Business Model Canvas App for Windows 8
A business model canvas is the lean alternative to a business plan. They say no business plan survives first contact with customers, so why write a large inflexible document. A business model canvas is supposed to give you at a glance the key important aspects and assumptions of your business. It shouldn't stay the same, but should change as you prove and disprove the assumptions your business model is based on. The idea comes from Alexander Osterwalder and he wrote about in his book Business Model Generation.
I've been playing about with them for a few of my ideas and decided to create this app for my Windows 8 tablet. I made it for me as I wanted it and just put it in the store in case anyone else might find it useful. It was a very true version of an MVP, but as a free app it has being doing very well and has been in the top free business apps category almost since day one.
As it is an MVP there is lots of scope for improvements. The strongest feedback I got was to add the ability to print and save. The person who asked for saving more than one canvas said he'd be willing to pay a small amount for this feature. I thought it might be a good oportunity to try in app purchases. I've wanted to experiment with these both as a business model and to find out how to implement them in Windows 8. So I added printing as a free option, but made saving more than one canvas an in app purchase for the cheepest price I could charge in the store.
I don't really have enough data yet, but so far it's been better than I expected. A lot more people have downloaded this free app, than have my paid app which comes with a trial and since I released the latest version 2% have bought the in app purchase. Now that's only 5 people, so I'm not rich yet, and the percentage is probably skewed by people who'd already downloaded the app. However, it's still enough to make me think that free useful apps with compelling in app purachses could be the way forward.
If you fancy checking my app you can get it in the Windows 8 Store.
Jason said
Looks great, I will definitely be downloading this to help with managing my own projects.
Does it or will it support sharing between multiple people? That's an in-app purchase I would definitely pay for.
Richard Garside said
You could save the file to a Sky Drive shared folder and share it that way. But there's nothing built in. Great idea, but I guess it would need versioning so you could be clear who had done what. Added it to my future feature list.