Lean Canvas Pricing Plans Go Into Effect Today

Here’s the updated pre-announcement back from January:

Hope you are having a great 2012 so far. I’d like to share a few announcements and our product direction for Lean Canvas. But first lets start with some vanity metrics:

Lean Canvas currently has over 8,000 12,000 canvases documented and we’re adding over 50 canvases a day.

The reason these numbers are vanity metrics is because first they have nowhere to go but up – Lean Canvas sign-ups are largely driven by other activities like book sales, and workshops. Second, the more interesting metric isn’t sign-ups, but retention i.e. what ongoing value are people deriving from repeated usage. This is something we’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about. Here’s what we learned.

The initial value of the canvas is brainstorming but the ongoing value comes from conversations with people other than yourself – co-founders, advisors, investors, even competitors.

Success is unlocked at the intersection of these conversations and we believe Lean Canvas can greatly reduce the friction of these exchanges.

Here are some of the features we’ve recently pushed towards this end:

1. Realtime editing
The canvas is a living document. We wanted to make it fast and easy to co-edit the canvas with your team. No refreshing required.

2. Single view
We’ve consolidated the business model, collaborators, comments, and experiments into a single view so everything is within easy reach. No more switching between pages.

3. New Experiments functionality
After the initial canvas creation, most of the work happens with the proper prioritization and execution of experiments. We revamped the old experiments screen to make this process easier with more guidance, commenting, and the ability to upload files. No more guesswork on what’s already been tested.

There’s even more stuff in the pipeline:

1. Canvas Snapshots
Go back in time and see what was said and done.

2. Presence, email notifications, @mentions
Get feedback easily from collaborators whether they’re next door or halfway across the world.

3. Innovation Accounting
Communicate ongoing learning with your entire team using a one-page dashboard.

As you can see, there’s a lot of work going into Lean Canvas. Last year, I also created a new company, Spark59, to consolidate all the different products we were building. Moving forward, Lean Canvas will be one of the portfolio products developed by Spark59 with access to more resources.

We are also starting the transition out of the early access program (where we were bundling Lean Canvas with the Running Lean book) and make Lean Canvas a stand-alone product. Effective February 15 March 1, we’ll be rolling out a new pricing model that reflects the “Startups as Conversations” focus:

What you need to do

• Everyone has been placed in the “Ideate” plan.
• If you are currently exceeding the plan limits, you’ll get an alert message at the top of the screen with instructions on how to upgrade your account.
• If you qualify as an academic or non-profit drop us a line and we’ll make the changes for you.

We’d love to hear your thoughts…