Value Props: Create a Product People Will Actually Buy
Value Props: Create a Product People Will Actually Buy
ELI5/TLDR
Most startups die because they solve a problem nobody cares enough about. This Harvard i-lab workshop by VC Michael Skok gives you three frameworks to pressure-test whether your product idea is worth pursuing: the Four Us (is the problem Unworkable, Unavoidable, Urgent, Underserved?), the 3Ds (is your solution Disruptive, Discontinuous, Defensible?), and the Gain/Pain Ratio (does the benefit of switching outweigh the hassle by at least 10x?). The whole thing boils down to one sentence: stop pitching and start asking your customers what hurts.
The Full Story
Kill Your Ideas
Skok opens with a declaration that would make most pitch-deck enthusiasts uncomfortable: he wants to get rid of ideas entirely. Ideas are “two a penny” — free-floating things with no meaning until they attach to a real problem. The workshop exists to build a single sentence: For [who] that is dissatisfied with [what] due to [unmet need], your product offers [solution] that provides [benefits] compelling enough that people actually want to buy.
Every framework that follows is just a way to stress-test whether you can fill in those blanks honestly.
For Who: The Minimum Viable Segment
The first question sounds almost insultingly simple. Who is this for?
Skok calls on Gulnaz from Connect-Ed, a nonprofit bridging the digital divide in Kazakhstan. She doesn’t say “everyone.” She says: children from marginalized rural communities who lack both digital literacy and equipment. That specificity is the point.
“If you think your customer is everybody, I can tell you, you’re going to fail by default.”
Another team, Compra Facil, built a credit comparison marketplace but never specified who would use it. Skok treats this as a near-fatal omission. If you don’t know your customer, you don’t know the persona you’re selling to, how to reach them, or what to build.
He introduces the Minimum Viable Segment — the MVS. Find the smallest group of users who share the same needs so you can sell the same product repeatedly without changing it. The MVS is the dance partner to your MVP. One without the other leads to a product being pulled in every direction at once.
A student raises a sharp question: when the user and customer are different people (children use Connect-Ed, but governments and donors pay for it), who goes in the “for who” slot? The room debates. The answer: start with the user. If the user doesn’t get value, nobody pays. But you’ll need a value proposition for the buyer too.
What Problem: The Four Us
Skok quotes Charles Kettering — “A problem well stated is half-solved” — and introduces the Four Us, a framework for evaluating whether a problem is worth your life’s effort.
Unworkable means consequences so severe that people get fired. When the iPhone launched, activation systems failed, iCloud wouldn’t sync contacts, and Steve Jobs reportedly lost his composure. A company that fixed carrier provisioning for AT&T made tens of millions solving just that workflow. Social problems qualify too: if Kazakhstan’s children can’t get educated, the country faces civil unrest and economic stagnation.
Unavoidable covers the Benjamin Franklin specials: death and taxes. Both have spawned enormous industries. Education is unavoidable. COVID was unavoidable, and it created entire supply chains — masks, testing, remote work infrastructure — from nothing.
Urgent is relative, and this is the trap. Space health is urgent if you’re an astronaut. It is spectacularly not urgent if you’re sitting in Cambridge. Skok’s advice: when you talk to a potential customer, don’t mention your product. Ask them what their number one priority is tomorrow morning. Then ask when they’ll get to number two. Often they won’t. If your product isn’t in the top one or two priorities, expect to wait.
“If you go in to try and pitch somebody something that’s a nice-to-have new extension to their existing workflow system, but they haven’t got basic security in place and they’ve just been hacked, you’re not going to get any attention.”
Market shifts create urgency artificially. Mobile banking didn’t exist 20 years ago. Now every bank scrambles to offer it. AI is doing the same thing right now.
Underserved is the gap between what exists and what’s needed. Zipporah from Taste of Kenya explains that Kenyan coffee consumers can’t afford Kenyan coffee, so they drink Brazilian instant. The local product is both too expensive (unworkable) and literally unavailable at accessible price points (underserved).
The standout moment is Selene Health’s presentation. Stella explains that menopausal symptoms can make women unable to work — unworkable. Menopause affects roughly half the population — unavoidable. When symptoms hit, they’re immediate — urgent. And only 2% of research funding goes to this population — wildly underserved. The room applauds. It is, objectively, a textbook Four-U problem.
One team has a different kind of breakthrough: they realize their problem might be better solved by government policy than by a startup. Skok gives them a round of applause for honesty. Not every problem is a company. Recognizing that early saves years.
Latent to Blatant: The B2C Dimension
A student asks what unworkable problem Facebook solved. Skok pivots: B2C works differently. It’s less about unworkable problems and more about fundamental human needs — connection, security, belonging. Harvard’s longest-running study on happiness (since 1938) found one predictor: social connection. That’s what Facebook sells. WhatsApp exploded because calling home from abroad was too expensive. These are needs, not problems in the enterprise sense.
Products often start latent and aspirational (nice to have) and need to become blatant and critical (must have). The iPad was mocked as a big iPhone. Then pilots started using it for navigation, surgeons used it in operating rooms, and it became indispensable for specific users. Pebble Watch had the same shot but died. Apple Watch survived because Apple built a developer platform and waited for the applications to create criticality.
The 3Ds: Beyond Faster-Better-Cheaper
Every startup claims to be faster, better, or cheaper. Skok considers this dangerous. Anyone with more money can out-fast, out-better, and out-cheap you. He proposes the 3Ds instead.
Disruptive is often a business model, not a technology. Airbnb owns no homes. They connected people with unused space. That idea could have been conceived in a dorm room — and was. Multi-touch was a technology disruption: a single interface that adapts during a surgical operation, replacing dozens of dedicated instruments.
Discontinuous means enabling something previously impossible. Amazon started by offering book selection no physical store could match, then layered in fast delivery and low prices. The real discontinuity was AWS: cloud computing born from Amazon’s own excess data center capacity. Andy Jassy, who created it, told that story at the i-lab. Without the cloud, there’s no mobile economy, no remote work during COVID, no modern startups.
Defensible is the moat. Dan from TerraFlow (pharma biomarker software) has potential IP and, more importantly, switching costs — once scientists build their workflows around TerraFlow’s interpretation tools, ripping it out is painful. Network effects are the strongest moat: a superior social network with zero users is worthless. Data compounds too — Vivian’s marketing analytics product gets better with every additional user, making the next competitor’s job harder.
The surprise is Taste of Kenya: a consumer coffee company with 10-year contracts locking in farmers. And Sharon’s bike seat startup, which collects real-time ride data to dynamically adjust seat form — defensible through IP, data, and long-term contracts with bike-share companies.
Evaluate: Before/After and Gain/Pain
The before/after test is simple. What does life look like without your product? What does it look like with it? Selene Health: before, women are dysfunctional and in pain; after, they work, raise families, live fully. Taste of Kenya: before, farmers cut down coffee trees and the industry dies; after, Kenyans drink Kenyan coffee. The bigger the contrast, the more your product looks like morphine instead of a vitamin.
The gain/pain ratio is where most founders fool themselves. They obsess over gain and forget about pain. Venmo’s gain was obvious (no more checks, instant payments). Its pain was less obvious: another app to download, connecting your bank account, trusting a startup with your money, a network that barely existed at launch.
“What are all the reasons you would not buy my product?”
Ask that question, Skok says, and keep asking until the customer runs out of objections. Common pain points: the alternative is good enough, cost, retraining, supply chain disruption, risk of a startup folding.
Dan from TerraFlow suggests a 10:1 gain/pain ratio as the threshold. Skok agrees for enterprise B2B. For consumers, the bar might be lower — David’s destinationless travel app offering 30-90% cheaper airfares might clear it, depending on the user. The point is to measure it, not assume it.
The Statement
It all collapses into one sentence:
For [minimum viable segment] that is dissatisfied with [current situation] due to [unmet need validated by Four Us], [your product] offers [3D breakthrough] that provides [gain/pain ratio compelling enough to overcome inertia].
And one final concept: founder-market fit. If you don’t uniquely understand the problem, someone who does will outbuild you. Your personal knowledge, your obsession, your unfair insight — that’s what makes the value proposition yours and not just a framework exercise.
Claude’s Take
This is a genuinely good workshop, and it’s good for a specific reason: Skok barely teaches. He asks questions, lets students answer, and then reframes what they said into his frameworks. The frameworks themselves — Four Us, 3Ds, Gain/Pain Ratio — aren’t original (they appear in various forms across startup literature), but the live application makes them stick. Watching a menopause health startup nail all four Us in real time is more persuasive than any textbook.
The strongest idea here is the one Skok keeps returning to like a refrain: ask the user, don’t pitch them. He says it so many times it starts to feel like a mantra, and that’s probably intentional. Most first-time founders are allergic to this advice. They want to explain their vision. Skok is telling them their vision is irrelevant until a customer confirms the pain exists.
The weakest part is the 3Ds framework. “Disruptive, Discontinuous, Defensible” sounds clean in a lecture hall, but in practice, most early-stage startups cannot credibly claim any of the three. The examples (Amazon, Apple, Airbnb) are post-hoc rationalizations of companies that succeeded for dozens of interlocking reasons. Telling a student building a bike seat that she needs to be “discontinuous” is aspirational advice dressed up as analytical framework. It’s more useful as a thinking tool than as a diagnostic one.
The gain/pain ratio is the most practically useful concept in the talk. Most founders can list ten benefits of their product and zero reasons someone wouldn’t buy it. The simple exercise of asking “why would you NOT buy this?” would save a lot of startups from building products that are technically impressive and commercially irrelevant.
One moment deserves special mention: the team that realized their problem might need a policy solution rather than a startup. Skok applauds them, and he’s right to. The ability to recognize that your problem doesn’t need your solution is rare and valuable. Most incubator environments subtly discourage this kind of honesty. Credit to Skok for celebrating it.
The workshop is from 2023, and some references (COVID masks, early AI hype) are already dated. The frameworks are not. A founder working on anything from pharma software to Kenyan coffee could run through these exercises in an afternoon and come out with a sharper understanding of whether they’re building something people will actually buy — or just something they find interesting.