Build a lean canvas with RealtimeBoard

- [Instructor] Hey, and welcome to another episode of Weekly Marketing Tips. I'm Brad Batesole and today I wanna talk about building a Lean Canvas using RealtimeBoard. So I've always been a fan of keeping things simple and being realistic with the amount of information needed to kick off your next marketing project or how to plan a new product. Now we're marketing in a landscape that's shifting at incomprehensible speeds. This means we need to be agile and find ways to introduce new marketing strategies without going overkill on the planet. But every idea has to be baked to a certain degree. So this one page plan approach that I'm about to show you doesn't suggest you circumvent doing your research. It's just a format for you to quickly align your ideas and help steer decisions as the plan unfolds. This one page idea comes through an adaptation of the business model canvas which was originally proposed by Alexander Osterwalder and then was adapted by Ash Moira into the lean canvas which I'm going to be sharing with you in a moment. So the easiest way to get started is to load up this model using RealtimeBoard. You can get started by free by visiting realtimeboard.com and then setting up an account. You'll arrive at a dashboard similar to this and I'll choose New Board. Now RealtimeBoard provides a ton of other awesome collaboration tools so you'll definitely want to play around with it for more than just the Lean Canvas. The first thing we'll do is select the three dots in the bottom left hand corner. Choose templates from the popup menu. And then I can do a search for lean to find the Lean Canvas. I'll select Add in the bottom right hand corner and now we have our Lean Canvas. So here you can see the various components of the Lean Canvas. And you can simply drag and drop the text box in order to fill out the various areas. So let me walk you through the components of the Lean Canvas. What you want to do in the upper left hand corner is list the top three problems that your product is solving. And for the solution box, you want to outline the feature that solves each of those problems. From here we move into the unique value proposition. And as it suggests in the help text, this is the compelling message that turns the visitor into your interested prospect. This is what grabs your customer's attention. The unfair advantage is slightly different than the unique value proposition in that this is what deters competition. What is it that you have that your competition doesn't and is going to keep you ahead of them? Perhaps you have more money. You're better known. You have existing happy customers. Maybe you have certain key employees that have experience or networks that are hard to come by. Next you list your customer segments. These are your key target customers. Just put a few in here. That way you'll understand who you're going after. Below this you'll talk about existing alternatives. This will tell you how the problems are being solved right now and this gives you insight into what to include in your marketing to make sure that you're speaking to how you differentiate and how you improve beyond the existing solutions. Next you'll also want to list your key metrics. These are going to be the activities that you measure. And these are going to tell you if you're achieving the goal that you set out for this marketing concept. Next we have the high-level concept. This is essentially your elevator pitch moved all the way back into an analogy. So if you had to explain what you are using pre-existing concepts that somebody will immediately understand. Beyond that, you want to list the path to your customers, all the channels that you're going to use in your marketing. You can include early adopters which are going to be the characteristics of your ideal customer. And then the last two areas are the cost structure. This is where you'll indicate your customer acquisition costs, distribution costs, people, hosting software, all of that, followed by your revenue streams which is the lifetime value, your revenue, gross margins, essentially your revenue model on how you're going to monetize. I encourage you to take a minute, even if you're already in the midst of a marketing project, to develop this Lean Canvas, print it out and use it as you go about developing all of your marketing. Use this as your foundation and build off of it.