Building real-life products from scratch with Value Proposition Canvas
By: Dora Melher
Tags: MVP, Value Proposition, Startup, Product Design, Service Design

Once you will probably face a problem or a need that you want to solve or fulfill somehow. You search for the best application with high hopes, but the App store is as empty as your feelings. If you are not lucky enough to have it in your role description to design a product from zero, this will be probably the perfect timing to start something which is 100% yours.

This story is a comprehensive description of the beginning phase of researching, testing, and validation (of brand new ideas) through a real-life process we have done with my product designer buddy Peter.

How to find a five-star idea?

The best-case scenario is to have your own experience, which reflects on your needs, or someone else’s who is kind of close to you. At the very beginning, we collected ideas from our lives and listed on Trello with only one sentence as an internal narrative. But, what is a good idea, which reflects on a problem that is painful enough to become significant? If I feel that my issue is really tough, but there are only 15 people out there who feel the same, then it obviously doesn’t worth the time and energy to discover. Y-combinator came up with a pretty good criteria system to find the “best painful problems” out there which are important enough to work with.

⭐️ Popular (a critical amount of people have the problem)

⭐️ Growing 20% a year (the market is getting bigger affecting more people)

⭐️ Urgent (need to be solved quickly for the business/person)

⭐️ Expensive (we can charge money for it)

⭐️ Mandatory (has to be solved because of regulation pressure)

⭐️ Frequent (even multiple times a day) — **Most important!**

When we started our own product, we had a common problem which was worth to discover

Research

Research is a kind of thing that you put everything in a hat (imagine that you can do that with every available piece of information in the world) and always pick one and dive in deeply to understand the core. It’s always pretty hard to select the most informative and useful pieces, but it is recommended to keep that maintainable since every single minute you spend with misleading information is just a pure waste of time. We did a generic food waste research, then explored the available products on the market, and tried to figure out the deficit which generated an impact on their efficiency. Sometimes it is easily available information, but in most cases, you need to download the app itself or understand the whole market to figure out the users’ reaction to the product. After this phase, you should have a complete kit of information about every other competent product, your future costumers’ generic needs, their willingness to pay and the main barriers which can lead your product to a complete failure.

Here is one of our competitor’s app reviews (masked). It always worth to look for comments, reviews, and ratings to learn those features that can be an added value for the users.

This is the time when you can have persona research as well to dig deeper into the problem or carry out simple in-depth interviews to be prepared with your customer insights when it comes to the product planning part. If you don’t have much time to conduct extensive researches, there are a few other techniques that can be a great helping hand to avoid questionable decisions. One potential solution is described below for these busy days.

Value Proposition Canvas

While with the research you get a broader (but superficial) picture of the problem, this will be enough only to understand the game you got into. The next step should be something which helps you to understand every single segment of your future solution and at last but not least, your future users. Value Proposition Canvas is a great tool for this purpose, and here you may find further information about its techniques, mechanics to tackle the main objective well prepared.

1. Customer profile

We filled out customer profiles separately to get a deeper understanding of the core problems and the possible goals. This is the most important part of the whole process, if you don’t dig deep enough, or not invest the adequate time in this phase, it can happen that you will put energy only into your speculations. First, we defined customer goals, where we had to list the usual aims they try to achieve daily. The next section is about the pains, what covers every risk, negative impact or obstacle that can happen while they use your product. The third part is to discover the gains, growth, or benefits they will achieve with your solution.

Customer profiles help you to find out the most important aspects of your product’s future possibilities but helping you to gain empathy towards your users as well

After a well-designed customer profile, we defined the factors with high priority from the segments (five from each), and these became the basement of the value map. In our case, it turned out that from our users’ perspective the money-saving and practical aspects will be the most important factors, namely, that they will know what is in their fridge exactly to avoid wasting.

2. Value map

The value map is a practical document, which helps you to organize your future product’s functions and services, with its help you will be able to figure out gain creators and pain relievers that should be synchronized with your customer profiles as well. This is the part when you have to be really creative and come up with ideas from the very basic to the most wicked ones to establish the long term goals of the product as well. As a result, you will possess a “fair” MVP plan, which still has too many functions, but it will be way much easier to filter out than just coming up with functions without any kind of background. In our case, we had another session as well to keep the MVP in order and establish the most important features of our future app.

The value map is a practical tool to define the MVP’s concrete functions and services

After having your future MVP planned it is worth to conduct short research again to be sure you made the right decisions in your design.

Validation with landing page

Congrats, now you came up with a real-life MVP with specific functions and services, but you still can’t be sure whether people would like to pay for it to use or not. To avoid the disappointment and needless time investment it is a great option to create a landing page and watch users’ reactions. Do they click? Do they want to sign up for the release? Do they speak about it? To gain the biggest attention and impact with your product, you should have an almost-final product design with polished user experience and consistent identity that you can show on your page. Without it, you won’t be able to reach the minimum number of visitors. When a potential consumer visits your site, he should feel that this is something that is almost done, and he won’t be surprised if he could download it two days later from the App store.

Takeaway message

Now we should double back to the beginning, where I promised that we will learn how to design a product from scratch. It won’t be fair to not telling you to always keep in mind one tiny thing: to know when it’s worth to continue a planned MVP or when it’s more rewarding to let it go. Even if we feel sometimes that our product will be the next big thing, it can happen that during the landing page phase we realize that it’s not beneficial to put more energy into the project. Then let’s move on to our next idea and repeat the techniques we’ve learned!