Coherence Is Not Evidence
Why a business model that holds together can still be completely wrong
Coherence Is Not Evidence
Why a business model that holds together can still be completely wrong
At this stage, you have identified a customer, a problem, and you know what you have learned and what you still need to find out. Now, our task is to use that knowledge to build the venture’s first real structure: a single-page business model. The aim is not to plan every detail, but to put your best current thinking in one place. This includes how the customer, the value, the operations, and the money fit together. Each assumption should be visible so you can test it. The challenge is that a model can seem convincing before it has been checked with a real customer. By the end of this chapter, you will have a canvas you can support, the discipline to keep it honest, and a set of questions to ask the people who can answer them. If a structured tool will help, you will find a note at the end of the section.
We left the Meridian Team at a pause, and they came back from it in better shape than they left.
The two weeks paid off. Three calls with compliance people in their network told them something they’d been guessing at, and guessing wrong: the decision about compliance tooling wasn’t one decision. Part of it sat with the compliance function and part with IT procurement, and the line between them fell in a different place at almost every company they looked at. They rewrote that section of the Opportunity Statement, the customer came into focus, and for the first time, the team wasn’t guessing about what mattered most.
So they did the next thing you’re supposed to do. They built the canvas, starting from the customer and the value proposition and working outward, through channels and relationships, the activities and resources the model would take, the partners, the rough shape of where the money would come from and go. Nine blocks, two evenings. They stood back, looked at the whole thing on one page, and it held together.
Which was the problem?
You could read it across, left to right, and it made sense the whole way, customer leading to value proposition leading to channels leading to the people they’d need. A clean story about how a problem and a solution fit, every block propping up the next. They took that as a sign they’d gotten it right.
They hadn’t tested a word of it.
This is a common trap, and it often catches careful teams more than careless ones. When an idea fits together in your mind, you may treat it as true, even if you have not checked it against anything outside your own reasoning. A canvas that connects each block can give you the real feeling that you have solved something. That feeling is the problem. Finishing a canvas and testing a canvas are not the same, even if the first feels like the second.
The Meridian Team built a hypothesis and mistook it for a finding. This is one of the most common things a founding team can do. When you fill in nine blocks, you may feel the satisfaction of the pieces fitting together. That sense of fit can stand in for fact. The more finished the page looks, the less likely anyone is to look for the one piece of evidence that could force them to change it.
At this stage, you are not building a business model. You are building the first honest map of the bet you are making. Every assumption is set out where you can see it. This is more valuable than a finished model at this point. A finished model now would mostly be fiction. The honest map is what you can actually use.
🔓 Inside the Living Manuscript
This article is an exclusive preview from my upcoming book, tentatively titled “The Behavioral Science of Entrepreneurial Innovation.”
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