Working on a product is something I truly enjoy. It’s a multi-disciplinary effort juggling between technology, design and business. You have to approach things from different perspectives and when everything aligns, you’ll create something extremely valuable.

If you have attended any hackathons or business pitching competitions, you might have been introduced to the Business Model Canvas. It’s a tool to help you structure and design your startup’s business model.

It’s a powerful tool and quite often (if you do it right) you’ll discover some interesting insights about your startup. However, as pointed out by Steve Blank, it’s great for brainstorming hypotheses, but it doesn’t have much guidance in testing them.

This lead to the creation of the Lean Canvas, a variation that focuses on the problems, solutions, key metrics and competitive advantages, allowing you to deconstruct your idea into its key assumptions.

These tools have help me developed multiple products in the past (mostly failed but that’s on me not the canvas) so they definitely served their purpose. However, I’m not a big fan of the canvas format as it’s actually harder to use and maintain.

From advising and consulting first-time founders and entrepreneurs, I’ve also noticed quite a few of them struggled with the canvas as they tend to get lost trying to think about all the different aspects of their startup. Coupled with the fact that I also tend to give them pretty much the same advice at the start (focus on customer discovery first), I figured maybe there’s a better way.

So a few weeks ago, I wrote down all the usual questions I used to advice these entrepreneurs and developed a guide. It’s an action plan that walks you through the customer discovery, solution design, product iteration, product marketing and product-market fit phase of your startup.

Each step contains 4 questions and a checklist at the end. It’s designed to be answered linearly but you are encouraged to go back to previous answers and update them as you work your way down the list. Building a startup is an iterative process and you should be updating your business model and assumptions along the way.

I’ve built the MVP version of this guide on Notion.so. It’s a free tool that allows you to create powerful documents with tables and checklist. It also have a simple way for anyone to duplicate the guide for their own use.

Having used the same steps in the guide on itself and testing with a few dozen entrepreneurs, I’ve some early indicators that this might be useful. Obviously it’s still in very early stage but if you want to give it a try, please visit startupcompass.io and subscribe. I’ll email you the free template and any future updates. Hopefully, this will eventually be another resource to help entrepreneurs and founders build their product and startup.

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Cover Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash