Build Your Lean Canvas
The Lean Canvas (sometimes called Opportunity Canvas) is a powerful tool for describing your business, going from an initial idea to the next level of launching your business. The Lean Canvas is a 9-box worksheet that allows you to articulate your business in a very lightweight way to describe any business that exists.
A startup isn’t just any business that’s being started, it’s looking to leverage asymmetric advantage. Asymmetric advantage is a situation in which one person or group in a transaction has more or better information compared to another. This often happens in transactions where the seller knows more than the buyer and vice versa. This unique insight that you have can be the foundation to unlock latent value that you see that others do not. That’s how you can recognize other opportunities others may not.
Don’t write business plans
These are 50-page word documents with lots of spreadsheets, and in the real world fall apart very quickly.
Iterating & the Lean Startup
Planning will not get you any closer to the answer, you will learn what asymmetric advantages are, iterating, and how that will get you closer more quickly. The problem with a highly polished business plan is you get attached to it, when likely your assumptions were wrong. Not your fault, but when changing the world you nearly always have to iterate or make changes.
Part 1: Build Your Lean Canvas Part 1 - Create a Business that Works
De-risk the things that matter the most in early stages of the business.
You need a very lightweight tool to iterate on that plan, to systematically take the uncertainty and risk out of the business. The techniques of beating the crappiness out of the business.
