Lean Canvas: A First Step for Entrepreneurs
Whenever we have an idea and we want to transform it into a business or project, we must anticipate many obstacles even though it is impossible to predict them all. As much as it is impossible to establish a perfect plan like the movie “Money Heist”, we can still use simple tools that allow us to adapt quickly and respond effectively to these obstacles.
The Lean Canvas tool allows us to visually understand our business model in a simple and focused way. The Lean Startup methodology seeks to generate business ideas quickly and respond to market feedback quickly through prototypes.
Due to its ease of use and visualization, this has become a tool for every entrepreneur, as it has the following advantages:
- Helps to select the problems that we want to solve from a market segment.
- Allows us to define how our product is different from the rest of the products or services in the market, and thus build our value proposition.
- Delimits the solutions that our idea identifies to the selected problems.
- Identifies the competitive advantage that will make our business stand out.
- Facilitates the selection and combination of marketing channels to effectively reach the customer.
- Enables the definition of key metrics that help us measure our performance.
- Describes our cost structure.
- Defines the income streams and how our customers would pay to access our solutions.
Once we visualize our business model in this tool, it is easier to introduce changes to the business model, showing how the entire system is affected and thus find innovations for the market and in our internal processes.
Once we obtain feedback from our potential clients, we can build a Minimum Viable Product that will help us demonstrate our solution to our market segments. This way we can validate our ideas before arriving at the final version of our product.
Whether your company is at an early stage or is looking at developing new products, to integrate into your business model, this tool is quite functional and allows teams to efficiently generate new ideas and learn from the market.
