If people could see what you see. Know what you know. Feel the passion you feel. Believe what you believe. Would it be easier to do business with them?
This exchange is known as value. Value has many different characteristics and types like:
- Functional – This type of value is what an offer does, it’s the solution an offer provides to the customer.
- Monetary – This is where the function of the price paid is relative to an offerings perceived worth.
- Social Connection – The extent to which a product or service allows the consumer to connect with others.
- Psychological – The extent to which a product allows consumers to express themselves or feel better.
You can extract value by building empathy for a market with what you sell, what you discover, and how you understand the business by taking notes and interviewing people from the community.
Sorry to break the news to you, but what you value doesn’t actually matter. What matters is what the market values. This is usually the difference of what sells. Unfortunately this isn’t always what you believe will sell, so iterating until you find this market fit is common.
With a knowing of what sells in the market, you can now apply your methodology to it. How do you package the offering to people in the market?
Mindset
If you could build an asset that provides value for a lifetime and leverage a network of billions of people instead of an employer, how free would that make you feel?
This is the mindset of being value-driven.
Build
Your goal to become value-driven is to get enough of a signal from all the noise by creating content that points out a problem in the market.
Once that signal is strong enough, you can build products that provides a solution in exchange for money.
The thing is, not all problems are the same or even the same magnitude.
If you can get experience of doing the things people don’t want to do and expand it to reveal the real challenges, you’ll find yourself in a unique position.
In other words, you can only solve the problems that you can communicate clearly.
Process
Communicating the problems is only half of the equation. Being able to communicate the solution is equally important. As you start to communicate the solution, people start to build trust with you by means of social proof.
This starts to build your reputation as an authority in the topic. Now is the time to speak with confidence, focus on the value, start to scale the solution, and do so in a transparent & authentic way.
Design
Your first goal in designing the solution from a concept to a product is producing a result.
Your second goal is to build it yourself so you can truly understand the limitations of your solution.
Keep in mind that as you build this, you should only spend 20% of your effort on building the very system to handle the 80% of the solution.
Recap
Building value-driven is a mindset. It can free you from work and give you the autonomy you seek. By providing value in the market, you are doing one or more of these:
- Make someone more competent (functional).
- Making someone money (monetary).
- Make someone fit in better (social).
- Make someone feel better (psychological).
Once you have found a strong enough signal of the problem, you can build a solution from scratch.