Management often boils down to setting clear expectations and following up on results. Those expectations are the metrics.

There are many ways to think about a business model. One of the most effective is described and illustrated by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur in their best-selling book Business Model Generation.* In their structure, a business model includes nine basic elements:

Customer segments. The specific, different groups of customers the business serves—that is, the identified customers for whom it will create value.

Number of potential purchasers × Percentage of capturable market share × Absolute dollar amount of each sale × Percentage margin of net profit = Total potential profit

Key activities. What the business does to make its business model work, such as inventing, buying, building, distributing, operating, and so forth.

A product or service can be cool, or innovative, or beautiful, or even useful, but it only becomes a viable business if the aggregate economics of the value being created are significantly more than the aggregate economics of the costs of operating the business.

Among the leading online competitive analysis tools are kompyte.com, similarweb.com, SEMrush.com, and the free Alerts service from Google.

You need to know your market extremely well to run your business. What you do not have to do, however, is to include everything you know about it in your lean business plan.

the number one differentiator between an aspirant and a real founder is that the former is in love with his product, but the latter is in love with her business model.