How “Better” Brands Die: A CEO’s Guide to Framing a Value Proposition That Converts

In this crowded marketplace, “better” is less of a Value Proposition and more like background noise. Seed and Series A CEOs routinely ship products that are objectively superior by features or ethics, yet watch deals stall, pilots go nowhere, and investors discount their narratives. After 27 years of carrying and coaching quota, Rich Laster has seen a pattern repeated: high‑intent buyers and sophisticated investors do not reward “better,” they reward clearly framed, risk‑reducing, outcome‑specific advantage.

Why “Better” Fails in a Crowded Market

From a buyer’s perspective, most categories are already over‑supplied with “better” options. In software, for example, global SaaS spending has climbed above 200 billion dollars annually, with thousands of near‑substitutable tools competing for the same budgets.¹ In that environment, small performance deltas, a nicer interface, or a more principled mission rarely justify the cost of switching, the integration risk, or the political risk of backing a young company.

Research has long shown that profitability comes not from being generically better, but from creating value gaps, that is, pockets of buyers for whom your solution delivers meaningfully more value than their best alternative.² When a CEO settles for “better,” they implicitly frame their company side‑by‑side with incumbents on a flat comparison grid, which drives price pressure and slows decisions.

When Value Proposition is fuzzy or lacking uniqueness, customer satisfaction becomes volatile and uneven. Empirical data from Wharton shows that while higher customer satisfaction boosts shareholder value, high heterogeneity in satisfaction reduces the return on that satisfaction by nearly 70 percent because different customers are experiencing wildly different value.³ In practice, this is what happens when some customers happen to “get” your value on their own and others do not. The Value Prop. is not doing the heavy lifting.

From “Better” to “Decidedly Different”

Rich Laster’s experience is that serious buyers and investors evaluate early‑stage offerings through a simple, often unspoken lens:

• Does this materially change an outcome I care about?
• Does it do so in a way that is hard for others to copy?
• Does it lower my risk relative to the status quo or a known incumbent?

Harvard Business Review has argued for decades that durable advantage rests on discovering and activating specific points of differentiation that customers recognize and value.⁴ More recently, HBR has highlighted companies like Toast that built defensible positions in crowded markets by designing a growth system around tightly defined, differentiated solutions for narrowly understood customer segments.⁵

The Value Proposition Clarity Framework: “Who, What, Why This, Why Now”

To move beyond “better,” Laster uses a four‑part Value Proposition Clarity Framework. It is simple to state and difficult to execute well, which is why most founders do not do it.

1. Who: The narrowest segment of customers for whom your value gap is largest.
2. What: The specific, measurable outcome you improve.
3. Why This: The structural reason you can deliver that outcome more reliably or more completely than alternatives.
4. Why Now: The external trigger or internal threshold that makes acting urgent.

Applied rigorously, this framework forces the team to choose a hill to dominate, instead of trying to be marginally better for everyone. Columbia Business School research on value gaps reinforces this strategy: profitability improves when firms identify and prioritize buyer segments in which their marginal value creation is highest relative to alternatives.²

A Value Proposition that passes the Clarity Framework might sound like this:

• “For multi‑location restaurant groups with fragmented tech stacks (Who), we compress payment errors and chargebacks by 40 percent within 90 days (What), by orchestrating POS, online ordering, and payout rules in a single reconciled ledger (Why This), at exactly the time when labor and food cost volatility are eroding margins and financial visibility (Why Now).”

There is no “better” in that statement. There is only a specific buyer, a quantified outcome, a unique mechanism, and a time pressure that aligns with the investor’s thesis.

A Practical Value Proposition Stress Test for CEOs

To turn the Value Proposition from a deck artifact into an operating tool, Laster recommends a short stress test that CEOs can run quarterly with their leadership teams. An efficient means of diagnosing scalability challenges, and engineering custom solutions, is the Revenue Scalability Assessment available on GrowExpand.com.

Use the following questions as a scoring system, on a simple 1 to 5 scale, where 1 is “not at all true” and 5 is “consistently true.”

1. Buyer Clarity
   • Every rep can name, in one sentence, the specific type of account for whom we are the obvious choice.
   • Investors can describe our ICP without looking at a slide.
2. Outcome Specificity
   • Our Value Proposition contains at least one quantifiable outcome that matters to the CFO.
   • Case studies and references explicitly tie our presence to that outcome, not just to satisfaction.
3. Mechanism Credibility
   • We can explain, in plain language, why our architecture, model, or process makes that outcome more reliable than alternatives.
   • Competitors would struggle to copy this mechanism quickly without strategic or cultural disruption.
4. Timing Urgency
   • We can point to external trends or internal thresholds that make acting this quarter materially better than acting next year.
   • Our messaging reflects those triggers, not generic fear of missing out.
5. Risk Asymmetry
   • Our Value Proposition clearly shows why choosing us lowers career and operational risk for the champion.
   • Commercial constructs (pilots, warranties, SLAs) support that narrative.

Scores below 3 on any dimension signal a Value Proposition that is relying on “better” or “more ethical” language instead of value gap clarity.

Anticipating Counter‑Arguments: When “Better” Seems to Work

There are CEOs who will say, “Our category is still immature. Being better actually is enough.” Early in a technology or category life cycle, this can be true for a time, especially when incumbent options are obviously broken. The risk is that the team mistakes an early adopter wave for proof of a permanent advantage.

Academic and practitioner research both show that as markets mature, differentiation on basic quality alone erodes and customers become more price sensitive, unless firms layer on distinctive value elements that are hard to imitate.³ In other words, “better” may buy you your first cohort, but it rarely defends your Series B or your margins.

Another objection is, “Our impact story is our differentiation.” For B Corps and mission‑driven ventures, impact is a strategic asset but, capital markets are increasingly familiar with “impact‑washing.” Columbia’s work on the Business Model Canvas for social enterprises magnifies exactly how important it is that value propositions integrate both impact and economic value creation to be investable.⁹ A Value Proposition that leans only on mission often leaves investors unclear on leverage, scalability, and defensibility.

The CEOs and investors who will win the next cycle are those who treat the Value Proposition not as a tagline, but as a strategic operating document that directs product, go‑to‑market, and capital allocation. In Rich Laster’s experience, once a company commits to that discipline, the noise of a crowded market becomes less threatening and more clarifying. Competitors can always claim to be better. The ventures that endure are the ones that can show, in precise terms, for whom they are decisively different, why that difference matters, and why now is the time to act.

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Footnotes

1. Global SaaS spending data and the proliferation of competing tools in crowded software categories are discussed in “Create a System to Grow Consistently,” Harvard Business Review, 2024.
2. O. B. L. and F. Subramanian, “Value Gaps and Profitability,” Columbia Business School, 2016. The authors formalize how firm profitability depends on identifying buyer segments where the firm’s marginal value creation exceeds that of alternatives.
3. R. Grewal, J. A. Cote, and H. Baumgartner, “Customer Satisfaction Heterogeneity and Shareholder Value,” Wharton School working paper. The study finds that while higher customer satisfaction increases shareholder value, high heterogeneity in satisfaction reduces the return on that satisfaction by nearly 70 percent.
4. J. L. Calloway and B. J. Shapiro, “Discovering New Points of Differentiation,” Harvard Business Review. The article argues that profitable strategies are built on specific differentiation points that customers recognize and value, not on generic superiority claims.
5. “Create a System to Grow Consistently,” Harvard Business Review, 2024. The article uses Toast as an example of designing a growth system around a differentiated solution for a narrowly defined customer segment in a crowded market.
6. T. Levitt, “Marketing Success Through Differentiation of Anything,” Harvard Business Review. Levitt demonstrates that nearly all goods and services are differentiable along multiple dimensions beyond basic quality, and that firms must intentionally select and communicate those dimensions.
7. S. A. Spiller, “The Perceived Value of Money Depends on Irrelevant Uses,” Wharton School, 2014. The paper shows how perceived value depends on the set of uses and tradeoffs customers face, a principle that applies to how buyers assess competing offers.
8. “The Business Model Canvas: A Useful Tool,” Columbia CaseWorks, Columbia Business School. The case emphasizes that for social enterprises, including B Corps, the value proposition must integrate both impact and economic value creation to be viable.