Distilling down the value proposition is always important, but it’s never as easy as it seems.  Creating a simple value proposition for iTaggit has been gnawing at me because the ‘value’ depends on who the user is.  For example, the value of iTaggit for an artist is to document their work and share it with potential buyers, the value for a dealer is to showcase items and assist with SEO, and for casual collectors it’s getting the value of their items.  So is the value Organize?  Showcase?  find the dollar value?  It can be all of those.

The problem is that the value is specific to the person hearing the value proposition.  I was struck by this today here at Demo as I listened to the executives on stage try to describe what their business is.  One executive talked about his site being a ‘mobile publishing platform for connecting social contacts and building a mobile social fabric’ or something like that….  The best one that I heard today was ‘the worlds easiest database for normal people to organize, publish, and distribute data’.   Pretty good.  I’m a semi-normal person.  The only thing missing is the ‘why’.

What we finally came up with for iTaggit is that we are ‘the online destination to organize, showcase, value, and monetize the things that you are passionate about’.

Why is this important?  In my experience (and borne out by watching multiple onstage demonstrations today) you get or lose the interest of the customer in the first two to three minutes.  If that’s what it’s like when there is a captive audience in a presentation forum, what’s it like when a potential customer is looking at passive ad content?  It’s critical to figure out what resonates to optimize the conversion of prospects to ‘interested’ prospects.