Assignment: Mapping your "Big Idea"

Assignment
As your big idea is the foundation for your MVP experiment, you're going to map out your big idea first, before we move on to narrowing it down to a Minimum Viable Product.

How you're going to do this
The first four elements of my MVP Experiment Canvas are taken from Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas. The Business Model Canvas (BMC) is an easy to use tool to quickly define and communicate a business idea or concept.

It is a one page document which works through the fundamental elements of a business or product, structuring an idea in a coherent way. See a blank example below:

Don't worry if you don't know what to exactly put in the boxes in this early stage of your idea. The goal of this assignment is to get an overview of your big idea, so we can work with it during the rest of the course.

⚠️ Download links
You can use the PDF (print it out to use with sticky notes or edit in a PDF reader) or Google Draw version of the canvas here:

Or
go to this link to map it out for free using a tool called Canvanizer: https://canvanizer.com/new/business-model-canvas (take a screenshot when you're done to save it)

2-Minute video explainer by Alex Osterwalder's company Strategyzer

Here's another great video (9:41) explaining the BMC in more detail.

or read this short explainer document in PDF:

Don't have an idea to work with?
If you joined No-Code MVP with an idea of your own, you can work through this assignment and the rest of the course using that idea. If you don't have something to work with yet, we're going to work with my idea for an online service I call "Homeworth Direct". You can view it in the next part of this chapter.