Quantify and monetize the pain: Make the VPs care
At the Activate fellowship program, last week’s topic was the product-market fit and value proposition: How do we convince the VP to pay for our product? Among many amazing entrepreneurship programs at accelerators and business mentorship programs, none of them presented the value proposition the way the Activate fellowship program panel did. The panel’s take on presenting the value proposition was very different!
During customer discovery, our goal is to identify the customer’s pain point. For example, we might talk to the technical people within a company and identify a pain point. Now we know what to focus on for our product. But we also learn that technical people do not have the power to write the checks. Then we know we have to go and talk to the decision-makers who write the checks; VPs and C-suite executives.
The key insight from this panel was those check writers may not care about the technical team’s pain point and there is a disconnect. So, how do you make the connection between the technical team’s pain and the VP of the organization? The VP cares about the dollars that the technical team’s pain is costing. So speak the VP’s language and monetize the pain.
In Pheronym’s case, my cofounder Karl and I did our customer discovery at the NSF I-corps National program. We interviewed 164 ag professionals in the agriculture ecosystem in 2020 Summer and Fall. We found that growers’ problem with difficult pests has not been solved. There was a need for pest control for the difficult pests in the soil. Consumers were the drivers of eco-friendly pest control solutions. The government regulations were very important. After that, we identified Pheronym’s beachhead market, value proposition, and key resources like investors, manufacturing partners, or toll producers. We were also asked to find whether our customers can afford our product. We also determined our customers had money to buy our product.
In a perfect world, after the customer discovery and identifying the pain point, we would present our solution to a VP of an ag input company, a distributor, or an ag investor, who would then write the check for further product development. After that, we would develop and manufacture our product. The customer would buy our products, solve their pest control pain, and success for Pheronym!
We quickly learned that things were not that simple and the relationships were a lot more complex in the agriculture pest control ecosystem. So we have to come up with a way to quantify and monetize the farmers’ pain for eco-friendly pest control to key resources and partners that care. At the end of the day, it is all about money!
Author: Dr. Fatma Kaplan is the CEO/CSO of Pheronym and Activate Berkeley Fellow & Berkeley Lab Affiliate Cyclotron Road Cohort 2021. She is also an entrepreneur and an accomplished scientist with experience in both biology and chemistry. She has a Ph.D. in Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology and postdoctoral training in Natural Product Chemistry with a focus on isolating biologically active compounds. Dr. Kaplan discovered the first sex pheromone of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans and published it in Nature. Then she discovered that pheromones regulate other behaviors in both parasitic and beneficial nematodes. Dr. Kaplan conducted the first agricultural biocontrol experiment in Space at the International Space Station in 2020. She has very high impact publications, and her dissertation (beta-amylase’s role during cold and heat shock) was cited in textbooks within 5 years of publication. Dr. Kaplan worked as a scientist at NASA, the National Magnetic Field Laboratory, and the US Department of Agriculture — Agricultural Research Service. Dr. Fatma Kaplan and Mr. Karl C. Schiller co-founded Pheronym to bring nematode pheromone technology to the market and to provide effective, non-toxic, sustainable pest control for farmers and gardeners.
