Ever used a business plan?
If you have, then like me you probably found it to be a waste of time. Valuable time. Time you could have spent ACTUALLY working on your business.
I mean aren’t they boring?
Pages and pages of estimates and projections, when you haven’t even sold a product yet?!
What a waste of time.
They just aren’t that useful for us as entrepreneurs. A proper business planning tool should be flexible and be able to be tweaked to account for realtime market feedback.
So, we are going throw out the business plan and get rid of it for good. Say goodbye to pages of useless estimates.
At Eco Founder I am going to teach how to use the Lean Canvas instead.
This weeks lesson I’ll walk you through why you need to plan, why you shouldn’t use a traditional business plan and how a single page planning document will help you to clarify your business.
In this weeks lesson you’ll learn how to:
- Effectively plan your business for future success
- Manage the different areas of your business
- Express how your business functions as a whole.
- Clarify your ideas and your business for yourself and to explain to other people
- Explain how your business works to a partners, a business mentor or even an early investor.
Lean Startup
Most startups spend to much time and effort building the wrong product. Lean startup and the Lean Canvas look to eliminate that problem by seeking to truly understand the customer problem you are trying to solve and building something that actually offers value to the customer. I was first introduced to the Lean Startup business method by Ash Maurya who created the design for the Lean Canvas which we are going to learn how to use in the video below.
Most startups fail, not because they fail to build what they set out to build, but because they waste time, money, and effort building the wrong product. I attribute a significant contributor to this failure to a lack of proper “problem understanding” from the start. - Ash Maurya
Introducing the Lean Canvas
The Lean Canvas is a single page business planning tool. The lean canvas will help you clarify your business so you can focus on what’s important, and forget what isn’t.
In the video below I explain exactly how to use the Lean Canvas to create a useable and actionable business plan. Use this video to create your first Lean Canvas but first download this pdf and print it off so that you can fill out your own Lean Canvas after watching the video. Enjoy.
Resources: Lean Canvas PDF
I hope you enjoyed the video.
If you would like to learn more about the Lean Canvas do yourself a favour and check out Ash Maurya’s blog here. He is the author of Running Lean and the creator of the Lean Canvas (which is an adaptation of the Business Model Canvas by Alex Osterwalder). You can also read Ash’s article on why he made these to the changes Business Model Canvas, here.
Become an ECO founder
Start the 30 day ECO founder Challenge (it’s free!) to learn how to startup your own clean technology business.
No spam, ever. You can unsubscribe at anytime.
