What is a Lean Canvas and Why you should create one?

Well, we all know the need and importance of documenting a business plan to assert your business model, proof of concept or hypothesis. But the problem is the low attention span of people that holds scope for confusion, mockery and never-ending Q&A.

Every time you go to an investor or potential partner, you never get your business plan read completely by anyone. And based on the even feedback without realising, you spend hours in going through what’s actually uncanny in your business plan and edit the same time and again.

And the solution is the answer to the common questions ‘How to create a perfect business plan?’. While the question itself glitchy and provokes you to be perfect – which ultimately keeps you pondering and struggling.

Fortunately, there is a solution i.e. the Lean Canvas.

So, what is the Lean Canvas?

Lean Canvas is a one-page template that saves you hours or days and lets you put all the cornerstones of your business model including your Problems, Possible Solutions, Unique Value Proposition, Unfair Advantage over the competitors, Target Customers, Key Metrics, Marketing Channels, Costs and Revenue Channels.

The template is created by Ash Maurya and adapted from Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas.

Who is Ash Maurya?

The creator of Lean Canvas is an author and helps businesses and entrepreneurs create business models. You can browse through his articles on his official Medium channel.

Who is Alex Osterwalder?

Alex is the creator of Business Model Canvas and the founder of strategyzer.com, a platform that helps businesses grow with practical courses, training and strategies to create better products.

Why you should create a Lean Canvas?

Lean Canvas completely eliminates the need for penning down a long and boring business model that is too traditional for this age and rapidly growing into the global startup ecosystem.

It backs your business model by entering the key information on one single sheet which hardly takes 30 minutes of your time and a few minutes for the prospects to go through.

Advantages of Lean Canvas

While the advantages of Lean Canvas as a handy tool may vary depending on your startup and implementation, I still would like to list down some of the prime benefits of it.

Time-saving

Since it is a one-page template that talks only about the cornerstones of your business, it is easy to create without spending days and months, unlike a lengthy traditional business plan.

Portable

It is like carrying a handy marketing leaflet to an event or meetup, handing it to the prospects and get it scanned in real-time.

Concise & Effective

We all know that low attention span in today’s time ridicules everything. You have only 20-30 seconds to grab the attention of your prospects. Your Lean Canvas establishes itself as a handy tool that makes it substantially easier for you to present your model, goals, challenges and vision of your business to anyone, be it investors, teammates or any prospects. Talking about the digital format, you only have 6-8 seconds to grab the user attention – as soon as a user takes first look on your Lean Canvas, he or she quickly starts peeking it through and understands what your business all about in a few minutes.

Standard

The exponential popularity gained by the Lean Canvas has made it stand tall across the global startup ecosystem. Since it is concise and easily perceivable, it is now universally accepted and very much demanded by the investors.

Trusted by Goliaths

As far as citing the benefits is concerned, it is important to know that the Lean Canvas concept is also being implemented by the world-class organisations and institutions that include Intel, HP, Dell, Harvard, techstars and many more.