Lean canvas template

A one-page business plan. Nine boxes that force the decisions a long plan lets you avoid: who the customer is, what hurts, why you, how you reach them, and how the money works.

Founders at the idea or first-customer stage, corporate teams testing a new venture, and established businesses checking whether a new product or market stacks up.

The canvas, prompts for every box in the order to fill them, a test plan for your riskiest assumption, and the mistakes to avoid.

Sketch it here first. Keep every box short enough to read in ten seconds.

1. Customer segments

• Who has the problem? Be specific enough to find them
• Who will buy first, before everyone else? These are your early adopters
• Who pays, if it is not the user?

2. Problem

• The top one to three problems, in the customer's words
• How they solve it today, including doing nothing
• What it costs them in money, time or risk

3. Unique value proposition

• One clear sentence: why you are different and worth attention
• Would a customer repeat it to a friend?

4. Solution

• The smallest set of features that solves the top problem
• What you will leave out for now

5. Channels

• How you will reach the early adopters, for free first
• How you will reach the rest at scale

6. Revenue streams

• What you charge, how, and how often
• What the customer compares your price with

7. Cost structure

• The cost to build the first version
• The cost to win and serve each customer
• Fixed monthly costs, and the break-even point

8. Key metrics

• The one number that shows the business is working
• The few numbers that drive it: visitors, conversion, repeat, cost per customer

9. Unfair advantage

• Something that cannot easily be copied or bought: insider knowledge, a community, data, a relationship, a licence
• If you do not have one yet, leave it blank. That is honest, and useful

Circle the box you are least sure of. That is where you start.

Set the pass mark before you run the test, not after.

• Describing everyone as the customer
• Writing features in the problem box
• A value proposition full of adjectives and no promise
• Revenue with no price on it
• Treating the canvas as finished. Update it after every test

This template adapts the Lean Canvas by Ash Maurya (2010), itself adapted from the Business Model Canvas, which is shared under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported. This adaptation, with HAM Agency's prompts, is shared under the same licence. Free to use and adapt. Commercial use allowed. Do not resell it as your own: keep the credits to Ash Maurya and HAM Agency (ham.agency), and share any adaptation under the same licence.

1. Wikimedia Commons: Lean Canvas by Ash Maurya, 2010 (CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported)
2. Creative Commons: Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported