Using Business Model Canvas to Launch a Technology

Startup or Improve Established Operating Model

1
CONTENTS
 1. Conduct Customer Segmentation

 2. Choose Key Partnerships

 3. Sketch Out Key Activities

 4. Find Relevant Revenue Streams

 5. Describe Your Value Propositions

 6. Outline Distribution Channels

 7. Identify Key Resources

 8. Choose a Customer Relationships Strategy

 9. Classify Cost Structure

 Business Model Canvas in Real Life: Examples

 The benefits of using the Business Model Canvas

 What the BMC excludes and why it shouldn’t bother you

 How the Business Model Canvas can help established businesses

 What now? Life after the Business Model Canvas

 Software to create a Business Model Canvas

 Conclusion

Reading time: 19 minutes

Not that long ago, organizations had to rely on a number of established
tools to build their business models, strategize, and innovate. The business
plan use as we know it today started to decline in the 1980s and 1990s due
to its complexity and time-consuming research process. This decline has –
not surprisingly – been in step with the high-tech boom and Silicon Valley’s
startup culture. A business plan was integral to any organization that
wanted to be associated with innovation. But, what does it mean today?
Despite – maybe due to? – their age and conventional status, business
plans take time, effort, engagement of top consultancies, and financial
resources to compile.

Today startups, especially of the tech variety, cannot afford such luxury. To
keep up with competitors, grow rapidly, and innovate, they require a truly
agile technique, a mind map of sorts that’s easy to write, edit, and
comprehend.

Back in 2004, business theorist Alexander Osterwalder and his professor at

the University of Lausanne Yves Pigneur suggested a business model
design that could replace cumbersome business plans.

An approach that was soon named the Business Model Canvas (BMC)

has since acquired a respectable number of loyal practitioners. Not only
have startups employed the approach, but also such giants as Microsoft,
SAP, and General Electric. Let’s find out what the Business Model Canvas
is and explore the ways a software company can leverage this method to
drive success.

The Business Model Canvas is a visual template for identifying and

organizing different elements of your business model. Osterwalder divides
the canvas into nine sections, each responsible for the most vital business
elements of every organization. (A click on an item directs you to the
segment in this article.)

 Customer Segments
 Key Partnerships
 Key Activities
 Revenue Streams
 Value Propositions
 Channels
 Key Resources
 Customer Relationships
  Cost Structure

Classic scheme of Business Model Canvas

Source: CNVS

Numerous adaptations of the methodology can be found. For instance,

there’s a Lean Startup Canvas, designed specifically for startup
launching. Even though it’s not approved by the BMC creators, many
organizations find it useful. Tom Hulme’s Business Model Framework, in
addition to nine building blocks, also covers growth and competitive
strategy.

One interpretation that Osterwalder and Pigneur consider acceptable is

called Business Model Theatre. For you visual types, watch a 1.5-minute
video right here. For the rest of you, here’s a quick recap: Just like in a
theater, a business has a front stage and a backstage. Even though the
audience can’t see what happens behind the curtains, it’s what makes the
front stage work. Your revenue comes from the front, but only the
backstage with its resources and actions can make the magic on the front
stage happen.

But today we’re going to focus on the original canvas since this tool has
been tested by many more entrepreneurs and businesses and has been
subjected to nearly ten years of research and development. With the
abundance of methodologies for building a business model, there must be
something really special about the Business Model Canvas that has earned
it a place among the classic tools.

To start with a BMC, you will need: a small group of people, a board or a

large sheet of paper, markers and sticky notes, and up to an hour of time.
When you’ve gathered everything, it’s time to map out. Let’s get down in the
weeds.

1. Conduct Customer
Segmentation
Your customers are going to dictate how your business operates every day.
By knowing and understanding your customers, you’ll be able to define the
core of your business – the Value Proposition.

If you are a software company, your customer segments can vary from
private individuals to global organizations, and they all require different
types of relationships, distribution channels, and payment options.
Previously, we explained how to create a Buyer Persona for a SaaS
business. In terms of BMC, the concept is similar.

Besides segmentation principles that we touched on in the article, there are

some customer groups that should be considered for a software business:

 Device type
With mobile traffic overtaking desktop traffic, it’s crucial to know the devices
your customers most frequently use. That will let you know how clients with
different devices experience your product and you’ll be able to tailor your
content specifically to their needs.

 Top purchases
It’s no secret that half of freemium game revenue comes from 0.19 percent
of mobile gamers. Despite the majority of users keeping up with their free
plans, a freemium model still allows companies to drive revenue. Make sure
you know the motivations of the people who are bringing you the biggest
value but don’t overlook those who don’t spend a penny but watch your ads
and contribute to the overall traffic.

 Visitor tiers
Users behave differently depending on how many times they’ve already
used your product. Just like with the device type, you can customize
personal experience depending on whether they explore your product via
guest mode or log in.

Let’s illustrate this and following sections using as an example Venmo – a

PayPal-owned service for bill-sharing and easy payments between friends
that recently introduced an integration with Uber. This canvas was created
using the online template by CNVS.

Venmo’s Customer Segments

2. Choose Key Partnerships

This building block defines your network of partners and suppliers that
make your business model work. Bear in mind that not all your partners are
your Key Partners. There are four categories of partners you can identify.

Buyer-supplier is the most common type of business relationship that

implies exchange of desired goods for both sides. It means a reliable
source of supplies for you and a confirmed buyer of their products or your
partners’.
Strategy alliances between non-competitors. The idea behind this
partnership is to leverage each other’s resources. As a startup, you can
collaborate with many different suppliers until you decide which ones
support your business model best. When it comes to a mature business,
you have a lot to risk and therefore need reliable and long-term
relationships. This is exactly the type of partnerships Venmo makes. The
tool provides integration with many eCommerce stores allowing users to
make purchases with their Venmo account on a featured website such as
Urban Outfitters, Uber, or GrubHub. In return, these websites can use
Venmo as an additional payment method.

Venmo’s key partners

Joint-ventures are created when you need to fill the gap that only another
business can fill, for instance, sell your product to a new niche. When you’re
partnering with a company that has a missing element you require, it helps
you grow your audience and increase sales. The affiliate plan we discussed
earlier could be considered a joint-venture as well. Just like enhancing
someone’s SaaS product with your API (or vice versa) or offering your
customer upsells from a third-party.

Coopetition is a partnership between competitors. It usually happens when

both companies are struggling to launch a product and want to spread the
risks to achieve common revenue. For example, when Apple launched an
iPad, the tablet became the biggest competitor to Amazon’s Kindle. So, the
rivals cooperated to sell Amazon books via the iOS Kindle app, which
helped Amazon to extend its e-book market and established iPad as a
viable reading device. Sometimes coopetition partnerships lead to mergers.
PayPal, for instance, was born from the merger of two competing financial
companies.

3. Sketch Out Key Activities

Key Activities are what a company should do to make its business model
work. For a pizza delivery service, it would be getting the freshest
ingredients for the best price, preparing meals, organizing a call-center or a
website, hiring couriers, etc. But in case you’ve developed an app that just
gathers and transfers pizza requests, you have another set of actions such
as supporting an app, organizing fast and seamless connections with
partners, automatically updating menus, etc.

According to Business Model Generation, you can unite all your activities
into three main categories:

1. Production.
2. Problem-solving.
3. Platform.

Venmo, like most software providers, fall into the third category. Key
activities for them are directly related to the platform. Consequently, the
lion’s share of their budget is spent on supporting the system and scaling it
up as the customer base grows.
 Venmo’s Key Activities

4. Find Relevant Revenue

Streams
Depending on the product or service you are trying to sell, you need to have
a clear understanding of the ways you’re going to drive revenue from each
Customer Segment.

A strategy that goes into identifying and managing your Revenue Streams
is called a Revenue Model. Here are some of the revenue models that may
work for you. See the article at the link for more information
about monetizing your software business.

Advertising. Such platforms as YouTube, Twitter, Google, and Facebook,

along with many other free-to-download apps and services have grown
mostly thanks to advertising. Yes, Internet users tend to block ads, but
organizations find ways to keep advertisements, from simply asking for
AdBlock to be disabled to curating highly relevant ads.
Affiliate Marketing. This strategy is based on making commissions by
referring other products and services to your audience. The key here is to
select merchants in the same industry as you and recommend only the
products you actually find beneficial to your users.

Subscriptions. This model would be the best match for your SaaS, PaaS,
or IaaS business. It also applies to on-demand streaming services, such as
Netflix, Spotify, or any online publishers, such as HuffPost.

Sponsorship. If you’re a small team of developers providing a useful,

engaging, and preferably unique service, donations may be a way to
go. Paint.NET is a free Photoshop analog that survives both by ads and
donations. Include a PayPal donate button or kindly ask users to buy your
team coffee or beer.

Freemium. It’s a no-brainer why this model is so extensively used by a

number of web services. By attracting an audience to the basic set of
features, you provide the paying customers (another Customer Segment)
premium features.

Fee-based. This model requires a large pool of users who find the service
valuable enough to pay a small fee. These fees can be either percent-
based or flat and allow for easy income calculation. Venmo uses this model
along with Uber, Stripe, and many online marketplaces. Its other
powerhouse is data – by storing information about user financial activity,
Venmo can make personalized suggestions and drive revenue from there.
 Venmo’s Revenue Streams

5. Describe Your Value

Propositions
The Value Proposition is the reason for a customer to buy your product. A
good Value Proposition is a unique combination of features that will either
solve a customer’s problem or bring them additional value.

The Value Proposition should be short. Make sure both you and your users
can read it in less than 5 seconds and clearly understand what your product
is all about. Drop vague descriptions and jargon.

Here are a few outstanding examples of Value Propositions that work:

 Trainer-led audio workouts for a fraction of the price of a live trainer.

(Aaptiv)
  Free, fast, detailed and entirely offline maps with turn-by-turn
navigation – trusted by over 65 million travelers worldwide.
(Maps.me)
 Bookmate is the perfect way to enjoy books — whenever, wherever.
(Bookmate)
 Collect all the songs you discover online. (Playmoss)
 The world’s best companies use InVision to design the products you
love. (InVision)
 We help big brands scale WordPress. (Pagely)
Please note: You should have different Value Propositions for each
Customer Segment.

Venmo has several value propositions focused on covering different

customer needs. Its official tagline is short and simple: Share payments.
The tool provides additional values with the social feed and eCommerce
integrations, each of which will be important for different user groups.

Venmo’s Value Propositions

6. Outline Distribution Channels
The Channels element reflects how a company aims at delivering Value
Proposition to its Customer Segments. But that isn’t the only function of
Channels; they can also create brand awareness and provide post-
purchase customer support.

In the book Business Model Generation, Osterwalder and Pigneur highlight

five phases of channels development. Each channel can cover more than
one of these phases.

Five phases of distribution channels

Raising awareness. You can let your potential users know about your
product through a wide range of channels. Currently, blogging and social
media are the easiest ways to reach those who want to listen. Content
marketing takes considerable effort, especially if you want to deliver quality
content regularly, but it makes people engage and share content willingly.
The awareness method that brings the most relevant and inclined-to-buy
audience is word of mouth. However, it is also the hardest to scale.

Evaluating your Value Proposition. How can customers find your

proposition helpful? They need hands-on experience. The try-before-you-
buy technique, for instance, does just that. Don’t forget to guide them
through a product to make sure they received the desired value or realized
its potentials. Case studies and reviews could be another way to help
customers understand the value before taking their wallets out.

Purchasing methods. Since we’re talking about software, your users will

definitely be buying your product online. If you’re developing a mobile app,
people should be able to find you in either the App Store or Play Market. If
you distribute the app through another platform, make sure that users know
that the payment process is safe and that they agree with the terms and
conditions.

Delivering the product. Although a software product doesn’t require

logistics and a complicated delivery process, you still have to make sure
that your app has been installed correctly and runs the way it’s supposed
to.

In our example, Venmo uses standard iOS and Android app markets to
distribute, but it also has a website where users can view transactions
without a payment option. Venmo also introduced a real debit card that
users can obtain by applying online. As for its awareness-raising methods,
Venmo relies on word of mouth and relationships with partners.

Venmo’s Distribution Channels

Post-purchase support. This is the phase that customers care a lot about.
What is the cancellation policy? How do they contact you with a problem or
a question? What is the onboarding process? Nowadays, many software
providers use chatbots or a simulation as one of their post-purchase
channel. (You can read our article about designing chatbots to learn more.)
Also, you can send out customer surveys, track reviews and questions on
social media, or create personal recommendations based on user activity.

7. Identify Key Resources

Key resources play a direct role in creating your Value Proposition,
delivering a service to your Customer Segments, and supporting Customer
Relationships.

Resources are typically categorized into four assets: physical, intellectual,

human, and financial.

Buildings, facilities, and vehicles, as well as any other tangible resource

such as hardware or cooling system falls into the physical category. In the
case of a software product, it also depends on what kind of delivery asset
your product requires: whether you need to own hardware assets or they
are sourced from a cloud provider.

For a software business, core resources will likely be human and

intellectual assets. Intangible (intellectual) resources include patents,
copyrights, licenses, and customer knowledge. The on-premise or cloud
services you may be using for your business is also a form of intellectual
resource.

As for human resources, all your software engineers, marketing specialists,

and customer service representatives are valuable assets of any service-
based business. However, it’s the costliest one as well. Consider
outsourcing the services you can and remember to include accounting and
legal consultants.

There are several ways that startups can get their financial resource,

including bank loans, advances from strategic customers, and venture
capital investors. In case your business revolves around an important
cause, you can request a grant or start a crowdfunding campaign online. Of
course, the majority of startups nowadays are self-funded (although, these
typically receive the least press mentions). This process is also referred to
as bootstrapping a business. Though, it is likely the hardest way to start a
venture as it takes time to save money, bootstrapping allows you to have
full control over your venture.

Venmo’s resources follow the standard model for software companies.

Along with its own code base, a company acquires software licenses
needed to build and maintain its services. Venmo also needs human
resources such as programmers, QA experts, customer service specialists,
management staff, and more.

Venmo’s Key Resources

When evaluating your Key Resources, ignore those that would be common
for any business, but pay attention to the ones that are strategically
important to you. For Amazon Prime, Key Resources would be licensed
rights to stream films and TV shows. For Microsoft, Adobe, or Google, it
would be numerous patents. And insurance and banking organizations can’t
survive without financial resources.
8. Choose a Customer
Relationships Strategy
According to Business Model Generation, there are five possible cases of
Customer Relationships:

Personal assistance. Make sure your customer can contact you at any

time prior to or after the purchase and make the contact channels diverse
and accessible: via e-mail, phone, or chatbot. A specific approach to
customer relationship is dedicated client care workers. They can be
involved to deal with SaaS customers.

Self-service. This type of relationship is often maintained for the B2C client

model. Except for automated updates and onboarding guidance, you don’t
usually communicate with your users in this case. Venmo draws on a self-
service model that provides users with an onboarding guide and a Help
Center with FAQs. In some cases, users are free to directly contact support
via phone, chat, or e-mail.

Venmo’s Customer Relationships

Automated service. This is how Netflix and Spotify maintain relationships
with their customers. By providing AI-powered recommendations of movies
and playlists, the services imitate human interaction and keep customers
engaged.

Communities. To better understand customers’ struggles and facilitate

connections between users, a company can create a community around a
product or a brand where users can exchange knowledge. Have a look
at Oracle. Their community with half a million active participants helps
customers find advice among fellow users.

Co-creation. User-generated content is a feature of the modern web.

Anyone who’s uploaded a video to YouTube has contributed a service. The
role of the company, in this case, is to precisely match content creators and
content consumers. Another good example is HiNative that allows people
around the world to contribute questions and answers about their
languages on the same platform.

9. Classify Cost Structure

Delivering Value, maintaining Customer Relationships, and buying
Resources all incur costs.

For a typical product development software company, the major operational

expenses usually include research and development (R&D) costs, sales
and marketing activities, and support costs. Let’s break them down:

 According to MarketRealist, only 10 to 20 percent of costs in the

software industry go for research and development, only 5 percent of
that sum is actually spent on innovation, and the rest goes to testing.
 Due to the large competition in the market, marketing expenses of
software companies usually surpass R&D costs, which is why about
25 percent of revenue is spent on marketing and sales. Depending on
the product, this number can vary.
 Support costs are related to handling customer requests and retaining
your audience. Since it’s difficult to retain customers of a software
product, a big chunk of expenses goes to Customer Success
Management and churn prevention.
Apart from operational costs, your Cost Structure should include:
  Capital costs – investments that go into acquiring or upgrading
physical resources, such as buildings and computers.
 Overhead costs – the general operational costs that have no direct
impact on delivering a product, such as electricity, or a processing
time for installation and testing software.
 Staff costs – resources spent on hiring, training, and retaining
employees.
As most tech companies, Venmo heavily relies on its R&D capabilities.
Sales and marketing costs come in second, including customer support.

Venmo’s Cost Structure

Business Model Canvas in Real

Life: Examples
Understanding how the approach works is one thing and following someone
else’s example is entirely different. If you’re still struggling to figure out what
should go on your board, here are a few examples to get your wheels
turning in the right direction.
A Lemonade Stand
Starting a lemonade stand is for many their first experience with running a
business. And it’s also –  conveniently – a fine and simple illustration for a
Business Model Canvas. Here, your partners, suppliers, resources, and
even customers can all be your family and friends. As for revenue streams,
it’s different from the software model and in most cases comes down to a
finite price for a drink.

Business Model Canvas for a Lemonade Stand

Airbnb
Hotel alternative provider Airbnb concentrates on two big customer
segments – guests and hosts – each of which can be broken down into
subcategories. Same goes to value propositions: While some are attracted
by cheap prices for greater value than hotels, others are searching for
luxurious and unusual experiences that can be easily explored via the
platform. Airbnb’s biggest source of revenue is its fees: Hosts are charged 3
percent and guests up to 20 percent. For a more detailed look at Airbnb’s
model, check out this canvascreated on Canvanizer.
 Business Model Canvas for Airbnb

Uber
Uber is a common example used for understanding a BMC since it’s such a
prominent business and a great case of innovation in technology. Just like
Airbnb, another shared economy business, Uber has two big customer
segments – drivers and riders. This segmentation is also geo-demographic
as the service seems to employ drivers who live in areas with the highest
unemployment rates. Uber is also an interesting scenario from a marketing
standpoint – an innovative service, it enjoys a lot of free of media coverage.
 Business Model Canvas for Uber

LinkedIn
LinkedIn also offers multi-sided solutions for different customer segments –
it’s widely used by recruiters to seek and contact talent, it helps people
maintain a professional identity and connect with specialists in their field,
and it can also be used by companies as a marketing channel. Despite
keeping its main social function free, LinkedIn has three revenue streams
for each customer segment. First is a paid account that widens one’s social
reach, second is a hiring solution that helps recruiters manage job offerings,
and third, ads that help brands target an audience based on their profile
data.
 Business Model Canvas for LinkedIn

For more examples, make sure to visit BusinessModelGallery.com – a

collection of thorough models and templates to inspire you or compare.

The benefits of using the Business Model Canvas

1. Visible connections

The design of the canvas directly illustrates the way elements are
connected and provides a clear understanding of the impact the building
blocks have on each other. That’s why it’s important to follow the specific
order to fill in your business model.

2. Changing and advancing

While many business strategy enthusiasts compare the BMC to a traditional

business plan, these two methods have fundamentally different
approaches. Business plans are heavy 100+-page documents that take
time to write, read, and edit. The BMC is meant to be a living document
that’s always changing and evolving. Thus, you and your team can make
immediate decisions and add changes on the go.

3. Value Propositions are always at the core

If you have another look at the canvas, you will notice that one element –
Value Propositions – is placed at the very center of the canvas. It’s a
backbone, a bearing wall that separates the front stage and backstage of
your business theater.

4. Speaking the same language

Eventually, the BMC makes your crew members understand each other
better. By using the same definitions for reference, you provide a
transparent communication between people and teams. You can take your
BMC sheet to a meeting, brainstorm, use sticky notes to outline your new
ideas, and later place the canvas directly on the wall, making it easier for
ideas to be seen and adjusted.

What the BMC excludes and

why it shouldn’t bother you
By looking at the model and even after starting to work with it, many
entrepreneurs argue that it excludes a lot of key factors for creating a
thriving business. Executives are bothered by the lack of external factors.
What about competitors? And why not include the organization’s mission
and priorities?

The short answer is: Because that’s not what the BMC is for.

But let’s provide a broader explanation.

 The main purpose of the BMC is to visually represent how you intend
to build or develop a successful business. It’s a simple scheme aimed
at defining the pathway in the constantly changing market and
providing a concise overview of how your operational processes link
up with one another.
 Just as you can’t include profit as a resource, an external impact is
more of an outcome than a building block of your business. Thus,
instead of trying to fit those elements into the canvas, you can adjust
the internal processes when complications arise.
 Imagination is the key. You can’t make the model work for you unless
you want to work on it as well. It’s not a silver bullet and it’s not meant
to apply to each individual situation. So, don’t make the approach
restrictive. Stay creative and inventive when working with the canvas.
Combine it with other tools, such as a Value Proposition Canvas from
 the creators of the BMC, or consider the ways other companies are
successfully implementing this method.

How the Business Model

Canvas can help established
businesses
You may now be thinking, “Okay, all this sounds great, but isn’t it another
startup tool? What if I want to take a fresh look at my established company
and see how I can make it better?”

The tool’s versatility allows you to apply it in many different ways. You can
strategize a logic behind a new initiative (like Amazon’s decision to allow its
Prime users stream movies for free). Or even analyze the leaders’ success
stories and learn to apply them to your business (see LEGO’s reinventing
experience presented on a canvas). Osterwalder says, “Everybody needs
to understand how to use this and use this as a shared language.”

Here are just some of the reasons to use the Business Model Canvas for
your established business.

1. Detect opportunity gaps and find new perspectives.

2. Create your competitors’ business models and compare them to
yours.
3. Keep track of external changes in each building block.
4. Pitch investors using a visual representation that others can
understand.
5. Test new business models.
6. Map out potential changes.
7. Align your team’s goals and actions.
8. Look at the business from a customer’s perspective.
9. Analyze new opportunities, partners, and channels.

Remember that you aren’t using the BMC to confirm what you already know
about your organization, but rather to find flaws and pinpoint the ways to
make your business processes more effective, and after evaluating the
changes, act upon them.
What now? Life after the
Business Model Canvas
The BMC is not a tool that you use once or twice and forget about it till the
next evaluation of your company. It was designed and invented to become
a part of every business’ day-to-day life, a map to guide your ship between
rocks and shallows. So, what happens after you’ve laid out your business
model?

Dashboard. Use the BMC to track the changes in your building blocks and
the level of satisfaction of these changes. Color-code the most complex
elements to focus on them more and attract the team’s attention to the
current problems.

Meetings. Use the BMC as a brainstorming instrument at meetings to unify

new ideas and manage them later in your work.

Understanding customers. You don’t have to create the BMC for

companies only. Try understanding your customer by creating their own
business models. For instance, SAP, the German software giant, uses the
BMC in their pre-sales process. The SAP sales teams sketch the
customer’s business model to prepare for sales meetings.

Onboarding. When hiring new talent, especially top management, you can

use the BMC to give them an immediate understanding of where your
company stands and help them join the team smoothly.

Software to create a
Business Model Canvas
Even though a traditional approach is to grab a large piece of paper (or a
whiteboard), a Sharpie and start filling in the canvas, there are several
options to digitize this process using the software. Let’s have a brief look at
those options.

Canvanizer. This is a free, easy-to-use business model canvas tool that

allows you to share the same canvas with your teammates using links
similar to Google Docs so you can brainstorm together. You can export the
canvas into CSV or an image format. Besides traditional BMC, Canvanizer
suggests templates for various similar and related tasks. For instance, you
can do SWOT Analysis, use Lean Canvas for startup planning, feedback
canvas, customer journey canvas, and more.

Strategyzer. The tool is much more complex than Canvanizer. It allows for

creating a Business Model Canvas and a Value Proposition Canvas with
real-time collaboration support. Strategyzer comes with a built-in estimator
module that can analyze revenue streams and assess whether the
business idea is financially viable. Additionally, the product suggests a
Testing Dashboard for Lean Startup development and has a number of
other additional features that justify its price, ranging from built-in help to
sticker color coding and advanced encryption. The base version costs $25
per month and supports unlimited canvases and an unlimited number of
users. The enterprise package includes multi-team collaboration, portfolio
management, and offers dedicated coaching.

CNVS. We used CNVS to create visualizations for this article. The tool is
great if you don’t need bells and whistles but you like clean and slick design
with cute monsters. And it’s totally free if you don’t consider subscribing to
their newsletter a payment.  You can create traditional BMC, Feature
Canvas, and Lean Canvas; share them with or with no editing access using
a link; and that’s basically it.

Conclusion
“The same products, services or technologies can fail or succeed
depending on the business model you choose. Exploring the possibilities is
critical to finding a successful business model. Settling on first ideas risks
the possibility of missing potential that can only be discovered by
prototyping and testing different alternatives,” said Alex Osterwalder,
creator of the Business Model Canvas.

No business plan works out the way you intend it to. The only way to be
prepared and effective in the ever-changing market is to stay dynamic and
ready to act. Instead of spending months or even years developing a
strategy that may not even materialize in the end, you can adjust your
processes on the go in the existing environment and surpass competitors
while you’re still growing. Moreover, you will stay connected to your team
with the power of co-creation and be sure that you’re on the same page
with every party involved.