Value Proposition Canvas — free online maker
Match what you build to the jobs, pains, and gains your customer actually has. Guided prompts on every block, autosave in your browser, and one-click PDF export.
30-45 minutes to a first draft6 blocks How to fill it in
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What is the Value Proposition Canvas?
The Value Proposition Canvas zooms into the two blocks of the Business Model Canvas that decide everything else: the customer segment and the value proposition. It splits each into three parts and asks you to line them up.
The layout here pairs them deliberately. Products sit beside jobs, pain relievers beside pains, gain creators beside gains — because the only question that matters is whether the right-hand column is genuinely answered by the left. Anything on the left with nothing opposite it is a feature you built for yourself.
Developed by Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Greg Bernarda, and Alan Smith in Value Proposition Design (2014) as a companion to the Business Model Canvas. Licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.
Use it when…
- Before building, to check the product answers a problem someone has
- When a product is technically good but does not sell
- Writing landing page or sales copy — the customer side gives you the words
- Any time the Business Model Canvas value proposition block feels vague
The 6 blocks, in the order to fill them
- 1
Customer Jobs
What is the customer trying to get done?
The tasks customers are trying to complete, the problems they are trying to solve, and the needs they are trying to satisfy. Include functional jobs (finish the quarterly report), social jobs (look competent to my boss), and emotional jobs (stop worrying about audit season).
How to fill this block - 2
Pains
What annoys, blocks, or scares them?
Bad outcomes, risks, and obstacles related to the job. Rank them: a pain the customer describes as 'mildly irritating' will not fund a purchase, and one they describe as 'the reason I could not sleep last night' will.
How to fill this block - 3
Gains
What outcomes would delight them?
The benefits customers want — required, expected, desired, and unexpected. The distinction is useful because required and expected gains earn you no credit for delivering them and heavy punishment for missing them, while desired and unexpected gains are where preference actually comes from..
How to fill this block - 4
Products & Services
What do you actually offer?
The list of what you offer — physical, digital, service, or financial. This is a list, not a value proposition: nothing here creates value on its own.
How to fill this block - 5
Pain Relievers
How exactly do you remove those pains?
State how your offer eliminates or reduces each specific pain listed opposite. Be concrete and quantified wherever possible — 'reduces reconciliation from two weeks to one afternoon' is a pain reliever, 'streamlines your workflow' is a slogan.
How to fill this block - 6
Gain Creators
How do you produce the outcomes they want?
How your offer creates the gains listed opposite. Same discipline as pain relievers: each entry should point at a specific gain.
How to fill this block
Worked Value Proposition examples
Complete, realistic canvases with an analysis of what each one reveals. Open one on its own page, or load it straight into the editor above.
Value Proposition FAQs
What is the Value Proposition Canvas?
A one-page tool that breaks a customer segment into jobs, pains, and gains, and your offer into products and services, pain relievers, and gain creators. You then check whether the two sides match. It was created by Osterwalder and colleagues in Value Proposition Design (2014) as a zoom-in on two blocks of the Business Model Canvas.
Which side should I fill in first?
The customer side — jobs, then pains, then gains — and ideally before you look at your own product at all. Filling the value map first almost guarantees you will describe customer pains that conveniently match what you already built. The blocks in this tool are numbered in the correct order.
What does 'fit' mean on this canvas?
Fit is achieved when your pain relievers address pains the customer actually rates as severe, and your gain creators produce gains they actually want. There are three stages: problem-solution fit (the canvas suggests a match on paper), product-market fit (evidence from real customers that it holds), and business model fit (the model around it is profitable and scalable).
How does this relate to the Business Model Canvas?
It is a magnifying glass on two blocks. Complete the Value Proposition Canvas for each important customer segment, then carry the resulting one-sentence value proposition back into the Business Model Canvas. If you have three segments, you should have three Value Proposition Canvases.