The frameworks founders actually use — and the tool to apply each one

Business Model Canvas

Alexander Osterwalder · 2005

Your entire business on one page — nine blocks from value proposition to cost structure.

Apply with 🗂️ Business Model Canvas

Value Proposition Canvas

Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur · 2014

Zooms into the two blocks that kill most startups — what customers actually want vs what you're actually offering.

Apply with 💡 Value Proposition Canvas

SWOT Analysis

Albert S. Humphrey · 1960s

Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats — a four-quadrant sort that only pays off when you pair the quadrants.

Apply with ⚔️ SWOT Analysis

Porter's Five Forces

Michael E. Porter · 1979

Why some industries print money and others grind — five structural forces that claim your profit before rivals do.

Apply with ⚡ Competitor Analysis

Blue Ocean Strategy

W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne · 2004

Stop fighting for share in bloody red oceans — create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant.

Apply with ⚡ Competitor Analysis

The Golden Circle

Simon Sinek · 2009

Start with why — people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

Apply with 🗣️ Elevator Pitch Builder

Positioning (Obviously Awesome)

April Dunford · 2019

Positioning is context-setting: deliberately choose the market frame that makes your strengths obvious.

Apply with 📣 Marketing Strategy

Zero to One

Peter Thiel · 2014

Competition is for losers — build something 10x better for a small market you can monopolize, then expand.

Apply with 📏 Market Sizing

The Lean Startup

Eric Ries · 2011

Treat your startup as a series of experiments — ship, measure real behavior, learn before you scale.

Apply with 🏗️ MVP Definition

Lean Canvas

Ash Maurya · 2010

The Business Model Canvas rebuilt for pre-product startups — problem and metrics in, partners and resources out.

Apply with 📋 Lean Canvas

Customer Development

Steve Blank · 2005

Search for the business model before you execute it — four steps that put talking to customers ahead of building for them.

Apply with 🧪 Assumptions Tracker

Jobs to be Done

Clayton Christensen · 2003

Customers don't buy products — they hire them to make progress. Find the job, and the real competition stops hiding.

Apply with 🔍 Problem Statement Canvas

The Mom Test

Rob Fitzpatrick · 2013

How to ask customers questions even your mom can't lie to you about — talk about their life, not your idea.

Apply with 🧪 Assumptions Tracker

Lean Analytics

Alistair Croll & Benjamin Yoskovitz · 2013

One Metric That Matters, chosen by your business model and stage — because tracking everything means learning nothing.

Apply with ⭐ North Star Metrics

AARRR Pirate Metrics

Dave McClure · 2007

Five funnel stages — Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue — and exactly one honest metric for each.

Apply with 📊 Growth Scorecard

The Hook Model

Nir Eyal · 2014

The four-phase loop — trigger, action, variable reward, investment — that turns products into habits.

Apply with 🔒 Retention Strategy

North Star Metric

Sean Ellis · 2017

One metric that measures the value customers actually receive — and aligns every team behind moving it.

Apply with ⭐ North Star Metrics

Crossing the Chasm

Geoffrey Moore · 1991

The gap between early adopters and the mainstream kills more products than competition does — cross it with a beachhead, not a broadside.

Apply with 🚀 Go-to-Market Strategy

The Flywheel

Jim Collins · 2001

No single push makes a company great — momentum comes from consistent turns of one self-reinforcing loop.

Apply with 🔄 Growth Loops

Bullseye Framework

Gabriel Weinberg & Justin Mares · 2014

Nineteen traction channels, three rings, one winner — a process for finding the channel that actually moves your numbers.

Apply with 📡 Channel Strategy

OKRs

Andy Grove & John Doerr · 1999

A qualitative objective sets the direction; three to five measurable key results prove you actually got there.

Apply with 🎯 OKRs

RICE Prioritization

Sean McBride & the Intercom product team · 2016

Reach × Impact × Confidence ÷ Effort — a score that makes roadmap debates about evidence instead of volume.

Apply with 🛣️ Development Roadmap

Working Backwards (PR/FAQ)

Colin Bryar & Bill Carr · 2021

Write the press release before the product — Amazon's method for killing bad ideas while they're still cheap.

Apply with 📝 Product Description