One of the start-ups I’m currently advising is Atomic Contacts. I really like the concept because a) I think the founder is very bright and has what it takes to build a great company and b) the problem of contact management is still a pain after all these years. If you think about it, it’s a ridiculous anachronism of the pre-network age that we still manage our own private database of contacts. As the Atomic Contacts tag line says, your contacts should “manage themselves.”
We’re not under any illusion that we’re the only ones who have thought of this and are proposing solutions (Plaxo, CirlceBack, Bump, Soocial, Unyk all have their own takes on it and we wish them well). To differentiate Atomic Contacts we’re doing some brainstorming around Customer-Problem-Solution and I created a document to track our hypotheses.
I also figured it would be useful to create a generic version and publish it for people to use. You can see it below and access/edit it here – please tell us what you think.
I like this, I would put sequence as Problem, Customer, Alternatives, Solution, Advantages, ROI to force yourself to define the problem and current alternatives for a particular class or category of first customer first. But I find his more useful than the Business Model Canvas approach.