Lay Out Your Canvas and Its Bottom Edge

Lay out your canvas and put numbers on its bottom edge

Draw the nine blocks of your business on one blank page or a printed canvas: the customer side on the right, the delivery side on the left, the value proposition between them, and costs and revenue along the bottom. Leave the upper blocks empty for now. Pick one unit, such as one customer, one month or one order. Write what that unit pays you under Revenue Streams and what serving it costs under Cost Structure, and rework the page until every check in the list below passes.

1. What does one unit pay you, and what does serving it cost?
2. Does each new customer add to your profit or to your loss?

All nine blocks sit on one page, each in its place

You chose one unit: one customer, one month or one order

Revenue Streams shows what that unit pays you, as a number

Cost Structure shows what serving that unit costs, as a number

You can say whether each new customer adds profit or adds to the loss

If the unit loses money, you wrote down whether price, cost or usage changes first