The Importance of Lean Canvas in Business Planning

You have all these amazing ideas and are excited to start your own venture. The biggest challenge for many aspiring entrepreneurs, at this stage, is how to turn these brilliant ideas into actionable business plans. And without business planning, it is easy for things to go haywire. You can lose track of your vision and goals or overspend or make other big mistakes.

Business planning, however, is a time-taking process. Startup founders, especially those who are still in or just out of college, don’t have that kind of time, resources and expertise to come up with manual-thick business plans. And manual-thick business plans may not be necessary either. This is where lean canvas comes in.

In this article, we delve into the details of lean canvas and help you understand why it is important to business planning.

What is Lean Canvas?

Developed by Ash Maurya, Lean Canvas is a business planning method apt for entrepreneurs who are just starting out. This one-page document helps entrepreneurs get to the heart of their business idea, turning it into something more solid. It helps entrepreneurs in optimizing their business plan to maximize business value.

Lean Canvas vs Business Model Canvas

The Lean Canvas adapts and simplifies the Business Model Canvas by Alexander Osterwalder. Creating a Lean Canvas is a simple and straightforward process. The canvas (refer diagram) has 9 sections that help you map key points necessary to convert your ideas into business plans.

The Lean Canvas focuses more on the practicality and viability of your business idea. It is more actionable than the Business Model Canvas. While the Business Model Canvas is great for established businesses, the Lean Canvas is perfect for startups.

Why Lean Canvas is Important in Business Planning?

Great problem-solving tool

Designed specifically for entrepreneurs, Lean Canvas focuses on finding and solving business and customer problems. Using its structured format, you can seamlessly verify your ideas. Sections like unique value proposition and unfair advantage help you to build your ideas in a way that you stand out. It helps you gain actionable insights.

Integrate multiple perspectives

Its collaborative nature helps you to get your team onto the same page and integrate multiple perspectives into your business planning.

Faster time-to-market

Lean Canvas helps you to go quickly from ideas to plan to product to launch than other business planning approaches. So, you will be better equipped to get much-in-demand products to the market faster. This is valuable in the VUCA world where the market is constantly changing.

Understand customer behavior better

The Lean Canvas helps you to understand customer behavior better. You can easily analyze how your solutions will solve problems and add value across different customer segments.

Track viable metrics

The focus with Lean Canvas is only on viable, actionable metrics. You don’t have to key in unnecessary details such as key partners, key resources and customer relations information that only help others understand your business.

With Lean Canvas, you need to put together only that information which helps you understand your business and what you are doing. For instance, problems, solutions, unfair advantage, key metrics, value proportion, etc. These are the metrics that actually matter to an entrepreneur.

Helps you stay lean

Being inspired by the lean startup concept, the Lean Canvas offers a much quicker way to business planning. You don’t have to spend weeks and months planning. It is an efficient tool that helps you identify, streamline and optimize business ideas at a much faster pace.

Easy to create, update and share

Entrepreneurs can seamlessly create and update business plans using the Lean Canvas. It is a concise document that isn’t cluttered with unnecessary information. So, it is easier to share and communicate with your team, board, mentors, etc.

It is great to use while pitching investors. It helps you to present your ideas, key differentiators, targets and so on to investors with ease.

Business planning, though critical, can be a time-consuming aspect of starting a venture. With the Lean Canvas, budding entrepreneurs can swiftly turn their ideas into actionable business plans.

#studentstartups #youngentrepreneurs #agritech #tieuniversity #tieuniversityglobalpitchcompetition #pitchcompetition #leancanvas