Your unique value proposition is the primary thing you say about what your product is. One thing, chosen on purpose, aimed at the people you are going after.

It is not a list of your features and it is not a slogan. It is the sentence that makes the right person say, hey, that is us, I want that.

It is also your pitch. If pitching frightens you, this is the way out of it: write this sentence properly once and you never have to improvise an answer to what do you do again.

Where the unique part usually comes from

From your competitors, and specifically from what they all get wrong.

When you look across the existing products and they all have the same flaw, fixing it can become your unique value. That is the thing you find in a gap analysis, and it is the most reliable source of a real differentiator, because it is grounded in what is on the market rather than in what you hope is special about you.

Which is also why you cannot write this sentence before you do the research. Written first, it is a guess, and it will not be accurate.

The test: could a competitor say it too?

This is the one that decides whether you have written a unique value proposition or just a description. If a competitor could say the same sentence, it is not a differentiator. It has to actually be unique to you.

Run your sentence past that before anything else, because most of the ones I am handed fail it, and they fail it in a way that is invisible until you ask the question.

And when it does pass, do not dress it up. If your differentiator is real you can say plainly what you do that the others do not, and the plain version hits harder. The more ordinary the language, the more believable the claim.

Pick the outcome, not the mechanism

Here is the example I use. A company had built a payments product for nonprofits, and the thing they said about themselves was seamless payments.

Seamless payments is the mechanism. Donor re-engagement is the outcome, and it is the market they were actually going after. You could say the purpose of the company is donor re-engagement using a seamless payment system, and that way you get both in. But whenever you do any marketing, any sound bite, focus on the donor re-engagement.

Any nonprofit having a problem re-engaging their donors reads that and thinks, hey, that is us. Nobody wakes up wanting seamless payments.

Phrase it as a value add for them

The most common rewrite I do on people's value propositions is turning a sentence about the company into a sentence about the customer.

"We use machine learning to optimise scheduling" is about you. "Small businesses that need a full time receptionist but cannot afford one" is about them, and it tells someone in about four seconds whether they are the person being spoken to.

Know what you are actually saving them

Be careful assuming the value is time or money without checking which one.

With nonprofits, for instance, you have to think about the fact that they have volunteers. It is not just saving time, because it could be a volunteer doing the work. That is expensive in the sense that the person's time is being used, but it is not costing money. If your pitch is built on cost savings and their cost is zero, the pitch does not land no matter how true the time saving is.

Test it against your one problem

The check I run on a proposed feature is the same check that works on a value proposition. What problem does this solve, and is it the one problem that makes people think there is no point trying the other solutions?

Just adding photos is not going to cut it. What problem would the photos solve? If you cannot answer that, it is not your unique value, it is just something your app does.

It has to be true for a specific group

If you are speaking to a group that wants to get rich and a group that wants to provide for their family and be happy, those are different products, and one sentence cannot do both.

Write the value proposition for your primary persona. The others can find you later.

The narrower that person is, the safer you are. The best defence for a unique value proposition is a niche you know deeply, or one you are interested enough in to learn deeply. The more specific your focus, the harder you are to displace, because a bigger company can copy your feature and still not know what your people need.

Keep reading

What Is Gap Analysis and How Do I Do One?

What Is a Persona and How Do I Build One From Real Research?

How Do I Know If My App Idea Already Exists?

Learn this with me

Your unique value proposition is class 5 of From Passion to Product, my free six-week live course, in the same class as the competitive research, and after it rather than before. You cannot write this sentence until you have done that research, because it is a claim about other products as much as your own.

The course is free, six weeks and live, and you write yours during it.

Join the waitlist for the next free cohort, or get the App Strategy Workbook and write it on your own time.