No business plan survives the first customer contact Michael Elwood-Smith told a recent meetingof Wellington’s Lean Startup group.
Describing his presentation as a Business Model Canvas meets the Lean Startup, the
He combined thinking of a number of influential books over the past five years to produce thisparticular plan. His presentation can be seen
The start of this model is a search for customers – broken down to discovery and validation ofthose customers, with a pivot (or two or five) to discover and validate for a business’sparticular offer.
The business execution comes down to customer creation and customer building.
What is most important; “it’s about the questions you’re going to ask as you go throughdiscovery,” says Elwood-Smith. “Then it is about validating.”
He says a business model describes the rationale of how an organisation creates, delivers andcaptures value……..”but this is just a set of hypotheses.”
“There are no facts inside the building, so get outside,” and query people and potentialcustomers he says.
The Business Canvas Model (see here www.leancanvas.com) can be used as a scorecard to trackprogress for such a search of a business model. This can be updated weekly as new insights aregained.
The following are a list of questions that can and should be asked Elwood-Smith says.
Customer Segments
It is based on the lean startup principles of building, measuring and learning, and agilesprinting within this framework.
As he commented in an aside. Building a business model on a piece of paper without going out tovalidate it means a new enterprise is almost certainly doomed to failure.
Only by asking people if they want something, and how much they’re going to be willing to payfor it can businesses get themselves to a scalable, repeatable size he says.