Value Proposition Development

Some people don’t recognize your value until they see you thriving somewhere else. I dont just show up - I add value 💯 Most people don’t quit jobs - they quit being overlooked, unheard, or undervalued. 💭 And if you don’t consistently communicate your value, you can’t expect it to always be recognized. Here’s how to make sure your impact is seen before you ever need a new table👇🏾 1️⃣ Stop over-explaining. Start over-delivering. 📊 Results speak louder than intentions. 2️⃣ Own your contributions. 👏🏾 Say “I led” instead of “I helped.” 3️⃣ Communicate outcomes, not effort. 🎯 “We exceeded the goal by 30%” lands stronger than “I stayed late.” 4️⃣ Make your wins visible - without being loud. 📈 Share updates. Use data. Let results tell the story. 5️⃣ Speak up, even if your voice shakes. 🗣️ Silence is often mistaken for agreement - or irrelevance. 6️⃣ Align your work with what leadership values. ⚡ Don’t optimize for busy. Optimize for impact. 7️⃣ Ask better questions - not just for answers, but for direction. 🧭 Strategic thinkers help shape the path forward. 8️⃣ Build allies before you need advocates. 🤝🏾 Trust accelerates influence. 9️⃣ Learn to say no to low-impact work. 🚫 Being available isn’t the same as being valuable. 🔟 Operate like you’re already at the next level. 🚀 Leadership notices who leads before the title comes. If you don’t show people what you bring to the table, don’t be surprised if they forget where you’re sitting. 💬 What would you add to this list? #LeadershipMatters #CareerGrowth #PeopleFirst #WorkCulture #EmpoweredTeams #TeamWork #LinkedInLeadership #WorkplaceWellbeing

Your value isn’t decided by the person who can’t see it. Sometimes people miss what’s right in front of them. This. ould be because of budget, bias, timing, fear, or simple misalignment. That’s information, not a verdict. A diamond can look dull in bad lighting; the diamond didn’t change. In business and in life, the wrong audience will ask you to shrink. The right audience will ask when you can start. Your job is to hold your standard, not hunt for permission. Here’s the play that never fails: Define your value. Tie what you do to clear outcomes instead of tasks. Revenue lifted, risk reduced, speed gained. Signal your value. Show receipts: case studies, testimonials, before/after metrics. Price in alignment with results. Protect your value. Say no to bad fits, scope creep, and respect discounts. Walking away is a growth strategy. Deliver your value. Over-communicate, set expectations, and make impact visible. Consistency compounds credibility. If someone can’t see your worth, change the room. The people who are meant for your work won’t need convincing; they’ll be grateful they found you.

The Army Just Launched FUZE. A $750M Annual VC Fund for Defense Startups. Secretary Dan Driscoll unveiled the Army's new venture capital model at the Demand Signal Forum in Arlington. Former private equity exec turned Army Secretary just flipped the acquisition playbook. FUZE channels $750M annually into nontraditional contractors. The man behind it? Driscoll ran a $200M VC fund before taking office. Iraq veteran with 10th Mountain Division. Yale Law grad. Sworn in by VP Vance in February. He calls traditional acquisition a "calcified bureaucracy" and he's not wrong. How it works. • Scout external tech, not internal solutions • Live pitch events starting October at AUSA • Other Transactional Authorities for rapid contracts • "Colorless money" flexible funding across programs First targets. • Counter-drone systems (interceptors, jammers) • Electronic warfare for spectrum dominance • Energy resilience (batteries for -40°F operations) • AI-driven autonomy and command systems Two prizes already announced. • $500K for emerging tech (October 2025) • $2.5M for counterstrike capabilities with U.S. Army Europe The shift is stark. Traditional acquisition takes 10+ years. FUZE promises prototypes to programs of record in months. Army labs and 75th Innovation Command vet the tech. Winners scale to production. Critics worry about over-focusing on tech while recruiting struggles. But Ukraine proved agile beats legacy. When commercial drones outpace billion-dollar programs, the model needs disruption. Three ways in. • SBIR/STTR grants for early stage • xTech challenges for specific problems • Direct pitches at AUSA mid-October Startups like Anduril benefit. Legacy primes lose their moat. The Army's telling innovators "we're open for business." Is your tech ready for a VC-style pitch to the Pentagon?

Do you know your unique selling point or your customer’s reason to buy? You should. Knowing how you compare to the competition and stand out is essential for strong positioning. Positioning is essential for every product and service for which the customers have an alternative. It means identifying which valuable characteristics your offerings have compared to the main alternatives. Without positioning, customers have no reason to buy from you. After all, if you don’t stand out positively in any way, why would they buy from you? There are many approaches to positioning, Michael Porter’s Five Forces Framework and Generic Strategies being the most famous of them. While Porter’s approach helps finding out WHAT your positioning could or should be, there is little information as to HOW to do it. This is where April Dunford’s approach to positioning comes in. In her book, “Obviously Awesome” she lays out a practical, five-plus-one-component approach to positioning. The components are: 1. Competitive Alternatives If you didn’t exist, what would customers use? 2. Unique Attributes What features/attributes do you have that alternatives do not? 3. Value What value do the attributes enable for customers? 4. Customers that Care Who cares a lot about that value? 5. Market you Win What context makes the value obvious to your target segments? 6. Relevant Trends (Bonus)  What trends make your product relevant right now? There’s a couple of things I like about Dunford’s approach: 👉 It doesn’t start with thoroughly analyzing the customer’s needs and not even start with the product or market. 👉 It starts with how customers currently fulfill their needs. Whatever the problem, customers have some solution right now (otherwise the problem wouldn’t be a problem they would need a solution for…). 👉 It only moves to the product or service category in component 5. This means that picking what you call the product or service comes after establishing its unique and value-adding attributes. 👉 It helps bringing in current trends at the right place. Not at the start, which would merely lead to chasing hypes, but as a way to enhance the product or service’s relevance for the customer right now. While seemingly simple, this makes it one of the more intelligent approaches to positioning out there. Time to look at your positioning. Do you use all six components, and do you use them in the right order and way? #targetaudience #marketingdevelopment #productdevelopment

One thing I push early-stage B2B founders to do (and it’s harder than it sounds) is to really understand — and quantify — the value you deliver to customers. Very few can put a dollar number on it.💡 Try to estimate the value your product creates for a customer in real dollars ($Z) 💰 Once you do that, , you can ask a few important questions to qualify how robust and urgent the value proposition really is: ▪️ Is $Z actually meaningful in the context of the customer’s business? (If it’s a rounding error for them, say <2% of top line, selling will be painful 😬) ▪️ Can you show or prove $Z quickly, or are you asking the customer to take a leap of faith? Quantifying value proposition also helps with 💵 pricing and 📐market size, which many founders struggle with early on. Example 1: cost / time savings ⏱️ - Say you’re selling software that saves a RevOps team ~5 hours per week. - Fully loaded cost is ~$80/hour → ~$20k/year in savings. That’s your $Z. - If you’re saving time or money, customers will often pay ~10–20% of that value. So a ~$2–4k ACV is a reasonable first pricing hypothesis 🎯 Example 2: revenue generation 📈 - Now say your product helps a sales team close 2 extra deals per quarter. - Each deal is worth ~$50k → ~$400k/year in incremental revenue. That’s $Z. - When you’re directly helping customers generate revenue, they’re often willing to pay more — say ~20–30% of the value. That points to an $80–120k ACV range (assuming you can prove the value). More importantly you can use $Z to estimate market size.  📐 Start bottoms up. Market = X customers × $Y ACV = market size Where: ▪️ $Y ≈ 10–20% × $Z (for cost/time savings) ▪️ $Y ≈ 20–30% × $Z (for revenue generation) Finally, pressure-test the assumptions: ▪️ Are we being precise about who “X customers” actually are? Do I need to sell a story where I start with a small #X and then expand? ▪️ Does $Y line up with real budgets and comparable spend? ▪️ Can we acquire customers for less than ~$Y/3? ▪️ Do we need more product to credibly charge $Y? You don’t need perfect answers early but a strawman that allows YOU to understand why you are willing to spend the next 10 years of your life working on something. 🚩

Stop guessing your growth path. Map it instead with the Lean Canvas model. Last year a client was losing cash after a bad investment. Their Board wanted a clear plan, but management's ideas were scattered. Pressure rose as their cash runway shrank. I used a blank Lean Canvas and met with management. Box by box, we turned fuzzy thoughts into clear statements. In a few hours, the team could see the whole business on one page. A week later, decisions sped up, waste was cut, and revenue began increasing. The Board praised the new focus because just one sheet had replaced weeks of endless slides. 1. Start with the Problem box because pain fuels purchase: ⇀ List the top three headaches your market hates. ⇀ Ask customers for blunt complaints. ⇀ Rank pains by urgency and frequency.  ⇀ If the pain is weak, the plan is weak. 2. Name the Customer Segments who wake up with that pain: ⇀ Avoid lumping everyone together - be precise. ⇀ Describe one real person, not a demographic blur. ⇀ Note where they already search for help. ⇀ Specific faces drive focused solutions. 3. Your Unique Value Proposition attracts attention: ⇀ Write it like a headline your customer would repeat. ⇀ Highlight the biggest outcome, not features. ⇀ Short, clear value wins the click. ⇀ Keep it under ten words. 4. Now sketch your Solution: ⇀ Draft three bare-bones features solving each top pain. ⇀ Mockup screens or sketches quickly. ⇀ Show them to five prospects tomorrow. ⇀ Speed beats perfection in early design. 5. Channels tell you how messages travel to wallets: ⇀ Pick the two cheapest tests before buying ads. ⇀ Leverage existing communities and email lists. ⇀ Measure response time and cost per lead. ⇀ Cheap learning outruns expensive guessing. 6. Revenue Streams prove the idea can feed itself: ⇀ State exactly who pays, how much, and how often. ⇀ Compare price to the pain’s current cost. ⇀ Pilot a single pricing tier first. ⇀ Real cash beats hypothetical guesses. 7. Analyse Cost Structure for sustainability: ⇀ List the three largest costs and make them variable. ⇀ Negotiate monthly, not annual, contracts. ⇀ Lean costs preserve runway for learning. ⇀ Automate before hiring. 8. Key Metrics keep founders honest on progress: ⇀ Choose one north-star metric and two support numbers. ⇀ Link each metric to habit or revenue. ⇀ Track weekly in one simple dashboard. ⇀ What gets graphed gets fixed faster. 9. Finally, name your Unfair Advantage: ⇀ This is the asset rivals can’t match. ⇀ Lean on unique data, patents, or proven community. ⇀ Document founder expertise that speed cannot buy. ⇀ Without moats, margins leak. 10. Don't forget to summarise your high-level concept and identify early adopters too. Review our lean canvas model weekly to stay on track with your strategy. What's your favourite strategic model? ------- ♻️ Repost to help others in your network. Follow Jonathan Maharaj FCPA for more insights on accounting, finance and leadership.

Many founders treat pricing as a revenue optimization problem. Figure out the product first, scale usage, then monetize. That's backwards. Pricing isn't about extracting money. It's about discovering whether you built something people actually value. At Gamma, we used pricing as a proxy for value and kept it pretty much the same for over 2 years. Free usage will lie to you (especially for B2B and prosumer products). Usage spikes feel like PMF. They're not. Usage without payment tests your onboarding, not your value. If you come out with too generous of a free plan, you'll never know what true willingness to pay looks like. Here's how to use pricing as a proxy for value: 1. Pick your value metric Choose the thing customers actually hire you for. Documents generated. API calls. Minutes transcribed. At Gamma, we gated by AI credits as the primary value metric, with business levers like custom branding. 2. Draw a hard boundary between free and paid Let people experience the "aha," then stop them at a generous but bounded gate. We gave users plenty of AI credits up front. Once they hit the limit: upgrade for access to more AI. 3. Research your range, then let behavior decide We used Van Westendorp to find our starting range. Ask users four price points: too cheap to trust, good value, getting expensive, too expensive to consider. Plot where these intersect to bracket your range. Then test a few prices within it. Research shows what people say they'll pay - conversion shows what they actually do. We watched free-to-paid conversion and early churn signals, picked the winner, and moved on. 4. Instrument retention and talk to customers Track whether paid users keep crossing your value threshold each week. Stay close to customers through power-user communities or direct outreach. Ask questions like: "What job were you hiring us for?" and "What would justify a higher price?" 5. Treat pricing changes like product pivots Once you've validated pricing, the only reason to change it is if you've fundamentally changed what you're selling. We haven't changed ours in two years because the value metric (AI usage) hasn't changed. Constantly repricing means you're still searching for product-market fit. Why this matters: Pricing early clarifies who values you, which channels convert, and which segments to double down on. You're better off launching pricing way earlier so you can see who's actually willing to pay for it.

The Gulf crisis just created the biggest startup opportunity in a decade. Five things Silicon Valley leaders need to understand right now: 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝘁𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘁𝘀. Iranian drones hit three AWS facilities. The Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea both data chokepoints are closed. The security frameworks behind the Gulf’s AI partnerships were built for chip export control, not for protecting buildings during a war. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝗳𝗲𝗻𝘀𝗲-𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘀𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴. The Pentagon set a $13.4B AI budget for FY2026 which is the largest in U.S. defense history. $130B+ in VC has flowed into defense-tech startups since 2021. → Palantir’s Maven system ran intelligence across five combatant commands → Anduril ($30.5B valuation) — Lattice OS selected as the Army’s fire control platform, Arsenal-1 factory producing autonomous systems at scale, OpenAI partnership for counter-drone AI → Shield AI ($5.3B) — Hivemind autonomous piloting completed AI vs. manned F-16 combat maneuvers → Epirus ($1.5B) — directed-energy counter-drone systems integrated with Anduril’s Lattice, directly relevant to Gulf drone defense → Saronic ($1.5B) — autonomous naval vessels applicable to Strait of Hormuz patrol → Hermeus ($1B+) — hypersonic aircraft for ISR and rapid strike → Ares Industries — Y Combinator’s first weapons company, building low-cost anti-ship missiles → Ursa Major ($2.5B) — rocket propulsion for supply chain independence Early-stage investors in this space are looking at generational returns. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗽 𝘄𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲. Every hyperscaler is now rethinking geographic risk. That creates massive demand for: → Sovereign cloud infrastructure (hardened, government-grade, physically defensible) → Multi-region failover and edge computing platforms → Satellite backup connectivity (Aetherflux, Astranis) → Underground and modular data center designs → Cybersecurity for critical infrastructure against nation-state actors → Alternative compute capacity for displaced AI workloads (CoreWeave, Vultr) Startups solving resilience at the infrastructure layer will command premium pricing from both governments and hyperscalers. This is the next $100B+ category. 𝗚𝘂𝗹𝗳 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗶𝘀 𝗽𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴. Sovereign wealth funds holding $2T+ in U.S. assets are reviewing commitments. The Stargate UAE mega-campus, Amazon’s $5.3B Saudi cloud all in limbo. But post-conflict, these governments will double down on tech diversification away from oil. Startups that maintain Gulf relationships now while diversifying their own risk will be first in line when capital flows resume. The Gulf’s structural advantages with sovereign capital, energy, ambition haven’t disappeared. But the risk has permanently shifted. Rapid de-risking without full retreat.

How I beat the competition without 50% of their features. Here’s how not to get stuck in a catch-up game with competitors. I still remember the early days of Quick Heal. Competing with MNCs like Norton and McAfee felt like David vs. Goliath. They had massive teams and long feature lists and I had neither. But I had one thing: a deep focus on what really mattered to users. And that changed everything. 👉 Lesson: Build for user value, not engineering perfection. Startups often fall into the trap of building "the right way"; perfect architecture, complete feature sets. But most of the time, that kills speed. And in the startup world, speed is survival. Here’s what worked for me (and still works today): 1. Focus on the core problem your product solves 2. Make those core features delightful and reliable 3. Don’t chase feature parity, chase user satisfaction 4. Release fast, learn faster 5. Let real-world feedback guide your evolution While others raced to add features, I obsessed over making core functionality rock-solid and learning from customer feedback that eventually led us to create true differentiators. This helped Quick Heal grow from a small Indian startup into a global cybersecurity brand used by millions. Every Quick Heal release had just a few “hero features.” But they solved user pain so well, even MNCs began copying them. So ask yourself: Are you building features just to tick boxes in a comparison sheet, or are you delivering real value based on what your users actually need today? 𝘗.𝘚. 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦’𝘴 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘸𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘥𝘦 𝘘𝘶𝘪𝘤𝘬 𝘏𝘦𝘢𝘭 𝘢 𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘵 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘳, 𝘣𝘦𝘺𝘰𝘯𝘥 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘧𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘴. 𝘐’𝘷𝘦 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘶𝘭𝘭 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺 (𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘭𝘶𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 5 𝘬𝘦𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘮𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘥𝘭𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘶𝘴) 𝘪𝘯 𝘢𝘯 𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘳 𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘵. 𝘊𝘩𝘦𝘤𝘬 𝘪𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦: https://lnkd.in/di556HtM #MVP #UserFirst #StartupLessons #DavidVsGoliath #QuickHealStory #EntrepreneurLife Quick Heal Seqrite

In a crowded marketplace, the businesses that win aren’t always the ones with the best products. They’re the ones that make their value unmistakably clear. I was walking through the Bryant Park Holiday Market in New York City. A swirl of lights, music, and more than a hundred vendors all trying to grab attention. Most booths were charming. Clever names. Cute displays. Plenty of personality. But they all blended together because you had to stop and figure out what they actually sold. Then I saw it. A simple sign. No fancy design. No clever branding. Just three words: “Gifts for Golfers.” Instant clarity. Who they serve. What they offer. Why someone should stop. In a sea of generalists, they stood out because they were specific. And it made me think about how often we bury our own value under jargon, creativity, or complexity. We assume people will get it, but most of the time they’re busy, distracted, and making decisions in seconds. So here’s the real filter to use: Can someone understand who you help and how at a glance? Because whether it’s your LinkedIn profile, your website, or the way you introduce yourself, clarity is a competitive advantage. The easier you make it for people to see themselves in your message, the faster the right opportunities find you. Clarity isn’t the opposite of creativity. Clarity creates space for the right kind of creativity that attracts the people you’re meant to serve.