One of the simplest (and simplicity is key) ways to outline a business model is using Ash Maurya’s Lean Canvas. The Lean Canvas is a tool described in detail in Ash’s book Running Lean, as well as in videos and articles online. There are many ways to create a Lean Canvas, from using leancanvas.com, to an iPad app, to just drawing it yourself on a whiteboard or a piece of paper. Wanting to make several Lean Canvases for my article I decided first to make it easy for me to throw together a Lean Canvas using just a PDF editor (like Preview on the Mac, or Adobe Reader on Mac, Windows or Linux).
One unfortunate side-effect of Lean Canvas being derived from the earlier Business Model Canvas, is that the order Ash suggests in filling it out is not in any order that makes sense from the layout. For people new to creating a Lean Canvas, this can be confusing, and it can be hard to remember which box to fill in at any given time.
What I’ve done is simply create a PDF version of the Lean Canvas, where each box is labelled with the name as well as the sequence number for filling in the box. The PDF also allows you to tab through the canvas in the proper order. So just open up the file, save a copy to edit, and then fill in the boxes in order.
There are two versions, one Letter size (used in US) and one A4 size (used most everywhere else). You may never print these, and thus this distinction may be irrelevant, but if you do plan on printing out your canvas on paper, these versions might help the pages line up a bit better on the page.
I welcome feedback, of all kinds, and if you suggest improvements they might end up in a future version of the PDFs. Keep in mind that there are many limitations to PDF forms, so certain basic things are not possible such as styling the text being edited, uploading images, etc. Please post your feedback in the comments for this post. If you use the PDFs and find them useful, please also share your experience in the comments.
Download the editable Lean Canvas in Letter size (used in US) or A4 size (used most everywhere else).
Philip,
Thanks for creating this great resource: very useful!
Dan
Very cool! Thanks for creating this 🙂
Thanks Philip, very helpful.
Achim
Thanks! Very useful.
I had a hard time finding the link to the actual pdf though, you might consider making the links a bit more obvious 🙂
Sorry for the confusion. I’ve added more links to the PDFs at the bottom of the post.
Thank you very much. Do you know if there is a similar editable PDF for the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas (both by Alexander Osterwalder)? I prefer those for more complex businesses. Personal preference but I think the Lean Canvas suits simpler tech-startups.
I have not made editable PDFs for those canvases. They do have PDF files you can download, but I don’t think they are designed to be editable:
http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/canvas/bmc
http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/canvas/vpc
Making one of the BMC would be relatively easy, but making an editable PDF for the VPC would somewhat difficult because of the non-square spaces that need to be filled in.
Adding additional links you cannot see does not help much. Changing the link color is the right thing to do.
If you’re referring to the links to the PDF files, they show up differently in all the browsers I’ve tested, but yes it is a subtle difference. I’ve added an underline to make it clearer.
Thank you for add this! Very helpful!
Hey Philip,
Funny — I just randomly came across this post when looking for a Lean Canvas I could edit (for another project of mine, not the ErgoDox). This came in helpful, thanks!
Thanks for the resource, was looking for the PDF version to print.
This is exactly what I was after – just the leanest possible version of a lean canvas to use for quickly sketching out business ideas. Thanks for putting this together and sharing freely – I really appreciate your generosity.
Glad you like it.
Excellent. Thank you!
Wow, that was great Philip. I’ll use it several times for sure 🙂
Thanks