“The major risk facing most efforts is solution risk. Discovering a solution that is compelling to customers. A solution that your customers will choose to buy and use.”

– Marty Cagan

Most companies fail.

What’s more, most companies that experienced venture capitalists invest in fail.

This is a truism at this point, but there’s something else many people know, yet haven’t really had a full-blown culture shift to address: the reason most companies fail is that they are selling something not enough people want to buy.

This seems crazy when you consider that learning what people actually do care about in the context of a buying or adoption decision is not that hard.

In less than a month, you can learn from enough people who made a buying decision and focus energy only on what they really care about to drive growth.

Sure, there are a million things that can go wrong for a company, but too often there’s an attitude like, “we already talked to some people once” or “we have a vision” or “we really understand the problem,” or “our competitors offer x, y, and z so we have to as well.”

Now that your company has proven you can execute and bring in some customers, you can accelerate your progress (across product, marketing, sales, and growth) by focusing on work that you can know that customers will care about.

As is becoming more and more clear, products have value only when people who use or buy the product perceive it to be valuable. If not enough people see the value, things like great execution or having a sizeable addressable audience don’t matter at all. Why wouldn’t you want as much clarity as possible about what people care about when they buy or use your product?

We help you understand what your target customers and potential customers find truly valuable, using a process that incorporates elements of Jobs-To-Be-Done, value discovery, customer development, and interviewing techniques to help teams to identify opportunities and to create strategic priorities.

Alan developed the concept of Value Discovery after working on numerous successful and failed products in his own companies and with clients. He became convinced that there is no need to waste billions of dollars and millions of hours of people’s lives building products that never are valued by customers.

Laure has a deep belief that if businesses understand what people care about and serve people’s most powerful motives, we can co-create a world that is more empathy-driven, caring, and sustainable.

We work with Series A up through publicly-traded companies to help them innovate, communicate, and accelerate growth. (Though this kind of learning is useful at the beginning of a company’s life, we’ve found that the chaos of very early-stage companies can make it hard to put strategy into practice, so we only work with companies who have an empowered product team in place).

We can help teams develop a practice of value discovery through a number of different approaches and levels of depth. Some of the ways we can work with you include:

• A coaching and teaching process for teams putting value discovery into practice
• Consulting with executives and product leaders on strategy, value discovery, positioning, and prioritization
• One-day workshops, giving a high-level understanding to teams or organizations
• Guided sprints, where we take your team through a value discovery process using data collected before the sprint
• Collaborative discovery, where we walk through every step along the way with a team as they investigate a customer segment

Most of our programs are available virtually.

If this is interesting to you, we’d love to talk.

Our pricing is typically based on the value you expect to gain from putting the work into practice, and we guarantee our work will generate or exceed your expectations.

Please contact us to book a time to chat.