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!
