What are Existing Alternatives in a Lean Canvas?

Definition

Existing Alternatives are how target customers solve the problem today without you - including spreadsheets, manual workflows, rival tools, or doing nothing at all.

Why it matters

You are almost never competing against another startup. You are competing against Excel, against Google Docs, against WhatsApp groups, against "I just remember it in my head." Understanding that determines your pricing, your onboarding friction tolerance, and your marketing copy. If your alternative is free Excel, charging 49 PLN/month needs to buy back hours of work; if the alternative is a 199 PLN/month competitor, you can anchor against that. Getting this wrong means selling aspirin to people who already take ibuprofen for free.

How it applies

You launch a CRM for solo consultants. Bad thinking: "our competitors are HubSpot and Salesforce." Good thinking: your actual existing alternatives are (1) a messy Google Sheet with client names and dates, (2) Gmail labels and a pinned note in Apple Notes, (3) remembering who promised to pay what. Now your landing page doesn't say "better than HubSpot" - it says "stop tracking client payments in a spreadsheet that crashes every time you sort by amount owed." That copy hits the actual friction the customer feels every Monday.

Common mistakes

• Listing only funded startups as alternatives - most customers are using Excel.
• Missing "doing nothing" as an alternative - often the #1 competitor for any tool is inertia.
• Underestimating how good free-and-mediocre solutions actually are for most users.
• Assuming customers will switch just because you are better - switching cost is real and often beats improvement.