09/06/2026
If you run a two-sided marketplace built to serve the people on one side of it, your business model canvas is quietly lying to you.
It gives you one box marked Customer Segments. But you have two customers who could not be more different: the side that pays, and the side you actually built the venture to help. Force both into one box and you hide the most important fact about your business. Neither side shows up unless the other does, and one of them is your mission.
The tools we reach for were each built for half of this. The classic Business Model Canvas assumes a single linear customer. The Social Enterprise Model Canvas centres the mission but not the network. The Platform Canvas captures the network but stays silent on impact. Stack the three blind spots and a fourth risk appears: mission drift. The marketplace grows while the purpose quietly dies.
So I built an adaptation that holds all of it on one surface with the help of Gen AI. The Marketplace Social Enterprise Canvas splits the customer in two, flags which side carries your beneficiaries, puts the matching engine at the centre where it belongs, and separates impact measures from output measures with a tripwire for drift.
Here is the question it forces, and the one worth sitting with this week. If your marketplace doubled its transactions next year, would the people you set out to serve be measurably better off, or merely busier?
I have written up the full framework. Link in the comments.
