Platform Canvas
The Platform Canvas (Ladd, Allweins & Proesch) maps a multi-sided platform block by block: consumer and producer segments, value propositions and substitutes mirrored either side of the core interaction, with the facilitation and stimuli that make the interaction happen in the middle, and cost, monetisation and metrics beneath.
Blocks mirror each other either side of a central interaction, with cost and metrics running along the bottom.
Reach for this when…
- You keep describing your platform as 'like Uber for X' instead of mapping your own consumer and producer sides.
- Supply and demand aren't matching and you can't tell if it's a value-proposition problem on one side or a facilitation problem in the middle.
- You're pricing the platform without having separated the cost model from how each side actually gets monetised.
How to run it
- Define consumer segments and producer segments separately - they are not the same audience wearing different hats.
- Write the value proposition for each side: what each gets that they couldn't get without the platform.
- Design the core interaction: how a consumer and producer actually find and exchange value with each other.
- Build the facilitation layer and the stimuli that get both sides in and keep them coming back.
- Name the substitutes on each side: what a consumer or producer would do instead of your platform.
- Set the cost model, monetisation and metrics that prove the platform pays for itself.
A worked example
Situation. Bereket Alemu was building Adwa Mobi, an electric-scooter share scheme in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and kept pitching it as a copy of bigger city schemes without mapping his own blocks.
Applied. Working through the Platform Canvas, he separated the producer segment, independent scooter owners renting out their own fleets, from the consumer segment, riders paying per trip, and wrote a distinct value proposition for each: guaranteed utilisation for owners, guaranteed availability for riders.
Result. Naming the producer segment on its own terms let him recruit small local scooter owners as supply instead of buying a fleet himself, which was the capital he didn't have.
The catch
Twelve blocks is a lot to fill in well - it's easy to write vague segments that don't hold up once real people show up, or to copy the consumer side's value proposition onto the producer side with the nouns swapped. It also says nothing about the chicken-and-egg problem of getting the first side to show up.
If the producer side of your canvas reads like the consumer side with the words swapped, you haven't designed a second side, you've decorated the first one.
Origin: Ted Ladd, Marcel Allweins & Markus Proesch