How To Create A 1 Page Business Plan In 20 Minutes

Before product/market fit there is problem/solution fit. Some of the first steps many failed startups neglected to follow were starting with their why and uncovering if they actually had a problem worth solving. Only then are you able to move towards achieving product/market fit.

Validating learning and systematically de-risking your business over time are also essential to scaling. But your customers don’t care about solutions, they care about their problems. The Lean Canvas is a creative method to document a hypothesis while focusing on problems, solutions, key metrics and competitive advantages.

Adapted from Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas, Ash Maurya created the Lean Canvas — a one-page business plan template. The Lean Canvas is a framework so startups can spend more time building versus planning the business. This template enables you to capture your idea in 20 minutes versus 20 weeks. Compared to writing a business plan which can take several weeks or months, you can outline multiple possible business models on a Lean Canvas in one afternoon.

The Lean Canvas is comprised of nine building blocks as displayed in the image above. You first want to articulate who your customer/user is and determine what their problems are. It’s only after you identify a problem before you can have a solution in place. Once you believe to have a solution for the problem you can determine your unique value proposition, the channels where you’ll be selling to customers, revenue streams, costs, key metrics and your unfair advantage. Nothing in the Lean Canvas is permanent or at least not early on. Adjust and change who your customer is or even your solution based on market feedback.

The Lean Canvas forces you to be brief and helps you deconstruct your idea into its key assumptions. More importantly, this one-page business model is much easier to share with others which means it will be read by more people (team members, advisors, mentors, friends) and enables you to update the model based on new data in real-time. I highly recommend the Lean Canvas to startups at all stages, established organizations working on internal projects or individuals considering launching their own company one day.

To view other creative methods for cultivating new ideas, click here. To create your own lean canvas, click here.

How To Create A 1 Page Business Plan In 20 Minutes was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.