What to focus on next? Identify key pitfalls of your startup with this toolkit
Including 30+ business model examples and 30+ experiment for startups
The Business Model Canvas is very popular, but it fails to account for this one key aspect of a startup: making sure all blocks align
For that purpose, you should use the Business Model Toolkit by the Board of Innovation
If you use it right, you can actually find what to focus on
The problem: limitations of the BMC
You probably know the Business Model Canvas (BMC). The canvas is likely the most used startup framework in the world. I don’t use it in my workshops. Why?
The value proposition building block is confusing to most people
Nobody intuitively understands what it is.
It overcomplicates the early stage: it maps a future business model, which is different from what most startups need.
Therefore, I prefer the Lean Canvas because it focuses more on the key challenges of a startups
And highlights the problem and solution as distinct building blocks
Most important: It doesn’t show how things are connected. It suggests that coming up with 9 answers is designing your startup.
My research shows otherwise
Solution: The Business Model Toolkit
If you want to focus on how your building blocks connect, be sure to check out The Business Model Toolkit by Board of Innovation.
It gives you a set of cards to connect and visualise your business model. There’s a Miro-template ready to use!
Swapfiets bike lease example
The Toolkit allows you to simply visualise the exchange of values between parties, as per the above Swapfiets example: A monthly fee gets consumers a bicycle and on-demand repairs. It’s a fairly simple business model.
Whoop example with multiple stakeholders
Whoop’s business model below is little more advanced as you can see. Making a business model visual like this is a great way to align your team on what the hell you are doing.
More examples:
There’s a PDF you can download with 50 examples over here. You just need to leave your email. Some examples here:
🔥Free Guide: How to get more focus in a startup
Find your Minimum Viable Startup in five steps
1. Open the Miro-template
2. Map your 5-year business model from your current business model
Odds are you have multiple value propositions, solutions and revenue models in mind for the future.
Map all stakeholders
The relations and the values exchanged
It might become quite a hectic visual (see below)
Example: this startup had 5 stakeholders with unique value exchanges in mind.
3. Map your Minimum Viable Startup’s business model
You might know what an MVP is:
“The minimal thing that actually delivers sufficient value to your customer, deployable in the context of the customer, that you can sell” (src)
Similarly, a Minimum Viable Startup is:
“The most simple business model that you will sets you on a path to profitability” (src)
Last week, a startup visualised it as such.
3. Reflect on evidence
For each stakeholder and asset, add a post-it in Miro that explains what evidence you have
Green post-it: You feel confident for now that this is sufficiently validated
Yellow post-it: validating now
Red post-it: Still need to test, or data is insufficient for now
4. Find your focus
The red post-its require attention
Are they really mission-critical, or could you remove them?
Always make things as simple as possibile
5. Focus on the remaining red post-its
Prioritise the red post-its in a list
Create an action or experiment for each Post-it
For an overview of possible experiments, check out this PDF (below)
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