There are many ways to think about a business model. One of the most effective is described and illustrated by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur in their best-selling book Business Model Generation.* In their structure, a business model includes nine basic elements:

Revenue streams. Where the money comes from: how the business generates income from the value propositions it offers to customers.

You need to know your market extremely well to run your business. What you do not have to do, however, is to include everything you know about it in your lean business plan.

There are three characteristics that together make a startup business model truly scalable: You have to be able to start small. Unless you happen to be the long-lost daughter of Emperor Palpatine, the odds are that you do not have enough capital to build your first Death Star, nor will you be able to raise the funds to do so.† The ideal startup is

Key activities. What the business does to make its business model work, such as inventing, buying, building, distributing, operating, and so forth.

The single most important component of any business plan—lean, traditional, or any other kind—is a review schedule.

One unusual offering comes from eDataSource.com, which specializes in tracking competitors' e-mail marketing campaigns. The company regularly tracks 24 million daily e-mail campaigns from 50,000 brands and can provide fascinating intelligence about things your competitors are doing in your customers' e-mail inboxes.

The lean plan is about what is supposed to happen, when it is supposed to happen, who does what, how much it costs, and how much money it generates.

A product or service can be cool, or innovative, or beautiful, or even useful, but it only becomes a viable business if the aggregate economics of the value being created are significantly more than the aggregate economics of the costs of operating the business.