immediately but in the long term? Piling on the example above, measuring the size of a particle is not an end in itself, but a stepping stone for better drug development strategies. Within that overarching long-term view, there will be many more, like understanding the impact of a given lipid in a formulation, or the stability of a compound, etc.
• Their pains. What is not going completely according to what they expect? What obstacles there are that prevent them from completing their job. In scientific instrumentation that normally relates to improving the range or resolution of a technique, or removing sample preparation constraints.
• Their gains. If you remove the pains and people complete their jobs, what is there to win for them. A postdoc may be after a permanent position, and a professor may be pursuing a large grant. Don't forget that they are people and they have personal gains driving them, not just the betterment of humanity.

Here's an example from Lumicks:

Measure cell-target binding strengths with the z-Movi Cell Avidity Analyzer to accelerate the development of immunotherapeutic strategies

And another from Vitrotem

The Naiad automates graphene preparation and assembles GLCs [ graphene liquid cells ] containing liquid-based samples on standard TEM grids

Both examples are extremely targeted to their audiences. Remember that the value proposition is not a pitch you are giving to a broad audience, but the message your customer receives.

Not everyone will understand what "binding strengths" or "liquid-based samples" are. And that's OK, the message is not targeted to them. Science-based companies that target other scientists are very specialized, and that also permeates the way they decide to communicate with their customers.

In both examples above, the job they had in mind is clear. The first explicitly tells you what you can measure. The pain is implicit: there are no other tools that can do the same. The gain is being able to develop therapeutics faster.

In the second example, the job they tackle is the preparation of the graphene liquid cells. The pain is that the process is slow (the hint here is the word "automates") and the gain is that you can now use liquid samples in your electron microscope.

Value propositions are not an end in themselves

Crafting value propositions is a necessary step in understanding your customers and what you need to build. They are hardly static and they may not be unique either. The same tool may lead to applications in different fields, where pains, gains, and jobs are different.

Once you have a clear value proposition, you will notice people reacting differently to what you say.

But by no means your job is done once you have a compelling value proposition.

A value proposition is just a communication and validation tool. It doesn't say anything about your actual solution (nor if you even have one available.) Value propositions go hand in hand with product development and business development.

Value propositions can help you identify priority features for your product, and can be used to guide the marketing efforts.

It's not by chance that it takes one of the central portions of the Business Model Canvas.