How to Create Your Value Proposition

Your value proposition is a short description of what you offer and why a particular person would want to pay for it. It creates your base for explaining what you do and why it matters, which is why it’s so important.

Without a clear and compelling value proposition, people won’t understand what you do or why it matters, and you won’t get any sales. But with a good value proposition, you can clearly share your value, create good marketing, and start driving sales with less effort.

I’ll help you do that.

A value proposition is a short description of what you offer, who it’s for, and why that customer would be willing to pay for it.

It’s primarily meant for internal use, something your team can all understand and then use in their respective functions to make marketing materials, sales scripts, product decisions, and more.

Your value proposition is going to evolve naturally as you learn more from your customers, improve your offering, and as the market shifts around you. That’s okay — it’s probably a good thing.

That also means there’s no one perfect value prop that’s going to convince everyone to buy from you every time. In fact, an imperfect but easy-to-understand value prop is going to help you move faster than a perfectly worded treatise on everything you can do.

A value proposition highlights several things:

That sounds like a whole lot to unpack, huh?

In a way, it is. You need to thoroughly understand your customer, the market, your own product, existing customer behaviors, and existing solutions. That’s not something I can fully teach in this one post, but once you have a decent understanding of those elements, here’s how you can pack them altogether into a simple value proposition.

In practice, that might look like:

Text Request provides small business owners with text messaging software so they can get customers to respond. It’s better than making phone calls, because the response rates are 8x higher, works with your existing business phone number, and can be managed by a team rather than an individual, leading to more customers serviced and more revenue earned.

Or that might look like:

Readerful provides novelists with a platform to share their works in progress with readers, so they can earn money while they finish writing their story. It’s better than waiting for traditional publishing because you can make money while you work, grow your following, and get feedback to improve your stories as you go, leading to a more lucrative writing career.

These elements don’t have to speak to specific features or services you offer, though. They can speak more towards your brand positioning and emotions, too.

For instance, DeWalt, the power tools brand, may use something like:

DeWalt provides tradesmen with power tools so they can make a living. Our tools are better than Milwaukee or Makita, as evidenced by our 48hr “repair or replace guarantee,” and the fact that other tradesmen trust us for the toughness and dependability, leading to more jobs getting done with fewer issues.

Crafting your value proposition is as much art as it is science, and it’s going to be primarily an internal tool, so just be sure you include the key elements listed above. You can wordsmith it and turn it into competitive positioning or marketing copy later.

AI gets smarter when your input is complete. Wispr Flow helps you think out loud and capture full context by voice, then turns that speech into a clean, structured prompt you can paste into ChatGPT, Claude, or any assistant. No more chopping up thoughts into typed paragraphs. Preserve constraints, examples, edge cases, and tone by speaking them once. The result is faster iteration, more precise outputs, and less time re-prompting. Try Wispr Flow for AI or see a 30-second demo.

Start flowing free

We’ve all been to a networking event or some meetup and been asked “So, what do you do?” And if you’re like most of us, you saw the light in that person’s eyes fade as you tried to explain what you do.

Then they said something like, “Oh, that’s cool,” and moved on. They were clearly bored — or didn’t understand — and you may have even been a little embarrassed.

Instead, use the simple formula below to kickstart the conversation. This kind of response gives you about a 95% chance of having a positive conversation. This is also the easiest way to start immediately applying your value proposition to see if it resonates.

For instance:

The main purpose of these one-liners is to get the conversation going. These are intentionally short, and used to get the other person to ask you questions, like “How do you do that?” or “What does that entail?”

Now you’re having a full conversation where they’re actually interested in learning more!

You can come up with numerous one-liners and use them on rotation depending on your context, which is what I tend to do. For instance, if I’m explaining what I do to a target customer, I’ll be more direct and use some industry terminology that they’d understand. But if I’m talking to someone who’s not a target customer, I’ll keep things higher level.

Your value proposition is a simple summary of everything you know about your market, and how your product or service competes in it. You don’t have to overcomplicate it, no customer has to see it, and you can always revise it.

But, you’ve got to have this in order to build your marketing strategy and earn sales.

So sit down and work on it, and bring a few good customers or partners into the conversation to help you workshop it. It’ll be well worth the effort. If you’d like help, just email me at [email protected].

Hi, I’m Kenneth Burke. 👋 As a Marketing VP, I led our bootstrapped startup from $0 to $20M and an acquisition. Now I help startup founders achieve product-market fit, so you can remove the guesswork from growth.

I post stories, advice, and frameworks weekly here on #BurkeBits, and share content more often across LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. If that sounds interesting, subscribe, email me at [email protected] with your current challenge, and share this with another builder.