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Once you’ve defined the problem, it’s time to evaluate the solution. People often ask, “I’ve defined my value prop, am I ready for funding?” No. You’re ready when you’ve evaluated it and assessed whether, once someone notices your value proposition, they’ll actually pay for it. There are two ways to evaluate: qualitative and quantitative.

The qualitative evaluation is easy to put on paper and harder to prove: describe the before state and the after state of your value proposition. Done well, the before is acute pain and the after is absolute joy.

Selene Health illustrates it. Before: women going through menopause suffer symptoms like hot flashes and night sweats that sharply reduce their functionality, so they can’t work, on top of the personal health toll. After: they function normally and get their quality of life back, they can keep working, look after their families, and sustain their livelihoods. I’d push you to take the “after” to the absolute extreme of everything good that happens if you succeed, and the “before” to the full cost if you don’t.

Akiban gave a business example. A local dating company, Online Buddies, was searching enormous amounts of data in real time to find matching profiles, and the more search criteria, the longer it took (and time is a killer in a database). They’d been re-architecting the whole application to cope, rewriting everything at roughly $250,000 every time, every year. Akiban plugs into the existing architecture, you redirect the query, and it runs hundreds of times faster with no re-architecting. So the before is the acute pain of sitting for hours while the search returns nobody; the after is absolute joy when it returns ten great matches in nanoseconds.

uTest is the fullest before/after. Before: to test software across many devices, configurations, and environments, you had to build a big in-house lab or hire a fixed set of testers, which startups couldn’t afford, and you could never keep pace with innovation (every time a new iPhone shipped, the device matrix grew). Consider HBO GO: it runs on Android, iPhone, iPad, and gaming devices, works only in the US, and must be tested across carriers, on Wi-Fi and non-Wi-Fi, across 200 to 300 Android device combinations. That can’t be done in a lab, or by an internal team, or in China, or in India. After: uTest mirrors your real user base with profiled, rated, geographically distributed testers “in the wild,” so you get real results, real data, and genuinely happy customers. As one of their team put it, the revelation was that QA teams weren’t doing something wrong in the lab; they were missing a step, testing outside the lab, closer to where users actually live, work, and play. That’s absolute joy.

The real test of the qualitative evaluation: have you got a vitamin (nice to skip a day) or penicillin (skip it and you’re in serious trouble)? Your solution is far more likely to succeed if it’s penicillin, meeting a real, painful need, than if it’s a vitamin. That said, you can’t stop at qualitative. The willingness to pay is what we quantify next, with the Gain/Pain ratio.

Before that, a warning about how not to describe your solution: faster, better, cheaper. If your idea is only faster/better/cheaper, it’s incremental, and incremental is easy to copy. Worse, you’ve handed competitors the exact axes on which to beat you. What we want instead is a genuine breakthrough that changes the game, which brings us to the 3D’s.