Lean Canvas Examples: Create Your Lean Hypotheses in [30 Mins Flat]

In this article you’ll learn:

Every business starts as an idea.

A set of business assumptions and hypotheses.

Here’s a fact whether it’s for your startup or a new feature for your existing product:

Nobody wants to spend their hard earned cash and 2 years of their life working on something that customers won’t buy.

So let’s get right into how we can avoid that.

Why you Need to Know Your Business Assumptions?

But what happens before that?

The purpose behind customer discovery is to interview customers to understand their point of view regarding a particular pain point that your business will, or plans to, solve.

And to have an effective customer interview, you need a clear picture of your assumptions and ideas around that pain point.

The assumptions are all the guesses, that we make regarding our business.

Think of it like this:

​It’s an idea without evidence, that needs to be proven.

Your Basic Sales Assumption Validates your Business

For example:

Let’s say you want to start a brand of jeans trousers because you think that you could make a better quality product and sell it online.

The assumption here is that customers would be interested to buy a better quality jeans trouser from a new-comer and that they would buy it online.

This is your basic sales assumption.

There's no proof that customers would be willing to:

​Without evidence to back-up your business assumptions, it’s just a theory.

If you want to know whether you have a business, prove your basic sales assumption.

The sooner you find out the holes in your business assumptions, the better.

It’s less expensive and less painful.

So how do you uncover these assumptions in a structured reliable way?

Lean Model Canvas

The Lean Canvas Will Categorize Your Assumptions Into:

​By the end of completing your Lean Model Canvas you have a ready-to-use set of custom-made business assumptions.

The only thing left after that is interviewing customers to determine whether what you assumed is true or not.

Here's the kicker:

Completing the Lean Canvas will only take 30 mins tops.

Boom.

In fact:

Dropbox had serious problems when they first started before they turned it around and grew their user base from 100,000 to 4 Million.

It's not until they started implementing the Customer Development process and focusing on learning as fast as they could from customers that they started to see this massive growth.

Lean Canvas Examples For Each Category

Customer Segments

Define the specific type of customer you are targeting with your product or service.

A study by marketing leader Hubspot showed that SkyTap increased sales leads by 124% by using targeted personas.

For example:

HR Managers in multi national companies.

If your customer segment is too general, consider breaking it down to smaller segments and create a separate Lean Canvas for each segment for more clarity.

Take a look:

Early Adopters

Go deeper into your customer segment and list the main characteristics of this group.

For example:

HR managers that have been in their role for less than 2 years and use collaborative software daily.

This will be further refined with the information you collect from your customer interviews which we'll talk about in more detail in another article.

But you can start with this:

A quick exercise to determine your Early Adopters.

Complete the following statements as a starting point to uncover Early Adopter characteristics.

"This is the perfect customer segment to target right away because they already" :

- Do or use...

- Know about or have information on...

- Have...

- Spend on...

- Are interested in....

Source

In fact, Geoffrey Moore's talks specifically about "early adopters" in his best selling book, Crossing the Chasm.

He explains the idea behind focusing on those who are open to experimenting with new things prior to targeting the mainstream market.

Lean Canvas Problem

List the top 3 problems you suspect your specific customer segment is currently experiencing that your product or service is looking to solve.

For example, problems with existing solutions are:

Existing Alternatives

List all the solutions your customers are currently using to solve the above problems. Even if this is not a direct competitor or tool.

​

For example:

If your product is a software tool that helps customers easily complete their taxes then:

Lean Canvas Value Proposition

Lean Canvas Solution

Channels

Think of this in 2 ways:

1) Where can your potential paying customers be found both online and offline?

For example:

Blogs, forums, social groups, networking events, industry events etc

2) How you plan to reach them both online and offline?

For example:

Partnerships, cold outreach, online marketing channels (paid and un-paid), networking, Word of Mouth campaigns etc

This is a good starting point for when you'll need to create a Go-To-Market and Traction strategy.

Lean Canvas Key Metrics

Source

Unfair Advantage

Also known as your business "Defensibility".

Or as Warren Buffet calls it, your "Moat".

This is the thing that gives your business a competitive advantage over others and creates barriers to entry for new competitors.

For example:

High Level Concept

This is an analogy of your business that helps customers, investors, stakeholders instantly understand what your business is about.

Often this will come from your customers themselves.

Personally, I'm not a big advocate of this section but an example would be:

Flickr for videos (Youtube)

Cost Structure

​List the fixed and variable costs that you anticipate and your expected break even point.

For example:

Fixed costs are those that do not change such as rent and salaries.

Variable costs are those that change according to the Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) such as production costs, packaging costs, Customer Acquisition Cost, distribution costs etc

Here are the definitions as per Investopedia:

Revenue Streams

​And finally

An example of what a completed Lean Canvas looks like.