Business Model Canvas — what it is, and how to map yours on one page before you start a business

The Business Model Canvas maps a business model on one page: who pays, for what, through which channel you reach them, and what it costs to deliver what they are paying for. In a new business, that description is not a document for a drawer. It is a list of assumptions, each one you can check in a conversation with someone who is meant to buy, before you pay for a logo, a website, or your first ad.

Two templates do the mapping. The Business Model Canvas lays the model out in nine fields. Lean Canvas, Ash Maurya's adaptation, replaces four of those fields with ones that surface the riskiest assumptions in a new idea. In both templates, the two hardest fields to fill in are the same: the customer and the value proposition, because they need evidence, not conviction. You gather that evidence with three tools: the Value Proposition Canvas, a persona built from real conversations, and competitor analysis counted from the customer's side.

Definitions and quotes below come straight from the tools' own authors, read 2026-10-02.

What a business model is

A business model describes how a company makes money, not what it sells. Strategyzer AG, the publisher of the Business Model Canvas template, puts the tool's job in one sentence: "Describe how your business creates, delivers, and captures value on one page" (Strategyzer, The Business Model Canvas, read 2026-10-02). The same page sums up what the nine fields cover: "who you serve, what you offer, how you deliver it, what it costs, and what it earns."

Why the plural — "business models"? One canvas describes one model. Strategyzer says so directly: "Fill it once for one business model, not for the whole company." If you sell two different things to two different customer groups through two different channels, you have two models, and you need two canvases. Mapped separately, they are easier to compare: you can see which one actually makes money and which one mostly consumes your time.

For anyone starting a business, one feature of the model matters most: at the start, every field is a hypothesis. An entry in "Customer Segments" is a guess about who will pay, until someone from that group actually pays. That is why a model in a new business gets tested, not signed off.

Business Model Canvas: nine fields

The Business Model Canvas is a sheet divided into nine fields, each answering one question about the business. The official template, as a PDF (assets.strategyzer.com, file dated 11 December 2014), does not include the questions below — they are ours, meant only to show what each field is for:

• Customer Segments: who are you creating value for, and who actually pays for it?
• Value Propositions: what customer problem are you solving, or what need are you meeting?
• Channels: how does a customer find out about the offer, buy it, and receive it?
• Customer Relationships: what contact does the customer have with you before, during and after the purchase?
• Revenue Streams: what exactly is the customer paying for, in what form, and how often?
• Key Resources: what do you need to deliver all of this — people, equipment, knowledge, licences?
• Key Activities: what do you have to do regularly for the model to work?
• Key Partners: who do you need from outside — suppliers, subcontractors, platforms?
• Cost Structure: what does maintaining all of this cost, and which costs are fixed?

The layout has a logic Strategyzer describes this way: "The right side is the market. The left side is what it takes to serve that market, with value propositions sitting between them." The right side of the canvas is the market: customer segments, channels and relationships. The left side is what you need to serve that market: resources, activities and partners. Value propositions sit in the middle and connect the two, and underneath all seven of those fields sit the finances: costs and revenue.

For a first canvas, we recommend an order: the right side first, then the left, then the finances last. That is our advice, not Strategyzer's instruction, but it matches the source's own note on finances: "Cost structure and revenue streams only hold if the seven blocks above them are right." A revenue forecast built on an unvalidated customer segment is exactly as unvalidated as that segment. On the cost side of a new business, the largest recurring item is usually social contributions and health insurance for the self-employed, set by each member state; we explain what drives them in how much it costs to start a business.

The canvas also has fields that are easy to forget: the header carries "Designed for," "Designed by," "Date" and "Version." Strategyzer recommends: "Date and version the canvas, then redraw it as evidence comes in." In practice, that means a new version after every round of customer conversations, with the old one kept as a record of what you believed before.

The template is free, and you are allowed to adapt it. It carries a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence, with Strategyzer AG named as the author. That licence lets you use the template and create derivative versions, provided you credit the author and share your own version under the same licence. If you prepare your own, translated version of the canvas — for a pitch to a partner or a bank, say — credit the source and the licence on it.

Lean Canvas: the version for someone starting a business

Lean Canvas is an adaptation of the Business Model Canvas aimed at the entrepreneur, and at whatever is most uncertain in their idea. Its author, Ash Maurya, first published it in August 2010 in a post about how he documented his own business-model assumptions, something he revisits in a post from 27 February 2012. A post from 22 February 2024 defines it this way: "A Lean Canvas is a 1-page business modeling tool that helps you deconstruct an idea into key assumptions or beliefs."

Maurya describes the difference from the BMC in that same 2012 post. He removed four fields — Key Partners, Key Activities, Key Resources, and Customer Relationships — and replaced them with four new ones: Problem, Solution, Key Metrics, and Unfair Advantage. Five fields are shared with the BMC: Customer Segments, Value Proposition, Channels, Revenue, and Cost. He kept the layout deliberately, writing that he wanted to credit Osterwalder's original, and that the Creative Commons licence's invitation to "Share & Remix" made that easy. Neither those posts nor the tool's own site state what licence Lean Canvas itself is released under.

Nine fields are not the whole template. LEANSTACK, Maurya's company, describes Lean Canvas on its tool page as a template from 2010 and lists 12 blocks. Beyond the nine fields, there are three sub-fields: Existing Alternatives, Early Adopters, and High-Level Concept. We use Existing Alternatives, which sits under the Problem field, below, for competitor analysis.

A few rules from the author's own writing change how you work with the canvas:

• Fast, not precise. A first canvas, Maurya writes, should be sketched "in less than 20 minutes." If you do not know what to put in a field, you can leave it blank.
• A customer pays; a user does not. "A customer is someone who pays for your product. A user does not." If your model has several actors, Maurya advises identifying the customers first, then the others who interact with them — users, for instance.
• Early adopter, not the mass market. "Your objective is to define an early adopter, not a mainstream customer." The customer-segment field can cover the whole market, but the early-adopters sub-field narrows it to the group you are starting with — what Maurya also calls the ideal customer profile.
• Unfair advantage is usually left blank. Maurya cites Jason Cohen's definition: "A true unfair advantage is something that cannot be easily copied or bought." He admits few startups have one on day one, so this field usually stays empty at the start.
• A problem is not a promise. The problem field collects the customer's most important problems, as they experience them. A unique value proposition is a marketing promise that results from pairing the problem with your solution.

Who is Lean Canvas for? The author answers directly: "Lean Canvas was designed for entrepreneurs, not consultants, customers, advisors, or investors." Asked which canvas to use, he answers "use what is most natural to you," adding that he has used Lean Canvas himself from ideation to product/market fit and beyond. Our advice for someone starting a business: Lean Canvas while the idea is still in your head and you need to establish whether the problem even exists; Business Model Canvas once you know who you are selling to and need to plan resources, partners and customer support. You can fill in both canvases for the same idea.

Value proposition: the Value Proposition Canvas

The Value Proposition Canvas zooms in on two fields of the business model — the customer segment and the value proposition — on their own sheet. Strategyzer describes its purpose this way: map what customers are trying to get done, what gets in their way, and what they are trying to achieve, then design an offer that fits (Strategyzer, The Value Proposition Canvas, read 2026-10-02).

The sheet has two halves. On the customer side, describing one segment, you fill in three things:

• Customer Jobs: what they are trying to get done;
• Pains: what gets in their way along the way;
• Gains: what they are trying to achieve.

On the offer side, you fill in the matching three:

• Products & Services: what you are offering;
• Pain Relievers: which of the customer's problems your offer removes;
• Gain Creators: which of their gains it delivers.

Fit is the state where the offer side matches the customer side. The most important line on the tool's page reads: "Fit is a claim until customers confirm it. Test the matches you drew against evidence, then adjust." The lines you draw between a problem and a solution are hypotheses until customer conversations back them up.

In a new business, this tool does one thing: it forces you to describe the customer in their own words before you describe the product in yours. If the customer's list of problems has entries your offer does not answer, and your list of features has entries that do not answer any problem, you know what to change before you build anything.

There is a licence difference from the BMC. On the PDF template (assets.strategyzer.com), the copyright line reads "copyright: Strategyzer AG," with no Creative Commons notice on it or on the tool's own page. You can download the template and fill it in for your own use. Before you publish your own graphic version of it — in company materials, say — ask the publisher about the terms. For that reason, this article describes the sheet's fields rather than reproducing the graphic.

Target audience and customer persona

The target audience is the canvas's "Customer Segments" field: people or businesses who have a problem and will pay to solve it. Lean Canvas's rules narrow that definition at the start to two conditions. A customer is whoever pays, and you start with early adopters, not the whole market. Maurya calls that group the ideal customer profile (ICP) — the same term sales teams use for business buyers. It is a description of the companies you can help best and earn the most from, written in traits you can spot on a contact list: industry, size, how they buy.

A persona goes a step further and describes one specific user. Its author, Alan Cooper, describes its origins in The origin of personas from 15 May 2008 (the original on cooper.com no longer works; we read the Internet Archive copy). Cooper started with user interviews — open questions about their work and what they were trying to achieve. After several interviews, a pattern emerged: users split into three distinct groups, differing in goals, tasks and skill level. Those groups produced three personas in 1995, which Cooper calls the first true goal-directed personas.

Two rules follow from that history:

• A persona comes from interviews, not imagination. Every sentence in a persona description should be traceable to a specific conversation in your notes.
• Goals define a persona, not demographics. Cooper distinguishes personas from the demographic segments product marketing has used for decades. A name, an age and a stock photo say nothing about what that person is actually trying to get done.

Cooper also explains what a persona protects against. Design "for the user," and you end up collecting feature requests from the whole group and building a product that has all of them. Cooper calls that "the sum of all desired features." The conclusion for a new business: a persona with one clear goal lets you say no to features it does not need.

An empathy map helps organise what you have heard. It was developed by Dave Gray's studio XPLANE and described on Gamestorming; it gained wider attention partly through its appearance in Osterwalder's own book on business models. The map asks five questions about a person: what they think, feel, say, do, and hear. According to its authors, a first-draft map takes around 20 minutes, provided you already know the person and their situation well. The method's last step is "Check yourself: Ask others to review your map."

Below is a persona template built from Cooper's criteria and the empathy map's questions. It is a template to fill in, not an example customer:

• Goal: what this person wants to achieve, in their own words from the interview.
• Tasks: what they do today to achieve that goal, and how much time it takes them.
• Skill level: what they can do themselves, and where they need help.
• Thinks and feels: what worries them, what frustrates them about their current solution.
• Says and does: how they describe the problem, and what they have already tried.
• Hears: who gives them recommendations, and who they trust.
• Source: which conversations each point above comes from.

Competitor analysis: who you are actually up against

Competitor analysis in a new business starts with what the customer uses today, not with a list of companies that share your industry label. Lean Canvas has a dedicated sub-field for this under the problem field, "Existing Alternatives" — how customers handle the problem today. Maurya puts the rule this way: "Your true competition is NOT who you think they are, but who your customers think they are."

Maurya also notes that these existing solutions "may not be from an obvious competitor." In practice — this list is ours, not his — they include a company in your own field, a spreadsheet, work done in-house, a friend who helps out after hours, or a decision to do nothing at all. That is why you build your list of alternatives from the same interviews that produce your persona: you ask how someone solves the problem today, and what it costs them in money and time.

A simple way to organise the results is a four-column table: alternative, the customer job it handles, the problem it does not remove, and its price to the customer. The third column connects directly to the Value Proposition Canvas. Problems no alternative solves are your best candidate for a value proposition. If you cannot fill that column at all, your offer is competing on price alone.

The second, formal layer of the analysis is the name itself. Checking whether your chosen business name, or a trade mark close to it, is already taken is a national-register task everywhere — through your own country's business register, plus TMview for trade marks registered in the EU and its member states. We cover trade-mark search and the cost of registering your own mark in logo design.

From business model to website and brand

A business's model is the input to everything you order afterwards: the website, the brand, the tools. The customer segment and value proposition from your canvas are the same information a website contractor will ask for. If you have them written down, not just in your head, you skip a round of questions and start the project conversation from facts.

What to carry forward from the canvas, and where we cover it:

• The purpose of your website and who is reading it is laid out in website strategy: five decisions before your first draft.
• The information a website contractor would otherwise have to guess is gathered by a website brief.
• Knowing who you are talking to feeds directly into the brand's visual identity, covered in brand guidelines.
• The order in which a new business buys a domain, mail, invoicing software and the rest of its technology is in technology for a new business.

Keep the canvas, the persona and the alternatives table in one place, and update them after every round of customer conversations. The date and version number on the canvas let you check later which assumptions held, and which had to change.