The Canvas That Lied
A canvas can have nine true blocks and still describe a business that fails. The flaw usually sits between two blocks that each hold up alone and cannot both be true for the same customer.
Webvan's blocks all checked out one at a time. The customers were real, the warehouses and vans were built, and orders came in. Set Cost Structure beside Revenue Streams, though, and the company was spending close to three dollars for every dollar of sales.
The pair is not always on the bottom edge. Color, a photo-sharing app, raised $41 million before it launched in March 2011, with a strong team and working technology. Its promise was to share your photos with whoever happened to be near you, and it never found a group of people who wanted that. The app was wound down in 2012, after its engineers left for Apple.
Read these three pairs first on any canvas.
Cost Structure against Revenue Streams: does one customer, served once, pay more than they cost?
Customer Segments against Channels: does the channel you wrote down reach the people in the segment box?
Value Propositions against Key Resources and Key Partnerships: can what you have, or what a partner controls, deliver what you promised?
When a canvas feels wrong, the instinct is to hunt for the weakest block. A weak block is easy to see and fix, while two strong blocks that contradict each other stay hidden until you set them side by side.
A dog-walking firm's canvas lists 'busy professionals in the city centre' as its segment and 'leaflets in suburban vet clinics' as its channel. Both blocks are well researched. What is wrong?
The channel does not reach the segment, so the two blocks contradict each other
Nothing, because both blocks are well researched
The segment is too narrow to be worth serving
The value proposition needs more detail before the rest can be judged
Each block is sound on its own, and together they contradict each other: suburban vet clinics do not reach city-centre professionals. That is the segment-to-channel pair. Polishing either block alone, or adding detail to the value proposition, leaves the contradiction in place.