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The aforementioned "stuff" includes more collaboration, reports, better versioning, and some new tools.

One of the core beliefs of lean startups and customer development is that you need to write stuff down. When you keep everything in your head, you end up ignoring contradictory evidence, forgetting important details, and generally making poor decisions.

The canvas is meant to be a quick way to write down the big, important building blocks of your startup. The goal here isn't to tell you what to do -- it's just meant to help you to make your own good decisions.

I like to start thinking about new businesses by filling in the one block on the canvas that I really care about. This is usually based on either your reason for starting the company or the unfair advantage you'll have once it's up and running. Once you've got that anchor, just sketch out a ton of different canvas variations that all have the one key block in common.

Try brainstorming from several different starting points -- for example, you might be a teacher (customer segment) who cares about spreading education (value proposition) and has some amazing phd research (key feature).

Basically, neighboring blocks affect each other. Whenever you edit a block, take a quick look at the ones beside it to see if your changes have broader implications. For example, if you learn something new about how your customers spend money, that could affect your revenue model which can then change your sales & acquisition channel.

Congrats - you just found your first risk! Now that you've moved beyond initial brainstorming, the main advantage of the tools is in helping you figure out the most important thing to work on next. A totally empty box (or one you're not too sure of) is a great place to start.

For example, you may be thinking about an amazing new way to book last minute airline tickets, but all of your ideas hinge on the leap of faith that you can get access to the flight data in a cheap enough way. You'll want to start with some experiments to find out if that's true. Some experiments may be as simple as online research, while others could involve interviewing industry experts, building demos, or even pre-selling your product. The toolkit has a risk dashboard for keeping track of these big questions.

Validating your beliefs is an ongoing process. Your business will always have more risks and your next big move will always be built on leaps of faith. You should continuously keep track of your top 3 risks and use them as a sanity-check for everything else you're working on. Is that new product feature really more important than resolving a mystery that your whole business is based on?

If you're embarking on customer development, you can use the canvas as a place to write down everything you're learning from your interviews & sales meetings. Over time, each block gets increasingly validated until you have a proven business model that's ready to seriously scale up.

It's also useful for sharing your ideas with your team, investors, and advisors.

A bunch of people way smarter than me! The worksheets and questions are from Steve Blank's book The 4 Steps to the Epiphany. The visual layout is based on the work done by Osterwalder, covered in great detail in the beautiful Business Model Generation book. Ash Maurya has also contributed his own twist on the canvas specifically for web startups. The risk dashboard is straight out of the pages of Komisar & Mullin's Getting to Plan B.

In some cases I've tweaked the content to make it fit a little better with early stage startups, but in most cases the knowledge is already out there. Unfortunately, it's often hidden within dense business books and expensive consultants. The Startup Toolkit is intended to take some of the pieces that have been most helpful to me and make them more readily available for other busy entrepreneurs.