Are you on a mission to bring something new to market? Beware: even though you’re hopefully on a valiant quest to bring value, not all value is equal. Deep value occurs when both the problem you’ve chosen to solve, and the way you’ve executed the solution, hold a significant place in people’s lives or attention spans.
How can you get there? Here’s a cheat sheet:
When you’re providing thin value:
You get all your research from previously published studies, because you assume that this is all you need to know. After all, other people smarter than you have been in your situation before, right?
You put a lot of effort into solving a problem that effects the lives of many people. But you’ve never investigated how urgent that problem is, to those people who have it.
You’re into shipping just those features that are easy to develop and ship. Why bring out the big guns before we’re ready to commit?
You constantly change your mind about whether you want to solve this particular problem.
Sound familiar? We’ve all worked this way at some point or another in a project or a product launch. If something about working this way has felt wrong to you before, but you couldn’t put your finger on why, it’s because cultivating deep value takes a lot more courage than most people have. Most people subconsciously work with thin value to reduce risk and hedge their bets, which looks legitimate on the surface of things. But creating deep value is an adventurous process fraught with the risk involved in all truly innovative advancements.
When you’re creating deep value:
You begin by looking at studies that experts have published, but do your own core research into the specific problem at hand.
You make sure that the problem you are solving is important to the people who have it.
You try to tackle problems that seem almost impossible to solve. You’re also excited by barriers that you encounter - because if you solve them now, your competitors will be far behind.
You have an intense conviction that the problem you are trying to solve is worthwhile, and this does not change over time.
Comparing one approach against the other, it’s easy to see how deep value is the green meadow for product-market fit to grow in. This way of thinking also forces you to dig the moat that will keep competitors out of your turf. Thin value just scratches the surface. What will you do today to begin creating deep value for those who need it?