So now we get to now we come on to the the key key activities. And here we think about what are the things that the company has to do to create and to deliver its value proposition. And there are thousands of things practically the thing you have to do to do that, what we're looking at here is a high level approach and try to pick the three to four most important things that your organization or your company has to do or has to get done in order to deliver the value proposition to to your customers. So there are four things that they that the key activities have to do. The first one really obviously is how do you produce your value proposition? Yeah, in the case of Ford or Tesla, this may be the one This means having a factory that assembles components from other suppliers.

It also means designing cars, so and then possibly just distribution as well. So those are three pretty, pretty critical key activities. But for those companies for a company like slack is very different. There what they're doing is focusing on building the platform because without the platform people can't communicate which is the whole point of the value proposition. And so, building and maintaining the platform. The next group of activities that you need to look at is how do you reach your markets?

So if you if you think about somebody like the the Rolling Stones or and then how do they reach their their audience of musicians? They question Grateful Dead, famously did it by doing lots and lots of touring. And they use the tools to sell albums. The Rolling Stones also does it by Tori. And they have a lot on Spotify and through traditional record sales. So each of these needs sets of activities.

So you need people to go out set concerts, find locations, set those up sell tickets market, that the concert, yeah, these are all components of the sales and marketing activity for that, that group. What do you need to do to get your, your message out there? And then there's a bunch of activities that are required to maintain relationships with customers. What do you need to be doing to to maintain relationships? You need to be regularly emailing them, you need to talk to them. Do you need to be standing in a retail shop?

Do you need to have people on the end of telephone, do you need to be on TV? What do you need to be doing? What are the key activities that are in gap you use on a regular basis to engage customers in maybe content creation, or a number of other things that just keep the whole business model churning through. And then finally, what activities do you need to undertake to actually maintain and the revenues that you get from from your customers. So if you're a consultant, you need to deliver a certain amount of personal service or consulting work. Or if you're a design firm, you need to deliver the designs to the customers.

So broadly speaking, there are three types of activity there are production activities, there are problem solving activities, and there are network activities. So production activities are the activities where you're involved in producing In designing, manufacturing something, making something and that can be physical or intellectual. So, for example, this course you're watching the production activities we're making and editing the videos writing out the content, and that got a production and every company is going to have some sort of production activities, or most other companies, who are consultants are offering services will tend to offer more problem solving type activities. So, for example, accountants will be trying to solve the problem of how do we fit the information that we have about this client's financial accounts into a format that satisfies a government or a regulator or some some other other body and so you're looking at what understanding that the problem And typically, activities that you'll be looking at here are either knowledge management, how do you spread knowledge throughout the organization and keep it maintained.

So everybody is the expert, that you're telling your customers that they are, and also the continuous training, how do you maintain that level of knowledge within the organization so that you are able to effectively solve the problems that your clients are bringing to you. And then the final one, and this is very appropriate for a lot of internet companies is the network and network management. And so this is this is because a lot of internet companies are based on on having a platform Skype has a telephony platform that allows people in one country to call person in a love country without the platform they have no business with The AdWords platform on search platform. Google has no business with that without a hitch chat platform, slack has no business. So the platform management is absolutely critical for these types of types of companies, you need to do the service provisioning, you need to make sure that everything is actually working.

And so this is everything from having the databases up and running to having the data flowing well between the consumer and you to having the engineers to support it, everything else that you need to run day to day operations. And then of course, you need to be doing the product promotion. You need to be letting people know when what the product is, where it is, how to use it, solving problems. And this is a big class of problems that anybody setting up an internet company needs to be looking at solving from work. Yeah, how to deliver those activities on a daily basis. And then finally, you're looking at integration.

How do you integrate your platform with other platforms? business, some businesses have made a business out of this in itself. So people like IFTTT and Zapier allow you to integrate different software platforms together without any code almost instantly. Other other companies that say for example, SAP SAP has API's, or connectors that are then allow you to connect to different types of business software. And this can be absolutely critical for allowing your customers to get the value that they need from from your product, how to do it again, you don't need to dig down into a massive amount of detail. A lot of the time it's going to be fairly obvious to you as you're working through the, the idea, these are the the key activities, these are the ones that I need to get done on a daily basis.

Yeah, almost. It's like, once you started who are the free people you can hire, hire coders to build a platform, I can hire a marketing person to get the word out there, and I gotta hire who. And that then gives you a pretty good idea of the most important activities that you need to undertake on a on a day by day basis. I don't generally go for more than three or four, maybe maybe five, because, again, generally most businesses, most startups, there are a small number of activities that have a disproportionate impact to the success of the company. If they're delivered well, of what you're doing in the business model canvas is identifying those critical activities. Please try to identify all activities that will take a vast amount of time, but is what is absolutely critical to you.

So, what I'd like you to do now go back to your business model canvas, add in the key key activities, and then start considering how that works with it with the rest of the business models. Any questions that you've got, please add them in the in the comments below or send me an email