Hey guys, I put this together as a easier way to visualize & update your business hypotheses.
Writing down the beliefs your startup is based on is crucial... it keeps you focused on risks instead of features, makes communication w/ team & investors easier, and stops you from ignoring the evidence. Yet most people don't do it (and almost no one consistently updates them).
I thought Steve Blank's customer development worksheets were a good start, but it's hard to update quickly and doesn't provide an overview. The canvas you see on the app is a modification of the Business Model Generation canvas, which I re-vamped to better suit startups.
I like it very much. In fact - I'm filling it out right now!
BTW - I love the potential of this app. I.e. you can expand Key Performance Indicators with some sort of the Steve Blank kind of small "no accounting" app with the API for integration - http://steveblank.com/2010/02/22/no-accounting-for-startups/ - to automatically track your performance...
Thanks for the kind words. And that's a really good idea..
I've been keeping a list of tools & frameworks that seem helpful to startups, and I hope to bring them together and have founders pick & choose the structure they think will be most beneficial to their situation. The accounting is a good addition. It's still unclear where I can add the most value, but, as you mention, there are lots of promising possibilities.
Just as a future heads up that jpg you have on the front page would look much better as a png (nothing mission critical or anything), other than that I'm not a fan of pop up editing but I really can't think of a way you could do it better.
My first thought was that this would be silly. Until I went inside and saw for myself. Very thought provoking, an exercise definitely worth my while.
Until I read this:
We'll try our best to preserve your data, but no guarantees. Your canvas is secured by obscurity, which is to say it's not very secure at all. Anyone with your canvas' URL may view and edit it. If and when we add a paywall, we'll make sure you can export any existing data.
Honestly, how hard would it be to just fix this first?
I think you're really on the right track to something good. But until you fix this, I'll just use my own text editor to save my thoughts on my own hard drive.
> Honestly, how hard would it be to just fix this first?
I thought it was a breath of fresh air. The unique ID is clearly very random and long enough to be unguessable. Even if the user and document hashes are not picked in a cryptographically secure way it's still going to be much more secure than the average alpha web 2.0 app that's hacked together with some generic login&auth component.
I think you should be upset at products that do auth but do it insecurely, not those who make a conscious decision that a simple solution is good enough. Just look at the websites that don't hash passwords, that don't restrict login cookies to the domain of the app, that don't have SSL logins, and so on. There are a million points where it can go wrong, and even today it's pretty difficult to asses whether your application is secure.
Think about it for a second. The security system the authors have chosen is almost impossible to mess up. Given how the hash looks I'm almost entirely sure they used some kind of crypto library to generate it. (If their magic ids looked like the output of randrange(100000, 900000) it would've been obvious). There is no other point of failure. If the hashes are random and unguessable, you're done! For a free product, I'd say that's pretty good!
What you want is security, but what you ask for is a login page.
Thanks for making me seem far smarter than I am. My mental process was basically: "Etherpad was easy to use, I'll do that." (come on google, I'm just like them!)
You can also type in a more memorable URL (like etherpad, trend emerging) but that, of course, makes it much more guessable.
What you want is security, but what you ask for is a login page.
Sorry if I didn't make it clear enough, but all I want is:
1. the ability to add, change, or delete my any of my data at any time
2. the ability to share my data with exactly whom I want, no more, no less
OP guarantees neither (and, refreshingly, admits it). In fact, "We'll try our best to preserve your data, but no guarantees" and "not very secure at all" were his words, not mine. I was responding to his disclaimer, not my interpretation of his site's security.
[FWIW, I use ramamia by hner's jasonlbaptiste and markbao, which has a great and appropriate implementation of unique id. But then again, I'm less concerned about the security of my family reunion plan than of my business plan.]
I know you want to do (1) and (2), but my point is that you're not getting that from the other web 2.0 apps either.
When you delete data perhaps only a is_deleted flag gets toggled in a database, and copies of your work may reside in backups for months or even years. When you want to share your data you want to be reasonably certain the app is secure, but there is no way for you to determine if this is the case. I'm saying that a very simple system with very obvious security implications may be preferable to a complex system. It's easy to get Open Auth wrong, it's easy to get logins wrong, and so on.
Many apps will give you that login form and the share and delete buttons but chances are you would shudder at the thought of using the app if you knew what the backend looks like.
About those remarks on the page. The first one, "We'll try our best to preserve your data", is the best you can hope for in any situation, and the second remark that the website isn't very secure at all is also truthful given that it doesn't even use SSL.
So to reiterate, login forms on an app may make you feel more secure, but it won't bring you any closer to what you want.
Of course, I said this in the context of a free app that's still in beta!
Maintaining data integrity during worst case scenarios is difficult, even when you have the budget and expertise for it. Especially if you offer real guarantees to your customers you should know that it's completely unreasonable to expect the same from a proof of concept web 2.0 app.
Thanks for the feedback. I think that's more than fine. After all, paper is what I've been using until now ;). I wasn't really planning to "launch" this or anything. I pinged the lean startup mailing list to get feedback on the layout of the canvas, and it made its way here.
Security certainly wouldn't have been difficult to fix, but it would have added a few days and locked me a little bit further into a canvas design that may-or-may-not be correct. So I started with the big risk first, and the other stuff with fall into place fairly soon.
This can be solved easily with a passphrase so you enter the passphrase on the page and then permission is granted, not the best but makes it more secure.
Still no TOS or anything saying that you ARE not giving up ownership of the data your enter.
I saw Alexander Osterwalder (author of Business Model Generation) speak at a TEDx event here in Stockholm and I liked his ideas. This looks nice, and I look forward to using it.
It is, as stated in the credits at the bottom of the page. 4 of the blocks are the same as the original biz model generation canvas, and the other 5 are tailored to early stage startups. I also changed the layout from being cash-driven to value-driven and embedded some stripped down worksheets into each of the blocks, which leads to a slightly different use-case (communication & documentation instead of discovery & discussion)
To be very honest, my first thought is that in all "HONESTY" you CANNOT do all this - its impossible to do all these things (claimed on the website), without experiencing those in person and it will vary from person to person based on the context, circumstances, idea etc. I think it will be a disservice to any confused soul (I am guessing those are the kind of people who would hit your site) by claiming to do things that are not practically possible, without actually experiencing those.
The app doesn't do anything for you, except give you a bit of scaffolding so you can make your own decisions.
If you look at startup case studies, the worrying constant is how obvious most of their failures are. We lose track of our basic business assumptions and end up charging down dead-ends or building products nobody wants.
By explicitly stating our assumptions in an easily consumable way, it keeps you aware of what you're trying to prove and helps you avoid those "obvious" mistakes.
Okay here's a (hypothetical) use case:
I want to create a software product, say a database, because I see myself solving a real problem by way of creating my product. My whole idea is driven by a real problem statement and my passion. How does this fit in here?
Don't you think all those blocks are a little misleading for a product like this? Or like these: http://projects.apache.org/indexes/quick.html ?
It's not a product management tool. There are lots of great options to help you do that, some of which I use.
If you already have an idea that you think is a fact, and you are going to build it, regardless of what the world says, then you needn't write anything down. That's what most failed projects do/did.
The canvas is meant to help when you see your ideas as hypotheses. You document them, and then you go try to find out if they're true or not (by talking to customers, building MVPs, watching mailing lists, whatever). If everything is true, you move on to scaling the business. If some of your initial beliefs turn out to be false, which is probable, then you have a place to go back and document your new learning, and hopefully see how that change will impact the rest of your assumptions.
Writing down the beliefs your startup is based on is crucial... it keeps you focused on risks instead of features, makes communication w/ team & investors easier, and stops you from ignoring the evidence. Yet most people don't do it (and almost no one consistently updates them).
I thought Steve Blank's customer development worksheets were a good start, but it's hard to update quickly and doesn't provide an overview. The canvas you see on the app is a modification of the Business Model Generation canvas, which I re-vamped to better suit startups.
Hope it's handy.