Blockchain startup canvas
I have a long experience with startups: form being the first employee in a startup, partnerships, setting up own startups, advising and mentoring. I won few hackathons and gained lot of very valuable experience. Business Canvas is present at almost every hackathon. Today I’m writing about the central point - startup idea and market validation.
However this one is a bit different - it’s shaped toward blockchain products.
Blockchain startup canvas
The canvas covers several fields and it’s purpose is to research the market in order to have a user validation, find the product-market fit and finally define financial.
Value Proposition
- What customer needs are we solving?
- How those needs are solved today?
- Why your idea works?
- Why the market needs your idea and why people will use it?
- What is different? What’s the Unique Value Proposition?
- How does your tech (blockchain) solves these needs more effectively?
User Segmentation
- Who is a beneficiary of our solution? Who gets most of it?
- Define the potential users, their roles, who will pay and what they will get out of it.
- What customer validation has been done so far?
- For each user segment, what pains are you solving?
- Which users will benefit from a blockchain?
User relationship
- Will user interaction with the system change?
- Are users expected to interact more with this compared to the existing solutions?
- Does such solution already exist?
- How valuable are these interactions?
- Put yourself in your customer shoes. Validate the experience.
- What are the pivots related to customer onboarding?
- Is blockchain awareness expected from a user?
- Do you need to explain your solution? Is it easy?
- How difficult it is to use your system? Can my grandmother use it?
Value Components
- What are the most valuable components of our product? Eg: Contract execution, scaleability, geography (location), security, verification, auditability, tracking, transparency, pseud-anonymity, identity...
- What’s in it to me?
- How many user have been performed? In which segments?
System Touch Points
- What systems are affected by our product?
- What systems will need to change?
- Who is the product owner of that systems?
- Whom we need to partner with?
Key Dependencies
- What are key dependencies of the product?
- Do they exist today in the market (buy vs build)?
- Can they be re-purposed within the organization?
- How can you take an advantage of existing blockchain solutions?
- Which blockchain technology are you choosing and why? How this will impact you in 1-year and in 3 year time?
Leadreship & Marketing
- Could our new system establish us as a market leader in our segment?
- Who is seen as the technology leader today?
Go To Market Strategy
- What are the product milestones?
- When will the marketing campaign start?
- What’s the plan for marketing and PR?
- How many FTE (full time employees) will work in marketing?
- What are the marketing streams?
Risk
- Who are the competitors?
- What are the known risks?
- Is there any conflict of interest?
- How the technology / blockchain security is preserved?
- What are the limitations of your technology?
- What are the blockchain related risks? Eg: time, scaleability, wallet / public key infrastructure? Will the technology stay?
- How expensive is your technology?
- Is the technology proven? What security assumption do you have?
- What are the financial risks?
Time
- How complicate is it to build?
- What key dependencies don’t exist and need to be build?
- What key dependencies will be most time consuming to create / use / learn?
- Is it the right time to build the solution?
- Is it possible to save some time?
Revenue, Cost & Profit
- Are there additional sources of revenue from users?
- What is the cost structure?
- Is there a cost saving?
- What are the revenue streams?
- What is the P&L forecast?
- What’s the expected size of the first investment round?
- How long the money will last? What are the next steps?
Company Structure
- What’s the company structure?
- Who will make invoices?
- Where is the IP?
Token Problems
When designing a token based product we need to clearly look at the intend of the token, especially if it will represent a value.
I described some of the major problem which may arise when constructing valuable tokens are in the Token Economics: Token Design problems & classification article.
In a nutshell we need to deal with the following subjects: speculative intent, regulatory implications, network deanonymization, risk of market irrationality, stakeholder alignment.