Business Model Stack Blog

Business Model Canvas Tool Roundup #bmgen

When I first set out to build BM Stack, I wanted to know: "Has anyone tried this before?"

Surprisingly only a few different business model canvas solutions were online when I started. Each takes a very different approach, and tries to solve different challenges. Here's an overview of each tool. Hopefully it will help you find a tool you like the best to build business model canvases.

One of the things I love most about The Startup Toolkit is that it's a great test of my customer development knowledge. Every part of the website enforces the lean startup methodology and the ideas of customer development. And even if you are rusty or don't know everything about the method, each screen and model includes tips and helpers that will make the process of filling out it's models much easier.

The system gives you a textarea to fill out, and right beside asks in plain english, "How are funds allocated for this type of purchase?" Or, "Which companies are we actively doing the opposite of?" These are questions that aren't taken directly out of a book, I don't know where they are from but clearly some thought has been put into the questions that startups need to answer.

It's very fast to switch between different business models as well. It includes three different models users can use:
"Startup Canvas Feature the questions from customer development, with a focus on finding & resolving early startup risks.

Lean Canvas Ash Maurya's canvas for lean web startups, divided into product (left half) and customer (right half).

Business Model Canvas The golden standard for documenting how businesses create & capture value, developed by Osterwalder and used extensively in the corporate world."
The Startup Toolkit also has a simple tool from Customer Development called the Risk dashboard. Being able to use these different tools in a single place, and having different options for what business model you want to use are the biggest benefits from this app.

The startup toolkit is not surprisingly, best designed for small groups of people in a startup environment. They need to tool that's fast, simple, and easy to learn.

One thing that I wanted BM Stack to do was keep the canvas interactive. So while The Startup Toolkit lets you click on a canvas block and fill out different fields, all of that information is hidden after you close the window. With BM Stack, what you put on you canvas is always there and you can always manipulate the data by moving it around from block to block.

This app is really for power users who can commit the time to learn the BM Designer tool and has the opportunity to advantage of it's features. It has some technical glitches, but letting users share their canvases is something I was thinking about how to do for a while.

A good example of the community features is where users can see all of the publicly shared models from a particular user and comment or rate them.

They've also built into their tools the option to do neat things after you've made a canvas. The application lets you:
  • Embed into other websites
  • View in fullscreen
  • Export as png
  • Export as PPT.
  • You can even generate a report of a canvas that includes detailed descriptions of canvas blocks, and their meta information. Great for printing out and sharing with others at a meeting.

Overall BM Designer does a great job as a public facing site to share information with all of it's users about the most active and innovative business models that are appearing on its site. It shares all the tags used on the business models and even provides a visual search interface for browsing models.

For BM Stack, I eventually decided that group collaboration and public repositories of canvases were two very different models that wouldn't work well together. If a small group was working on a private model they may feel that using a site designed primarily around sharing models publicly would be a risk.

I know how much people just want to build canvases, so what I like the most about BMC is the simple registration process. After you login for the first time, the only thing you really see on the page is a link to create your canvas.

The tool itself surprised me with it's simplicity. I never thought about putting text boxes right into the picture of a canvas. That certainly would have been a faster way of doing it. To users there's zero learning curve to it.

When I was building BM Stack I had only found BM Designer and The Startup Toolkit online, so I wasn't able to take any lessons away from BMC in the development of BM Stack.

I hope this collection and overview of the different business model canvas applications has been useful. I encourage you to try all of these applications, as well as my own BM Stack.

If you've found any other business model canvas tools online please leave a link to them in the comments!

Updates: December 3 2010

I've fixed the bugs that BM Stack had at launch that prevented people from... actually building business model canvases.

Here's an overview of the different bugs I fixed.

Creating Projects

Most noticeable was the bug that prevented users from starting projects after they created accounts. I've fixed that for all new users. If you have an account and still can't make a project, just leave a comment to this post with:

  1. The name of your company
  2. the side address you chose at the time of sign up.

I've tried to fix this for as many accounts as possible.

Firefox

The second main bug was a javascript error in Firefox that prevent the canvas tool from working. This was a simple error and I think I fixed it completely. Though the canvas tool still won't work if you use IE.

Signup Form

I improved the signup process. If you enter an existing username or site address, you'll get a simple error message. Before the whole form would break on you.

Credit and Attribution

Lastly I've added attribution to Alexander Osterwalder and proper CC by-sa links to all pages on the site.

Alex sent me a message on Twitter this morning after I had left for work pointing out that I didn't attribute the canvas properly on the site. I had to wait until I got home from work at the end of the day, but it was the first thing I fixed.

I hope everyone knows that it was an accident and not intentional at all. Getting so involved with getting this tool working properly got me focused so much on my ToDo list that what I forgot to add to the list escaped my vision.

(Bonus!) Stats

I've added stats to the main page of the site on the number of users, projects, and canvases!

This is really as much as it is a favour to myself as it is to make the homepage a bit more dynamic. I wanted an easy way that to see if people are using the tool at all.

Are those all the serous bugs?

I hope I've fixed everything prevent people from using the tool. If I've missed anything feel free to leave a comment here on the blog or send me an @ reply on Twitter @bmstack.

 

Introducing BM Stack

Screen_shot_2010-12-01_at_6

On July 1st I came up with the idea of building a web app to let some entrepreneurial minded friends and me quickly draft up business models ideas, and let us discuss those ideas, and then improve them.

On October 2nd, 2010 I managed to fix many creeping bugs and get the application to a usable state. Then on October 4th, 2010 I started my new job at Microsoft.

Since the start of the job I haven’t touched the code once, but more recently it’s been nagging at me to do something with it.

Put me out.

“But you look ugly.”

Put me out anyways.

“But you still have empty pages and broken images.”

Put me out anyways.

“But I don’t have any time to improve you or even fix bugs.”

Put me out anyways.

“But the application has features I haven’t made clear and it’s confusing.”

Put me out anyways.

So after all that, it came down to putting it out there in the state it’s in, or keeping it secret and guaranteeing that nobody would ever see it or use it.

It may not be pretty, but I've damn well put enough hours into this, so somebody is going to use it!

What BM Stack Lets You Do

BM Stack lets you work together with teams to build business model canvases.

Overall, BM Stack is organized like a Basecamp. You can send invitations to others on your team, either in your company or from other companies, and those new users will join your account. You can share projects in BM Stack with people in your own company only, or with others, though not publicly.

Business model canvases are organized into projects. Each project can have multiple business model canvases, and each canvas keeps track of its history in version numbers.

Even if you share projects and canvases with people from different companies, you can also mark particular canvases and updates as private. Those private updates and canvases are only visible to people in your own organization.

When you have a team that is working on new canvases or having discussions in the system, you have the option of subscribing to updates to those items by email.

The Canvas Tool

The canvas tool was certainly the hardest part of the application. I focused more time here than on any other single aspect of the application. I’m neither a good designer or developer, and this was a challenge that required both sets of skills.

Even with it’s flaws, when I compared to the other business model canvas tools that exist on the web, I think it’s the best. The other tools I’ve seen were poorly developed, confusing, and they didn’t help me make business models.

I wanted BM Stack to feel like you could make business model canvases on with the tool in the same way that you would make them on the whiteboard. The very first way this comes out is in the way still move notes around from canvas block to canvas block. The tool let’s you do this quickly and simply.

The tool lets you very quickly add new notes to the canvas. Some of the canvas tool is modelled after TeuxDeux. When I though saw how easy it was to add multiple tasks to TeuxDeux, I got excited at the thought of doing that for business model canvases and how it might make a digital canvas more fun to use.

Each time you hit enter, you add your note, and right away you can start typing the next one.

Just like real life, post-its come in more colours than just yellow. When I read Business Model Generation I liked the idea of using different colours to represent different layers of a business model. An example of this is using two colours to describe both the customer facing and B2B facing parts of a business model. So, I found a swatch on COLOURlovers of post-its and added the option to let you change the colour of your canvas notes.

This took some time. Not because it was technically difficult, but because there wasn’t an intuitive way that was clear to me that made sense for  changing a note’s colour. I wanted it to be easy to change the colour when you wanted, but then of hid that extra option to save space.

Infact, I also added the option to add additional comments to the bottom of each note, but then later removed it.

Overall the canvas was the most challenging part of the application to build, and I still don’t think I’ve nailed the perfect configuration for controlling elements on the canvas. At one point I had gotten very creative with jQuery mouse event functions like “click”, “mousedown”, “mouseleave”, “mouseout”, etc...

Keeping it simple made it work the best, and made it work the fastest.

As the author of the canvas you can add tags to your canvas, and add a description to help explain it.

The tagging is very basic and uses a simple Django library. You can add tags split by either spaces or comments. When you browse your canvas the list on the side will show you how many canvases have a tag, and you can quickly filter to just those canvases.

Authors of canvases can edit the canvases they have made, or they can also edit a canvas and save their work as a new version. People who didn't make a canvas can only save their work as a new version.

Also, the app uses Gravatars for all your profile pics in case you don't have one.

Future Plans

My plans for this app are frozen indefinitely.

Implementing features that would let teachers at business schools easily review and give feedback on the business models of their students came up early as a simple way of turning this application into something helpful for a lot of people. My experience in reading Business Model Generation and learning about the Business Model Canvas are a part of the foundation for working on this project after all.

One thing I want in the short term to create are guides for users of BM Stack. Not only could BM Stack be a tool for startups to build up their business models, but it could also fill the role as a tool for those new to the tool, and to help them experiment and learn.

I think everyone can always use fresh ideas when it comes to the business model canvas. 

Expect some things to break and to be broken. Just don't expect me to fix it soon.

You can create an account and get going here: http://bmstack.com/signup

Malcolm