Start modelling your business hypotheses with a Lean Canvas template

Amazing ideas come to you in the most inconvenient of times, despite your mind being a great incubator of ideas, whether you are out and about, or going for a jog in the park, and you don’t want that idea to escape your mind and conscious. Lean Canvas Template is a template you should download now and save on your Mac/iPad on Keynote, as a handy way of modelling your business hypotheses.
With your iPhone handy, the next step is to post on your Evernote app, a quick line or two on what that idea is. When you get back home, and within reach of your iPad, or notepad, you start modelling your business hypotheses. Before you waste your time writing up a business proposal formally, drawing your ideas on a “Lean Canvas”, the modelling canvas that Ash Maurya (Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works, 2012) has derived from the work of Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas, drawn in a convenient one-page table.

Lean Canvas

Creating a Lean Canvas is a good way of making sense of your idea, quickly evaluating whether it is practical and feasable, minus the hours and weeks of labouring a formalised business plan. You will have some hits and misses with your ideas, and this is a quick filtered way to draw your idea, show it to your friends and associates.

This canvas allows you to identify your idea, the risks associated, whether your value proposition can withstand threats (sort of a quickie SWOT analysis) along with ideas on how this business model will sustain itself revenue-wise. It will also allow you to identify growth prospects, how this model will scale with the increased sales, as well as scoping minimum functionality, which could eventually be derived into a Kanban stack/queue.

You can download a Keynote template that will allow you to draw a Lean Canvas. As a tip, be sure to save the keynote file as a template on your mac, so you can re-use it at a later stage.

Lean Canvas keynote template

Lean Canvas Template.key

 

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