
Why the Lean Canvas Model is Not Working For You ?
To be honest, I can not think of a better initial model for your new product than the Lean Canvas Model, but meeting with many entrepreneurs in my life taught me how most of them are falling victim to their own minds, not because of the model but their way of getting answers. So here you go, five fallacies you have to be aware of while bootstrapping your product and how you can avoid them?

(1) Confirmation Bias:
The confirmation bias is the mother of all misconceptions. Once you consider a business idea, you will tend to only consider scenarios proving you to be right. Seemingly absurd, the more information you have, the more convinced you are with your views.
One example: A Startup team decides on a new idea. The team enthusiastically writes down any sign that the idea is a success. They search the internet using keywords that conform with their problem description. Once the team gets out of the building any customer that doesn’t like their idea will be dismissed. Sometimes as an isolated incident and more often as benighted. They have become blind to any disconfirming evidence.
The Solution: When you are testing your hypothesis don’t look for examples to prove it. Start with the end in mind, think how your model can go wrong and you might end up proving it. For example, here is my version of the problem statement:

(2) Information bias :
The delusion that more information guarantees better decisions. I remember the first time I built my Lean Canvas Model, I spent days and days researching and collecting data. This was a big waste of my time and money and put me at a huge disadvantage.
Forget to try to gather all the data. Focus on bare facts. It will help you make better decisions. Superfluous knowledge is worthless, whether you know it or not. Daniel J. Boorstin put it right:
The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance — it is the illusion of knowledge.
The Canvas is asking you questions that you don’t have an answer for, your lizard brain is tricking you to have instant answers to get instant rewards. Most of the information is true but relevant. Building a product is a discovery process, remember, the second mouse gets the cheese.
(3) Effort justification:
When you put a lot of energy into a task, you tend to overvalue the result. Don’t get attached to something you are building or you will find a hard time pivoting. Remember to fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Put measurable success factors that reflect only on the results like time to cash, time to profit, time to scale.
(4) Not-Invented-Here Syndrome
Not-Invented-Here syndrome (NIH syndrome) fools you into thinking anything we create ourselves is unbeatable. The syndrome name can be misleading, remember it’s about falling in love with whatever you make not what your country makes.
I am going to quote Rolf Dobelli here as I can’t explain it better than him:
NIH syndrome causes you to fall in love with your own ideas. This is valid for all kinds of solutions, business ideas, and inventions. Companies tend to rate home-grown ideas as far more important than those from outsiders, even if, objectively, this is not the case. When people collaborate to solve problems and then evaluate these ideas themselves, NIH syndrome will inevitably exert an influence.
That’s why it makes sense to split teams into two group. The first group generates ideas; the second play the devil’s advocate. Then they swap: the second team comes up with ideas and the first team rates them.
(5) Domain Dependence
Insights do not pass well from one field to another. For example, a product salesman will find difficult to transfer his skills to start selling services. Transfering knowledge you read in a book about stocks to real life using real money will be very daunting. When you think you already know what the answer is, ask yourself: “How do I know?”, “Is that person trying to transfer knowledge to me from a different domain?” if yes, investigate.
We are all, in a way, handicapped in a similar way, unable to recognize ideas when presented in different contexts.
-Nassim Taleb
To conclude, if you look for information to support your business idea no matter what it is, you are guaranteed to find it. If you look for information to disprove your hypothesis you will end up building a flawless business plan that’s built on real life interaction with customers, not your imagination. These are all well-known fallacies in decision making books like The Art of Thinking Clearly, The Black Swan and The Invisible Gorilla. I am just trying to connect them to the startup world and most specifically to business model creation.
References: Rolf Dobelli — The Art of Thinking Clearly , Nassim Taleb — The Black Swan
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