The Minimum Viable Canvas

Product first, Market next. Product first Canvas for Lean Startups

The Minimum Viable Canvas is a subset of the Lean Canvas by Ash Maurya. The Lean Canvas itself is an adaptation of Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas. You can read about the two canvas’s in Ash Maurya’s post here.

The Minimum Viable Canvas is not meant to replace the Lean Canvas or the Business model Canvas. The objective is to split these canvas’s into two parts. The “Product” part and the “Market” part. For me this was easily done with the Lean Canvas, so that is why the Minimum Viable Canvas is a subset of the Lean Canvas.

The proposition I am making here is, that the two part’s have to be done by two separate persons/teams. It can be done by the same person/team also, if they are strong in both product development and customer development. Also, it has to be done in order. First the product part, then the Market part.

The Minimum Viable Canvas will use the iterative procedure as required by Steve Blank’s Lean Startup Approach.

So how did I come about this? In the last three our four months I have been learning about lean startups almost full time. Read books, articles, studied actual cases and so on. I must have studied over a hundred cases in detail. Here is what I observed.

1. The person/team have a good problem to solve, but come up with a solution and value proposition that is not unique.
2. The team has a good problem and a unique value proposition, but still come up with a solution that is not unique. This is because they were mostly trying to emulate or better existing solutions.

I also observed that this has something to do with how technically strong the team.

1. If the team is not technically strong, there is a high probability that they would end up in either of the two situations described above.
2. The team is technically strong and still ends up in either of the two situations above. This, I observed may be due to the team getting distracted by the “Market” side of things. They are not focussing enough on the “Product” side.

The Minimum Viable Canvas is my attempt at a solution to the problem. And this is how it should work.

1. Initially, the team must work on the Minimum Viable Canvas only, until they arrive at the Low Fidelity MVP, or High Fidelity MVP, MVP, whichever may be the case, depending on their technical capabilities and the complexity of the problem.
2. They should know how they are going to “make” the MVP. They should write a one page brief on how they are going to “make” the solution.
3. The solution must result in, or comply with, a unique value proposition. This is an iterative process until you arrive at the solution and unique value proposition.

Once you have the Minimum Viable Canvas right, you can move on to the Lean Canvas, or Business Model Canvas. If it is the lean canvas, just fill up the equivalent sections. And you will now have a Canvas with the “Market” side of things blank. Now the marketing team takes over and works on the rest of the canvas, and validates the hypothesis. Again, this is an iterative process. If you are wrong and need to pivot, start with the Minimum Viable Canvas again.

I have seen many teams trying to do a better tripadvisor, or better flipboard/newsreader. Some taking an existing solution and improving upon it, by adding AI/ML to it. Unfortunately almost all of them were going about it the wrong way. The Minimum Viable Canvas tries to constrain the team into only thinking of the problem, solution and unique value proposition. Thus, they can improve their chances of coming up with the optimal solution.

The Minimum Viable Canvas is a Product first canvas. The order in which to work on the canvas is as follows.

1. Problem
2. Unique Value Proposition
3. Solution
4. Cost Structure
5. Key Metrics (How are you going to test the value proposition?)

You must also write a one page brief on how you will make the minimum viable product. And how you will test the value proposition against it.

Next, read Using the Minimum Viable Canvas for more.

To see how this concept evolved read The Minimum Viable Product — Product First, Market Next, A Product First View.

The Minimum Viable Canvas is adapted from Lean Canvas (leanstack.com)
and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Un-ported License.