How to Find Your Startup's Value Proposition (5 Steps)
Value is more than technical details and it’s how you cut through the noise
Welcome to Issue 12 of Cyber Building Blocks. Each week, I share one newsletter focused on helping you build a Go To Market engine for your cybersecurity startup.
Not what used to work 20 years ago, but what’s working today. Remember, I’m building side by side with you!
While you are selling the first handful of customers as the founder you are doing more than just getting revenue and customers! Arguably in the long term, the early customers that you win will be a very small rounding error. They are crucial and there is no business without them but if that is all you are focused on during “founder led sales” you are missing out!
One of the most important aspects of founder led sales is practicing articulating your value proposition over and over again and making slight tweaks to see how it changes in the reactions from multiple customers!
Before you will be able to hire a sales team to really scale your vision you need to have a fairly clear, not perfect, value prop and an early ICP! I’ve spoken a ton about ICP so i’ll hold off there for now and focus on the value prop today!
To me, a value prop takes the early pain point your solution solves and really expands to take it much deeper! Every sales meeting, every cold call, every email, you should be able to trace your value prop through it!
It’s everything from the quick 30sec “pitch” you do in the elevator, to the longer version in your 1st meeting.
If we break it down a value proposition has 5 specific parts:
Hook
Functional Value
Emotional Value
Personal Value
Call To Action
You really don’t want to skip a step so i’ll dive in a little deeper to each one!
Hook:
This is arguably the most important part because if you don’t get this right you won’t be able to get to the later sections! This is most relevant in your initial outreach, maybe at an event, might be on LinkedIn, or through a partner, potentially even a cold call, it doesn’t matter the method, you will always need some sort of hook in order to grab your prospects attention.
The best hooks are 2 things: Timely & Relevant
Timely = why are you reaching out right now?
Relevant = why are you reaching out to them specifically?
This isn’t “We speak with a lot of CISO struggling with XYZ, is that you?” Please please don’t ever do that!
This also isn’t ambulance chasing, too often people hear timely and they think it’s in response to a public breach. That is not it either.
Functional Value:
This is what your product does. This is probably what you think of when you first heard value prop, but it’s only one part.
An example would be, “we leverage ML algorithms to better detect phishing emails that are bypassing your email gateway.”
It’s technical, it’s tactical, it’s what your solution does to help your customers.
Emotional Value:
This is why you do what you do for your customers. Not why you do it for you, but for them!
An example would be, “allowing your team to spend more time focused on triaging actual malicious emails and less time on false positives.”
This is why you are leveraging ML algorithms for better detections, to give them back time while being more secure.
Personal Value:
This is why it matters to them specifically! This will differ if they are a CISO who is more business level vs a front line manager of a security team vs an engineer who is still hands on keyboard and very in the technical weeds!
An example would be, “Allowing you to be able to log off at 5p and enjoy your family instead of staying late triaging through fake news.”
Don’t use the same personal value for everyone because it will change depending on what that specific persona at the company cares about!
Call To Action:
This is a very simple and clear next step. Could be a first meeting so you can show them a demo, could be a POC experience so you can prove your value in their environment, or something else to continue moving the evaluation along.
Please don’t skip this step. Best practice is to “book a meeting from a meeting” always!
So if I were to put that all together it would look something like this:
A Hook very specific to that customer and that individual + “we leverage ML algorithms to better detect phishing emails that are bypassing your email gateway. To allow your team to spend more time focused on triaging actual malicious emails and less on false positives so you can actually get to enjoy your weekends and holidays with your family” + Very clear Call To Action
That’s it!
Hook: Timely & Relevant
Functional Value: What you do
Emotional Value: Why you do it
Personal Value: Why it matters to them
Call To Action: Specific and clear, ideally soon
The value prop is something you will want to cover multiple times with those early sales and marketing team members so understanding and troubleshooting several different versions during the founder led sales chapter of your growth is really important!
Here’s what I’m trying this week: Remember I’m in the trenches building just like you
I spent hours this week falling down the rabbit hole of what is possible with the new AI tools that have come out! I wanted to get really technical and dive deep on how they can be applied in order to really take building a GTM engine to the next level.
I’m planning to do a deep dive on what I’m learning and consolidate what I believe to be the best practices when it comes to building cybersecurity GTM engine with the new tools we have in 2026 vs just redoing the playbooks from 2006!
If you have any tools that you have enjoyed, I would love to hear from you on how you are using them!
That’s all for this week’s newsletter (See you at RSA!!)
Keep fighting the good fight!
Konnor
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Plenty of products sound good in theory.
Fewer are explained in a way that makes one specific buyer feel the problem clearly enough to act on it.