Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Welcome to Joonomy, we want to be resource to help new businesses owners grow. We’re going to document and share our journey as a startup, we’ll share with you the lessons and mistakes we make along the way.

When we started Joonomy one of the first things we did was to try word our Unique Selling Proposition properly so it would appeal to our audience, although we always knew what we wanted we wanted Joonomy to be, we have always had problems with wording it properly. Currently we settled on:

“We help new business owners succeed by providing a trusted marketplace to hire the right candidates and find clients for their products or services. And we do it at no charge.”

If you have suggestions on how we improve on our USP, please feel free to let us know in our comments.

Now, let me share with you what we have learned about creating our USP, and our thought process, hopefully this will inspire with the creation of your USP.

You want your USP to be a make a unique promise to your clients that your business can deliver. After all USP is an acronym for Unique Selling Proposition, so you want to state something unique that your business can deliver on.

We wanted to achieve this with Joonomy, and we hope we did.

We wanted to help all business owners but we believed we’ll have the greatest impact on new business owners, being a startup and entrepreneurs ourselves we understand the struggles that new businesses face, so in our USP we wanted to reflect that.

It’s been estimated that only 20% of business understand their own USP and utilize it, if you’re part of the 20% congratulations, if you’re part of the 80% that need to come up with a USP, I hope this blog posts will give you some ideas.

Here are some ideas that will hopefully help you construct your USP if you haven’t yet.

1. Your USP and your business need to state and be able to deliver on a bold promise.
   You can’t offer one hour dry cleaning service, if you can’t deliver on it. Your USP needs to state a clear benefit that your business can deliver on.

2. Don’t let your USP be everything to everyone this will make you lose focus, you want your product or service to resonate with those you can help the most.
   With our USP, we knew our product would apply to more people, but we believed that the product we provided would have the greatest impact on new businesses owners.

3. If you want to use price as your USP, the price you use should be specific.
   If you go with a high price you want to convey quality, exclusiveness or
   If you go with a low pricing you want your price point to be a distinct advantage for example the $1 store. Everything for a $1 or less, this price point and message resonates with their target audience.

4. What is one of the biggest concerns of your market?
   In our case we believed, that one of the biggest concerns many businesses faced especially new businesses was in hiring employees not only because of the cost involved, but the time required in finding the right candidates. We wanted to help with this process by allowing free job postings, and allowing new business owners to utilize our matching features which we believe would also save them time when it comes to hiring.

5. You offer reassurance or guarantees and you’re willing to back it up, while your competitors can’t or are unwilling to.
   Dominos Pizza is a company that built its business on this concept.
   
   “Fresh Hot Pizza Delivered To Your Door In Under 30 Minutes Or Its Free! Guaranteed.”
   
   You’ll see some businesses in highly competitive industries utilize a double your money back USP.

6. You want to keep your USP short and convey a clear benefit.
   If your USP is one or two paragraphs, it won’t be memorable enough for most of your clients to remember.

7. You want your USP to entice your clients to take action.
   Our USP states that we offer our services free to new business owners, because we truly want new business owners to succeed and we wanted this to be enough of an enticement for new businesses to use our services.

8. If you service a specific age group, industry, person… you’ll want to convey this in your USP.
   With our USP as mentioned earlier, although we believe Joonomy will be beneficial to all business owners, and those looking for work. We believe the segment we would have the greatest impact on would be for new business owners.

9. Your USP is aligned with all aspects of your business
   For us we understand the challenges of business owners and truly want to help business owners and especially new business owners succeed, this is the main reason us for developing Joonomy, and we hope to reflect this with the services and products we release.

We hope the steps above that we used and thought about during our process in developing our USP will help you with the development of your USP.
If you have comments about your USP or have suggestions on how we can improve our USP, please let us know in the comments below.