From Plan to Benevolent World Domination with the KISS Canvas

[This is part of a series on the KISS Canvas]

For over twenty years I’ve had the pleasure of co-founding a handful of ventures and mentoring hundreds of startup and intrepreneurial teams. Over the past six years, and with great help, I’ve developed the Keep It Super Simple (KISS) Canvas to help innovators find and mitigate some of their biggest risks, from ideation to scaling. Today I’m releasing version 7, which incorporates changes to help get your innovation from idea to wide spread adoption (or what I humorously call, “benevolent world domination”).

Problem

There are a LOT of things that can go wrong in turning an idea into a successful innovation. It is very hard, in the moment, to know where to focus and when to move on. There are a lot of tools that can help, but each has limitations:

• The Business Model Canvas identifies the big picture hypotheses of your venture… but struggles to help you ID what is needed to get all your key stakeholders on board.
• A pitch deck template is great for telling a convincing story to investors, but not a practical guide for execution.
• The Founder’s Dilemmas brilliantly show you how people problems can kill your company, but doesn’t give a handy way for to quickly compare the different, and often conflicting, incentives of founders, line employees, and investors.
• The VIRAL pathway provides a great roadmap to guide truly big-picture decisions of your venture from startup to exit, but was designed for venture-backed startups and doesn’t fit well for non-venture startups or intrepreneurial innovation.

No one tool can solve all these problems or substitute for a skilled & dedicated team. However, we can do better.

Solution

The Keep It Super Simple (KISS) Canvas lets innovators take an idea from concept through to product-market-fit. Its simple guiding premise is: its all about the stakeholders. Each column represents a key stakeholder. Each row asks you a critical question to ensure success with that stakeholder. The questions cluster around: who the stakeholder is, what pains & incentives drive them, the value proposition needed to satisfy them, and how to generate adoption.

At the start of the venture, this makes it easy to document the core hypothesis that need to be tested to go from idea to launch, typically by focusing on the Payer, Channel, and User stakeholders. As you validate hypothesis, you mark them, highlighting what work is done and what is yet-to-be done. In general, a startup wants to validate from the top and work their way down.

When it comes time to craft a pitch for funders, the KISS Canvas covers 80% of a typical Pitch Deck by telling the very information investors want to know, in the order they generally want to hear it. Just add a description of why your leadership team are the right ones for the job and you’re done.

Once you’ve launched, it shows the path to product-market fit and adoption. By now you’ve likely validated the hypotheses in the Stakeholder & Problem sections, so you’ll focus on validating the hypotheses in the Value Proposition & Adoption sections.

As your venture matures and new customer segments, distribution partners, or investors become important, you simply add new columns and use the same familiar structure to document hypothesis and track progress validating.

Results

I’ve used various iterations of the KISS Canvas for years with students & clients. Some of the results I’m proudest of:

• Helped an enterprise client with thousands of employees go from idea to a deployed product tripling profit margins.
• Allowed a client who’s new product rollout was stuck to identify the problem & how to solve it. Once that was fixed, product adoption took off. The product has brought in nearly $100 million in revenue.
• Gave multiple traditional, low-tech nonprofits the structure they needed to go from idea to commercialization.
• You can find more results on PixelEdge’s recent blog post detailing how it uses the KISS Canvas to help clients.

Build your own KISS Canvas (Free!)

Below are three different formats ready-for-use. The KISS Canvas is licensed under creative commons, which means you may use or modify it freely.

Image for virtual whiteboards

Printable poster (4×3 feet)

Googlesheet

Best Practices

1. The column headers in the templates (payer, user, and channel) are generally, but not always, the right three to focus on at the start of a project.
   1. My first venture’s payers and users were the same people and we marketed directly to end users. If I was creating a KISS Canvas for that startup today, I’d use three columns, but each one would focus on a different customer segment that had distinct problems.
   2. The nonprofit example shown on the google sheet uses stakeholder names that are more appropriate for a nonprofit context.
   3. The google sheet offers dropdowns to suggest other stakeholder types you might find helpful. But feel free to make up your own!
2. At the start erase every assumption about a solution from your thinking so that you can (1st) expand the universe of the potential stakeholders, then (2nd) discover all the different stakeholders’ personas, in order to determine (3rd) their primary migraine-sized pains, and then (4th) bring to bear the benefits that your solution might/must provide.
3. Be clear & concise by staying within the size limit to the boxes.
4. Consider everything in a box as a hypothesis waiting to be validated by actual interactions with stakeholders.
5. Don’t agonize. Filling in the canvas should take about an hour. Then go test the hypotheses with stakeholders, update the canvas, and repeat as needed.
6. Indicate validated hypotheses by changing their background color to be a darker shade of its original color or put a nice checkmark ✔ at the start of the cell.

How is the Simple?

A fair question :). The Simple in Keep It Super Simple (KISS) refers to a few things:

• It is simpler to use one consistent tool vs many, disparate tools. KISS vs Value Proposition Canvas + Business Model Canvas + Viral Pathway + …
• It is simpler to use a canvas that flows from top to bottom and from left to right, vs one that starts in one spot and jumps around.

The flow of the Business Model Canvas.

• It is simpler to have different stakeholders cleanly separated in their own columns vs having different colors super-imposed on each other.

A Business Model Canvas that uses color-coding to capture the needs of a variety of stakeholders.

Gratitude

The KISS canvas was inspired by Alex Osterwalder’s The Business Model Canvas. Alex’s work completely changed my view on what was possible and I could not have created the KISS without his inspiration.

My great thanks to the many people who have contributed to the KISS Canvas design over the years. Some who I need to particularly call out for their awesomeness are Rick Plaut, Kelly Minton, and Liz Slavkovsky.

Thank you also to PixelEdge‘s Muhammad Awais Amjad for applying his design skills to make the canvas as attractive to look at as it is functional!

Build your own KISS Canvas (Free!)

Below are three different formats ready-for-use. The KISS Canvas is licensed under creative commons, which means you may use or modify it freely.

Image for virtual whiteboards

Printable poster (4×3 feet)

Googlesheet

A Canvas That Tells a Story: KISS Canvas (v6.0)

[This is part of a series on the KISS Canvas]

UPDATE: This blog post is about version 6 of the KISS Canvas. Version 7 was release in December of 2023 and incorporates critical improvements that facilitate product-market fit & adoption.

Struggling to map your business model because you have lots of stakeholders / customer segments?

The Keep It Super Simple (KISS) Canvas takes your complex, multi-sided business model and turns it into an easy-to-understand story. Each row answers a key question about a stakeholder. Each column represents a stakeholder: payers, users, channel partners, employees, etc. One can easily turn a KISS Canvas into a pitch deck for investors by simply creating slides that mirror the content in each row.

Let’s look at an example for for for-profit manufacturing startup: Magic Mops

Here we have a company that makes ergonomic mops used by janitors who work for commercial cleaning companies who purchased the mops through a distributor. These stakeholders have very different pains and incentives. Magic Mops must have a viable business model for all three stakeholders or their company will fail.

Now lets look at the model for a nonprofit entrepreneurship support organization: Valley Venture Mentors

Like many nonprofits, Valley Venture Mentors had 3 key stakeholder groups: funders, benefactors (in this case entrepreneurs), and volunteers (mentors). To thrive it had to make sure that all three were being served.

The KISS Canvas, in one page, highlights:

• Who each stake holder is and what motivates them
• The value that must be delivered
• The relationships needed to find, convert, & retain them
• The value each provides Magic Mops

Get Your Own KISS Canvas Template For Free

If you would like to use the KISS Canvas, you may do so completely for free as it are licensed under creative commons :).

Image for virtual whiteboards

Printable poster (4×3 feet)

Googlesheet

KISS’s Questions

• Key Stakeholders – Who do you serve? Each stakeholder gets their own column to keep their information clear.
  • Type – Stakeholders tend to fall into predictable categories: the one who pays you, the one who uses the product, the one who connects you to the customer, etc. It is important to know each type’s needs.
  • Persona – Describe the archetype that represents the key traits of this the stakeholder.
  • Pains – What problems do they have?
• Value Proposition – What do you offer?
  • Benefits – What promises are you making to your customers?
  • Competitors – Who else is solving the problem?
  • Advantages – How are you superior at solving the problem?
• Relationships – What kind of relationships will you have with each segment?
  • Find – How will you make people aware of your solution? This is often called marketing or promotion.
  • Convert – Once aware of you, what process will they go through to use/pay for your solution? This is often called sales.
  • Retain – Once someone is using your solution, how will you retain their loyalty?
• Financials – How does the money (and value) flow?
  • Value Model – What value does each segment provide you in return for your product (money, attention, referrals, etc.)?
  • Pricing – How much do you charge?
  • Cost Structure –  What are the costs associated with serving this stakeholder?

Best Practices

• The column headers are just suggestions. You don’t have to describe a payer, user, and channel partner. You could instead ID different stakeholders like funders, volunteers, & beneficiaries. You can add additional columns (although I recommend no more than 5 total columns).
• At the start erase every assumption about a solution from your thinking so that you can (1st) expand the universe of the potential stakeholders, then (2nd) discover all the different stakeholders’ personas, in order to determine (3rd) their primary migraine-sized pains, and then (4th) bring to bear the benefits that your solution might/must provide.
• Be clear & concise by staying within the size limit to the boxes.
• Consider everything in a box as a hypothesis waiting to be validated by actual interactions with customers.
• Don’t agonize. Filling in the canvas should take 30-90 minutes. Then go test the hypotheses with customers, update the canvas, and repeat as needed.
• Indicate validated hypotheses by changing their background color to be a darker shade of its original color.

Why KISS instead of the BMC?

30-page business plans are great for established businesses and terrible for startups that need to iterate quickly. 15+ years ago the Business Model Canvas (BMC) changed everything by giving us a 1-pager to help quickly document and test the key hypothesis behind our business models. The BMC was a quantum leap forward.

However, my students and I often struggled with the structure of the canvas. While it was superior to a business plan it was relatively hard to read & use. You literally needed a map to show you how to read it – start here, jump to there, then jump down to here…

A second major pain point is that if you have multiple customer segments or stakeholders, you need to use different colored sticky notes. I found that trying to filter out the information visually was very difficult, as you can see from this actual canvas I developed for a startup accelerator I was running in 2015…

Get Your Own KISS Canvas Template For Free

If you would like to use the KISS Canvas, you may do so completely for free as it are licensed under creative commons :).

Image for virtual whiteboards

Printable poster (4×3 feet)

Googlesheet

Check out more KISS Canvas Content.

Gratitude

The KISS canvas was inspired by Alex Osterwalder’s The Business Model Canvas. My great thanks to the many people who have contributed to the KISS Canvas design over the years. Two who I need to particularly call out for their awesomeness are Rick Plaut and Kelly Minton.

Thank you also to PixelEdge‘s Muhammad Awais Amjad for applying his design skills to make the newest version of the canvas attractive to look at and functional at the same time!

A canvas to help Business Services teams innovate

If you work in a business services company (consulting, accounting, legal, etc.) and are in charge of evaluating ideas for innovation, most of the tools you’ve heard of don’t work. The same is true if you are trying to quickly show junior staff value each of your service lines offers to your clients and to your firm. So I created the KISS (Keep It Super Simple) Canvas for Business Services.

Template (click to view Google Sheet version)

All of the key information you need to do a basic assessment of an idea’s potential, or to communicate your business model quickly, fits in about 500 words (one page). Some highlights:

• For the Client (in Green)
  • What clients you’ll sell this to and if they represent an economically interesting opportunity.
  • How committed the initial clients are to embracing the innovation.
  • The value proposition for each key stakeholder at your Clients’ organizations.
• For your company (in blue)
  • The value proposition to the key stakeholders in the business units (BUs)
  • The level of commitment from that business unit to champion this innovation.

Example (click to view Google Sheet version)

The Story It Tells

For the client: A set of current clients who build and run renewable energy facilities have a problem. If we can solve that problem, there are a much broader range of clients with similar problems, so there looks to be a sizable market opportunity. Clients’ senior managers spend too much time and capital when screening sites, hurting project IRR (internal rate of return). The innovation addresses this challenge by eliminating poor sites quickly and cheaply, increasing the IRR for each site. While there are lots of alternate ways to solve this problem, the proposed software+consultant solution gives clients the best of both worlds. They get better data quickly, and when there is a question that software can’t answer comes up, consultants with deep expertise are a click away.

For the consulting firm: One business unit is already committing staff to test this idea out, and if it works there are a lot of other business units that could benefit from it. Partners in the firm are losing work to competitors that can do it faster and cheaper. A software site screening tool tied to the firm’s consultants would get them in the door earlier on projects, increases margins at the early stages, and streamline and win more the intensive work on the projects later. The firm could use some of the existing software solution on the market, but doing so would not increase the productivity of their workforce and drive their margins.

What this Canvas Does Not Cover

This tool does not worry about 10,000 other things that matter, but are not critically important at the start. Marketing, sales, revenue models, and partnerships aren’t covered because most business services companies only want innovations that leverage their existing systems and partnerships.

This tool has proven to be effective at allowing junior staff to run initial screens of idea submissions. This saves senior people time to work on the most high-potential ideas.

Get your own copy of the KISS (Keep It Super Simple) Canvas for Business Services.

A Canvas That Tells a Story: KISS Canvas (v3.1)

A newer version (4.0) was release in June of 2021, read about it here.

For historical reasons, here is the v3.1 post…

[This is part of a series on the KISS Canvas]

Why

30-page business plans are great for established businesses and terrible for startups that need to iterate quickly. 15 years ago the Business Model Canvas (BMC) changed everything by giving us a 1-pager (or 4×3 foot poster) to help you quickly document and test the key hypothesis behind your business model. The BMC was a quantum leap forward.

However, my students and I often struggled with the structure of the canvas. While it was superior to a business plan it was relatively hard to read & use. You literally needed a map to show you how to read it – start here, jump to there, then jump down to here…

In a Nutshell

And so was born the KISS (Keep It Super Simple) Canvas. Each key stakeholder (payers, users, channel partners, etc.) gets their own row. Read the columns in each row from left to right and you’ll find the facts of the business model layed out in a logical narrative structure. In fact, it tells the story of your business, as you would in a good pitch. The bottom of the canvas holds the “waterfall of wisdom” where you store your invalidated hypothesis, so you can easily remember and tell the story of what you’ve learned in your startup journey. No map required.

At the highest level, this KISS canvas tells the following story just by reading from left to right: We help [key Stakeholders] by providing [value proposition]. We find, earn, and retain their trust by [relationships]. This is economically sustainable because of [financials].

Example:

We help the blind and visually impaired by empowering them to connect with their fully sighted friends and family as equals. We find, earn, and retain their trust through word-of-mouth and strategic partnerships with nonprofits that serve the blind. Customers pay us an $8 monthly subscription.

And today, after 3 years of field testing, I’m proud to roll out version 3! It has two variants. The first is…

KISS Canvas (Lite)

This variant is for people at the “I have an idea” stage.

KISS Canvas (Lite)

• Key Stakeholders – Who do you serve?
  • Segments – Name each of the groups of people you will deliver value to: payers, users, channel partners, etc. Each gets their own row.
  • Deciders – Describe the actual people (COO, front-line employee, Head of New Products, etc.) who make the decisions for each segment.
  • Pains – What problems do they have?
• Value Proposition – What do you offer?
  • Features – How will you solve their problems?
  • Benefits – What promises are you making to your customers?
  • Competitors – Who else is solving the problem?
  • Competitive Advantages – How are you superior at solving the problem?
• Relationships – What kind of relationships will you have with each segment?
  • Marketing – How will you make people aware of your solution?
  • Sales – Once aware of you, what process will they go through to use/pay for your solution?
  • Retention – Once someone is using your solution, how will you retain their loyalty?
• Financials – How does the money (and value) flow?
  • Value Model – What value does each segment provide you in return for your product (money, attention, referrals, etc.)?
  • Pricing – How much do you charge?
  • Cost Structure –  What are the costs associated with running your venture?
• Waterfall of Wisdom – When you disprove a hypothesis, have it “fall” vertically down into the Waterfall of Wisdom. Each hypothesis in the waterfall represents something you thought was true… and found out it was not! That’s the beginning of wisdom :).

KISS Canvas (Full)

If you are past the I-have-an-idea stage and ready to really develop your business model, then you’ll need to start answering much more detailed questions in each section. If that is you, then check out the full version of the KISS Canvas, where just about all the top-priority questions for a startup have been laid out in step-by-step, fill-in-the-blank fashion…

KISS Canvas (Full)

Examples (inspired by real startups):

• A Business to Consumer (B2C) company selling slime to kids and their parents
• A Business to Business (B2B) company selling ergonomic mops

Get Your Own (free!)

If you would like to use the KISS Canvas, you may do so completely for free as they are licensed under creative commons :).

• KISS Canvas (Lite)
• KISS Canvas (Full)

Check out more KISS Canvas Content.

KISS Canvas 9. Cost Structure

[This is a part of a series on the KISS Canvas]

What are the major cost centers of your business? When do you have to pay? Do you have any options to pay differently? What costs can kill you? All of this is covered in the Cost Structure section of the KISS Canvas.

Here is each sub-lesson:

1. Intro
2. Capital costs
3. Fixed  & Variable costs
4. Example: a family
5. Summary

Check out more KISS Canvas Content.

Introduction to the KISS Canvas

[This is part of a series on the KISS Canvas]

The KISS (Keep It Super Simple) Canvas (inspired by Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas) is a 1-page (or 4×3 foot poster) to help you quickly document (and then test) the key hypothesis behind your business model.

If you like to read, keep scrolling. For video lovers, click below!

OK, let’s dive in. It looks like this…

The KISS canvas tells a story in the way entrepreneurs should pitch, with the most important elements first (on the left).

• The Customer – Who do you serve?
  • Segments – Who are all the groups of people you will serve? Buyers, users, referrers, etc.
  • Pains – What problems do they have? Which are most important?
• Value Proposition – What do you offer?
  • Features – How will you solve your customers problems?
  • Benefits – What promises are you making to your customers?
  • Competitive Advantages – Who are your competitors and how are you better at solving your customers’ Pains?
• Marketing & Sales – What kind of relationships will you have with customers?
  • Get – How will you find and acquire customers?
  • Keep – How will you prove you kept your promises?
  • Grow – What new promises might you make?
• Financial –
  • Value Model – What value do customers provide you in return for your product?
  • Cost Structure –  What are the costs associated with running your venture?
• Beard of Learning – When you disprove a hypothesis, move it to the bottom. If you’re using sticky notes they will eventually form chains and completely cover the bottom of your canvas. It kind of looks like your canvas grew a beard. Each sticky in that beard represents a hypothesis the student thought was true… and found out it was not! Thus the name my students gave it, the “Beard of Learning” :).

This Canvas is by no means a complete map but I have found it is the foundation of everything else that is to follow. To get a better feel…

• Examples
• If you like using sticky notes & posters, here is a 4×3 ft poster (PDF) w/ lots of details. Just send it to your local print shop, ask for black & white, 4ft by 3 ft, laminated. Probably run you $30-50.
• Or if you prefer to work with digital files, here is an editable version (a Googlesheet), once you open it go to FILE > MAKE A COPY

Check out more KISS Canvas Content.

KISS Canvas 8. Value Models

[This is a part of a series on the KISS Canvas]

What price should you charge for your product? How should people pay you? What value do non-paying customers provide you? All of this is covered in the Value & Revenue model column of the KISS Canvas.

Here is each sub-lesson:

1. Intro
2. Every customer segment pays
3. Understand customer expectations
4. Know your models
5. Choose your pricing strategy carefully
6. Discover your price point(s)
7. Summary

Check out more KISS Canvas Content.

KISS Canvas: 7. Grow (Research & Development)

[This is a part of a series on the KISS Canvas]

If your flagship product is a success, what next? This section of the canvas helps you think through what new products you might offer and what new customer segments you might approach. This video explains some of the core concepts…

Here is each sub-lesson:

1. Intro
2. Add “sizes”
3. Solve your customer’s other problems
4. Bring your existing product to new customer segments
5. Summary

Check out more KISS Canvas Content.

KISS Canvas: 6. Keep (Customer Retention)

[This is a part of a series on the KISS Canvas]

This section of the canvas helps you think through customer retention. Once you a customer purchases your product, how do you prove to them you have kept your promises?

Here is each sub-lesson:

1. Intro & Keeping your customers is the right and smart thing to do
2. Make your benefits visible
3. Scorecards make benefits visible
4. Summary

Check out more KISS Canvas Content.

KISS Canvas: 5. Get (Marketing & Sales Channels)

[This is a part of a series on the KISS Canvas]

This section of the canvas helps you understand the many different ways you can find and cultivate relationships with your customers (AKA marketing & sales). Here is a video explaining the how to use this part of the canvas and tips for understanding and strengthening your hypothesis around customer acquisition.

Here is each sub-lesson:

1. Intro
2. Decide: direct or indirect
3. Decide: physical or digital
4. Discover key channel metrics
5. Decide how you’ll generate leads
6. Determine cost to acquire a customer
7. Summary

Check out more KISS Canvas Content.