
Got a startup idea? Validate it with the Startup Toolkit - JarekS
http://thestartuptoolkit.com/
======
robfitz
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.

Hope it's handy.

~~~
JarekS
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...

~~~
robfitz
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.

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edw519
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.

~~~
gizmo
> 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.

~~~
edw519
_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.]

~~~
gizmo
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.

~~~
edw519
_"We'll try our best to preserve your data", is the best you can hope for in
any situation_

If that's the best my customers could hope for, then I'd be broke.

I absolutely guarantee the integrity of my customers' data. To anyone who
doesn't, I ask, "Why not?"

~~~
aarongough
Because giving an absolute guarantee of anything is impossible?

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davidw
An undertaker might take issue with that:-)

~~~
mindcrime
Depends on if he's met Ray Kurzweil or not.

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sidyadav
Any chance someone can come up with a Word/Pages template of this? Perhaps an
offline/downloadable version of the site?

~~~
robfitz
Good idea. I'll post some pdfs or doc templates on the page for offline work
before everything's secured up.

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yesbabyyes
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.

Thanks!

[EDIT: Alexander Osterwalder, not Steve Blank...]

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efader
This seems like a derivative of the business model generation book

~~~
robfitz
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)

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fragmede
I like it, but the 'Save Changes' button is just a bit too low to be visible
on my netbook screen (javascript says window.innerHeight is 481).

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khangtoh
I wouldn't want to post my ideas/business revenue that is virtually accessible
to anyone other than myself especially a site that has no TOS.

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curiousfiddler
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.

~~~
robfitz
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.

~~~
curiousfiddler
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> ?

~~~
robfitz
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.

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Keyframe
Hah, great idea! Reminds me of Dramatica, Contour, Hollywood scriptmaker etc.
for scriptwriting.. and they all work.

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Colin-DeVries
Hi, Quick tip. In IE8 the chart before the accolade is not visible. Keep op
the good "stuff"!

~~~
robfitz
I'm surprised it didn't set your computer on fire in IE. Thanks for the heads
up - will get it prepped for mass consumption sometime.

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tomlin
A start-up who's function is to help other start-ups.

Novel idea!

~~~
robfitz
More of an "app" than a "start-up", but thanks ;)

