5 ways to use a Whiteboard for your entrepreneurial endeavours

Whiteboards are a highly versatile tool - being used at elementary schools as well as boardrooms. While whiteboards are great for a lot of things, they could be an entrepreneur's best buddy!

Here are the five ways in which entrepreneurs can use a whiteboard:

1. A whiteboard is a great tool to build, test, and iterate against your 1-page Business Model using a lean canvas approach. To be able to quickly deconstruct your idea into its key assumptions and visualize it all at once could very well be the catalyst you have been looking for in your entrepreneurial pursuits.

2. Whiteboard sketching is an excellent Product Development tool and brings the best of logic, intuition, creativity, innovation, and collaboration. Whiteboards contribute to the product development process by facilitating better idea exploration, collaboration, and a more clearly-communicated vision.

3. A focused Go to Market strategy that smartly deploys resources and channels your efforts in the right direction can strongly enhance the probability of your success. While there are different frameworks that facilitate the design of a go to market plan, my personal best is Leslie’s Compass: A Framework For Go-To-Market Strategy. This framework exhibits the interplay between sales and marketing across seven variables (Price, Market Size, Complexity, Fit, Customer, Relationship, and Touch). A whiteboard based Go to Market sketching that illustrates how your product is positioned across each of these variables can help you identify inter-dependencies, connect the dots, and develop an executable plan.

4. The ability to sketch out and visualize your buyer’s / user’s journey on a whiteboard is an incredible way to understand the key touch points and helps in delivering a seamless experience to your users. You can find here 14 visualizations mapping the buyer journey and select the ones that best maps with your situation.

5. As you grow and hire, your foremost job is to ensure that your employees are motivated, and are operating productively in an environment that is aligned with company’s vision and culture. A whiteboard based daily team huddle can go a long way in establishing the desired culture and work ethic. And a positive quote out there every morning can set the right tone for the day ahead.