Lesson 3: Business Model Canvas
What You’ll Learn: When it comes to transitioning an idea into a business, the Business Model Canvas is one of the fastest and best ways to think through your business before you spend a dime. It offers a time-saving shortcut to the traditional business plan process and will quickly give you insights into the viability of your new idea.
Business Model Canvas (continued)
Assignments
- Complete a Business Canvas for your idea by answering these questions:
Value Proposition
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- What are you building and for whom?
- What pain are you solving?
- What gain are you creating?
- What will your customers pay for?
- What’s in it for the customer?
- Does it solve a need or a problem that your customer has?
- Can you see the target market you wish to serve and why they would want this?
Customer Segments
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- Who are they?
- Where are they?
- What will they do with your product or service?
- Are you selling in a physical channel or in a virtual or web channel?
- Who are your customers? And what is the journey you’d like them to experience with you?
- How does your product or service resolve their needs?
- Can you make a picture of them as an archetype?
- What other websites or products do they buy?
- What are their demographics, psychographics, and interests?
Channels
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- How does your product get to your customers?
- Physical or virtual?
- How do you find the channels that will provide the delivery, packaging and transportation to you?
- Do you have back up channels in case of a disaster or supplier interruption?
Customer Relationships
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- How do I keep them?
- How do I grow them?
- What’s the journey they will have?
Revenue Streams
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- What is the value that your customers are paying for?
- What streams of revenue do you plan to create?
- How much revenue do you anticipate from each segment of your customer base?
- What is your strategy for acquiring revenue?
- Will you have online sales?
- In-person transactions?
- Will you be a subscription or licensing based business?
Key Resources
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- How will you finance the business?
- What kind of machines do you need?
- Are there any specific kinds of people you will need?
- How about Patents or intellectual property? These take time, so you may want to think about this upfront.
- How about the resource of time? Will you be dedicated to this creation once you begin, or will you ramp up slowly?
- Where will you work? Office? Home? Garage? Co-working space? Incubator?
Key Stakeholders
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- Who are the key people working with you and your business?
- Do you need any partnerships to start the business?
- Are there friends and family you want to work with, or those you definitely do not?
- Are there any alliances or groups of customers you want to tap into?
- Who has a strong interest in this business and who will want to help you sustain it?
Key Activities
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- What fundamentally are you doing to make the business work?
- What are you expert at?
- What do you need to learn? What expertise do you need to master to make your company the best at what it does?
Cost structure
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- What are the BIG costs for your business?
- What will be your fixed and variable costs?
- What will be your loss leaders
- How do you take in money? Venmo? Credit card?