No More BMC

What’s Wrong with Entrepreneurship Education

We’ve had lots of these at Aalto. In contrast, recently I’ve been listening to the podcasts from Indie Hackers, featuring interviews with people who have created profitable online businesses.

The more I listened to experience from real success stories, the more I felt all the gimmicks we learned about the BMC was almost completely useless.

Mauro: “Why do we need a canvas to begin with?”
David: “It’s just corporate workshop bullshit. They need a sheet to hang up.”

The BMC should be replaced by a toolkit that’s actually useful. Get into the implementation details.

• Replace “Channels” block with topics on funnel building, inbound marketing, ads campaigns, real numbers from Google, Facebook ads etc.
• Replace “Customer Relations” with real stories on cultivating an audience, how to use tools like Intercom
• Replace “Revenue Streams” with how to experiment with pricing, how to integrate payment processing
• Replace “Key” this and that with how to hire freelancers
• Replace the VPC with traction planning, testing, the intricacies of various platforms (e.g. HN, Reddit, Product Hunt, crowdfunding campaign…)

Elephant, drawn by someone who likely had never seen one

Ideally, the conceptual toolkit could extend to live tools for automating the success factors of entrepreneurship: for building feeds to be current with industry trends, keyword testing, landing pages, networking CRM, lead generation, follow-ups, collaboration, the “search problem” — the implicit factors of what worked can be made explicit and external, and replicated.

That is the fundamental difference between science and witchcraft.