The messaging process is painful.
You’re working towards fine-tuning the value proposition into clear, concise, and powerful words that will easily let your audience know WIIFM.
This is not an easy process, especially for the founders.
As you’re having a conversation with the different founders and stakeholders, you’re digging deeper and deeper in hopes to find the real motivations for them, their audience, and the market as a whole.
Now while having the right message is critically important, all individuals involved have other things they would rather be doing than answering the same questions, brainstorming, and getting into arguments with the other participants over disagreements, not seeing eye to eye on specific values, and simply hoping they could go ‘do something real’ instead of working on words.
But while this process is extremely important and helpful, it isn’t an easy one. Even when successful, they go through a journey of breaking down pitches, rehearsed lines, and hard sales propositions, and dig into real issues, while also having to find common denominators with each other when not necessarily in agreement.
Yet this painful process does well at the end: it cleans the nonsense, removes the fluff, and leaves participants with a clearer view of their value and direction. It also helps them realize their own startup in another light, being aware of the copy that works, or doesn’t work, and why, so they can adapt their own processes accordingly…when on calls, in meetings, or running around pitching their greatness to the external world.
Yes, even though their aim is to help, therapy sessions can be extremely painful.
Painful, yet for a good cause.