Last month, I had the opportunity to give a presentation to a large group of students participating in the InventOR pitch competition.

If you aren’t familiar, InventOR is a competition that brings together every college and university in Oregon and gives students the chance to present innovative ideas they are working on for a chance to win $25,000 of grant funding.

I was asked to facilitate a workshop specifically on the “Business Model Canvas”.

This can be a very useful tool for adding structure to ideas and identifying key questions associated with your business.

Even if you are an experienced entrepreneur or product manager, I am a big advocate of having a toolkit of various frameworks (ie BMC, 4Ps, SWOT, etc) when you need to force yourself to think about your business challenges from a few different perspectives or to shed new insights if you get stuck.

But the purpose of this article isn’t to tell you how cool the “Business Model Canvas” is.

No matter which approach, framework or tools you choose, the most important element to any strategy is being able to quickly test and validate it on real users.

And also to not only talk about your product thesis but think about creative ways to design a functional first version.

A big pet peeve of mine is when people talk about future products that don’t exist as if they are already built and people love them.

I chose to walk through Udacity as a case study with the students because it’s one of my favorite companies and a topic I am personally very passionate about.

In addition to walking through the example, I emphasized two additions to the framework that I believe anyone doing this exercise should always include.

Make a Customer Journey Diagram before doing the Business Model Canvas (or using any framework)

I often advocate for making customer journey diagrams at the very beginning of any process.

This is no exception.

It’s because they are so damn insightful and illuminate so many questions you may not have thought about otherwise.

If you do this before populating the areas in the Business Model Canvas, you’ll have a much better understanding of your customers which will help you input better information into the canvas.

Ask yourself, “How can I test this idea without building anything new and by using existing, off the shelf technology?” Then do it.

This one is huge.

Many new entrepreneurs, product managers, senior managers in larger companies, etc fall into the trap of wanting to build the “perfect product” before getting any user feedback.

In many cases (exceptions being rockets, autonomous vehicles, huge AI projects, etc), you can use existing technology to emulate the user experience that your product will create.

Even if it’s not perfect, you can test your idea a hell of a lot faster and get valuable feedback quickly.

In the example of Udacity, you can see this DNA clearly even now.

They use YouTube to host videos and Slack to facilitate chats with mentors.

That is not a knock.

They produce really great content and have helpful mentors.

That is the core value of their business.

Even as a multi-billion dollar company, they didn’t reinvent the wheel on things that were already available which weren’t central to their customer value.