7 sections to turn your passion into a business: The Collaborative Startup Canvas

As Ross Dawson, worldwide expert in crowdsourcing, says: “Most of the startups forget to harness the power of the crowd”. Lee Bryant, entrepreneur in the collaborative technology market, explains: “Startups replicate what they believe is successful business models. But what is considered the ‘norm’ is not working anymore.” After hundreds of conversations with entrepreneurs, we have decided to build a new framework: “The Collaborative Startup Canvas”. It is based on 7 sections to help startups gather people around their passion and turn their growing community into a thriving collaborative business. Let’s detail each section.

PEOPLE

Every entrepreneur should early work on the following questions:

• Which population do you want to work with?
• Who are going to be your early adopters?

Write down your personas. Here is, for example, how Kevin Dewalt from SoHelpful describes his target:

“Dave is a 35-year-old American who lives in Wichita, Kansas. He is married, college educated, and has a daughter. Dave’s life dream is become an entrepreneur and sell web and mobile products online. He has a full-time job and is willing to work very hard to make his dream a reality. He has some technical skills but unfortunately doesn’t live near a startup hub — and thus he has a hard time connecting with entrepreneurs to get advice when he needs it.”

(Have a look at this page from Hubspot for more examples of personas)

STATEMENTS

1) What is your purpose?

Explain your reason of existing. Why do you want to gather people? What is their problem or need? What do they don’t do correctly?
You should be able to complete the following sentence:

“People will join and participate in our community, because…”

As an example, here is how we describe our mission:

“… because we give them tools to gather people around their passion and turn their community into a thriving collaborative business”.

“If you get this wrong, nothing else you do matters.” (Richard Millington)

2) What is your vision?

Define your direction. What will the world look like when you and your community will have worked your magic?
Try to complete this sentence in less than 12 words:

“We dream of a world where…”

Again, as an example, here is The Collaborative Startup’s vision: “We dream of a world where business success and community success are reconnected”.
One more thing:

“Think big!” (Martin Luther King)

VALUE PROPOSITION

Which are the products and services you provide to the community?
We advise entrepreneurs to build a methodology to help members where they fail.
Then, it is all about creating around this methodology:

• blog articles
• courses
• presentations
• case studies
• white papers
• infographics
• videos
• meetups
• workshops
• conferences
• toolkits
• consultancy services
• softwares

You can even provide shoelaces or t-shirts to strengthen the community identity :)

AWARENESS

How do you make members aware of what you do?
Our main advice: Be where your audience already is.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of projects you can run to broadcast your message:

• Blog on Quora and Medium
• Share presentations on Slideshare
• Create a Meetup or Facebook group and invite people you know
• Share articles on Google communities, LinkedIn and Facebook groups
• Organize a meetup
• Search conversations on Twitter and Quora where you can share your expertise
• Get your blog articles listed in a popular newsletter

CO-CREATION

How do you let members co-create the adventure with you?
You can start with three simple steps:

1. Create a community of Google+
2. Invite people
3. Ask for feedback at each step of your projects

That is basically what we do in our community.
Sending emails with a personal message to each member also works well.
However, it is not enough if you want to build a company like Giffgaff, where a dozen of employees collaborate with a community of hundreds of thousands of people.
In your startup, who works on:

• Production?
• Foresight?
• Ideation?
• Sales?
• Customer support?
• Financing new projects?
• Design?
• Marketing?

Here are some famous examples of companies which crowdsource one of their departments well.

Sales

Dropbox enables its customers to spread the word and rewards them by offering some extra storage to those who find new customers. A “simple” referral program which has permanently increased signups by 60%.

Financing new projects

Years after years, Seth Godin has succeeded in building a large audience around his blog. In 2012, he launched a crowdfunding campaign to finance his new book. In 3,5 hours, the $40k goal had already been beaten.

Customer support

Giffgaff, a UK based mobile company, has its customer support run on a forum by its community. The average response time is 93 seconds, 24/7! And Giffgaff’s NPS is the highest one in the world for a TELCO industry: 77%.

INCOMES

How does your startup earn money to make the adventure sustainable?
Among the products and services you provide to your community (section 3), define which ones are free, which ones are paid. Define the right revenue models for those which are not free. (Here is a great video from Steve Blank about revenue models: usage, intermediation, subscription fees, licensing…)
Let’s take the examples of Ash Maurya’s business, Spark59, which provides tools, content, and coaching for entrepreneurs:

• You can access to the blog articles for free.
• The book, workshops and online courses are products you can buy once for all.
• One of their tools, the “Lean Canvas”, is downloadable in aPDF format for free but Spark59 also provides a softwarebased on a subscription model for entrepreneurs willing to work online on it with several co-workers.

(This is just examples of what Spark59 does and not the full list).
To generate incomes, you can also think about:

• Running a crowdfunding campaign
• Charging for membership
• Selling shares
• Creating an affiliate program

KPIs

Do not forget to track your progress! All along your developments, we advise you to measure:

1. The percentage of activities initiated and managed by community members (VS by the startup)
2. The referral growth (vs manual growth coming from the startup)
3. The sense of belonging (here is how to measure it)
4. The number of innovations launched by members
5. The revenue growth

CONCLUSION

The Collaborative Startup Canvas is a base to help entrepreneurs gather people around a passion, collaborate with members in order to build the best products and services to solve the community’s problems, and make money.
We would be happy to help your startup more. Check our next classes here

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• Find the Slideshare version of this article here.
• Thanks to Yara Qattom and Elzbieta Bednarek for their precious feedback!