How will you make money? They want to understand the intersection of your cost structure and revenue streams—your margins.

as we strengthen this link and reapply stress to this chain, the weakest link moves to a different, and often unpredictable, link in the system.

Once visitors are inside, the next battle is connecting your promise with the first user experience. This is measured as Activation. This step describes your first set of interactions with your users. Your goal should be closing the gap between your promise and the moment of first value creation (the aha moment) as quickly as possible. If, for

When operating in an environment riddled with extreme uncertainty and limited resources, it’s easy to find waste everywhere. The real challenge is identifying the few key actions that stand to deliver the greatest impact and ignoring the rest.

2. Frame the outcome in terms of a revenue (or throughput) goal. A yearly revenue goal more directly maps to the revenue streams listed on your Lean Canvas and keeps the model simple. Profit and valuation are derivations of revenue anyway, and here’s how to incorporate them. If you’d like to target a profit goal, use a gross margin assumption to

If you’ve ever tried to estimate how many pieces of candy there are in a jar, you’ve been exposed to a Fermi problem. Fermi estimates, or back-of-the-envelope calculations, work by making justified guesses to a problem’s input assumptions that are accurate within an order of magnitude (the nearest power of ten). This is often the best we can do

2. Convert Your Minimum Success Criteria to Customer Throughput In order to calculate the customer throughput needed, the first critical input we need is a pricing model. I review lots of Lean Canvases where this isn’t specified. Even at the early ideation stage, you need to get specific on pricing. The biggest objection I often hear is: “How can I

1. Lower Yearly Revenue Target You can always lower your yearly revenue target, but because that requires us to lower our desired outcome, we’ll leave this option as a last resort.

The singularity moment of a product is not when you write your first line of code or raise your first round of funding, but when you create your first customer. You go from nothing to creating value. Every business, whether it’s Amazon, Google, or Facebook, started this way—with one before the millions (or billions). While one might seem too simple