As I sit down to write this article, I’ve just spent the last three hours building a fitness business from scratch. Other than three hours of my time, I also spent $300 to get the business off the ground.
I’ve literally just finished and launched. I pressed enter to send it live, and here I am – ready to tell you all about what went down over the last three hours.
To be honest, I probably could have done it quicker, but as I went I was catalogued the steps I took so I share the process with you, for you to copy.
As we go, I’ll give you a minute-by-minute, play-by-play of what went down. I’ll talk about the reasons for my decisions, the software I used, and anything else I think may be useful.
So let me share my idea, and the business I’ve just built.
Although it only took me three hours to build and launch this business, the seed for this business was planted six weeks ago – so let’s start our journey there.
For the last six months, I’ve been consulting for Developmental Disability WA – they’re an amazing organisation with the mission of enhancing quality of life for people with developmental disability and their families. We started by creating a two-part course to help fitness professionals better provide exercise interventions for people living with an intellectual disability, and then to help those individuals get access to fitness facilities. Over the last few months we’ve been rolling this program out around the state, and I’ve been leading these workshops.
I was speaking to a great group of fitness professionals in a 24 hour gym, and I knew most of them were also dabbling in the online programming space. I asked them whether they thought there was the potential to create an online training business for people living with an intellectual disability, and they all agreed that it was probably too niche and that the online medium probably wasn’t well suited to some of the communication difficulties these individuals may have.
It was in that exact moment, six weeks ago that the idea was born. Because as soon as people say something is ‘too niche’, ‘too hard’, ‘not scaleable’ or that it simply won’t work, I get interested. When everyone else is zigging, you should zag.
It was time to zag.
Since that moment, I’ve been letting this idea percolate in my brain. I had a running document open in Evernote, where I can jot down ideas as they come to mind. I didn’t do anything with those ideas. There was no order, rhyme or reason. But every day or so, I’d spend 10 seconds writing things down as they came to me.
This is probably the most important time for the birth of a new business. It’s the daydreaming phase. It’s letting you mind combine ideas and solve problems – turning the concept over in your head without you consciously thinking about it. I need this time, because if you ask me to sit down and brainstorm ideas, I’m useless. Creativity is disobedient and doesn’t heel when you tell it to. You can’t tell creativity to ‘sit’.
Paul Graham, the founder of Y-Combinator, a Silicon Valley start-up incubator wrote a great article called ‘The Top Idea in Your Mind’. He opened the article by saying “I realised recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I’d thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I’d go further: now I’d say it’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.”
My idea was the thing I thought about in the shower.
And then, about three hours and four minutes ago this idea began its three hour transition from idea to business.
My vision was to create an online programming business for people living with an intellectual disability. It would be a very simple to follow, accessible and inclusive service that contained specialised elements unique to the unique needs of the client.
Basically, the idea is that the participants (or their carer, support worker or parents) would receive an email three times a week with a link to a short ten minute video. In this video, I would be leading them through a very simple exercise session with basic compound movements. I’d have a co-presenter with an intellectual disability demonstrating the movements as I coached the viewer through them in real time. Language would be simple and easy to understand. We’d have an on screen interpreter signing Australian Sign Language. Captions would be in ‘Easy Read’ – a simplified way of presenting written information used by people living with an intellectual disability.
It would be filmed by a professional videographer with professional lighting and audio, and we’d film in someone’s living room.
Let’s get started. Start the clock.
I knew I wanted the marketing for this idea to be online, so I needed a website. I already have a website for my business, so I didn’t need to register a domain name or get website hosting. If I had needed to do that, I’d be out of pocket another $27, and it would probably have added about 10 minutes. But I’d set a strict three hour time limit.
I spent 10 minutes making some notes for what I wanted on the website. I needed it to be super clean and simple – mainly because some of the people visiting it may have communication difficulties. And sometimes it’s easier to be complicated than it is to be simple.
The French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, once started a letter with the words “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” I think that’s genius – in fact, one of the hallmarks of a genius is someone who can make complex concepts, simple. I’m far from being a genius, but that was my challenge with planning the website.
In those ten minutes, I decided I wanted a simple landing page, with a screenshot of one of the videos (which obviously I hadn’t filmed yet) next to a basic form to fill out to express interest. There would be an open letter from me to parents, carers and support workers, then at the bottom, there would be a more complex form that allowed people to indicate their level of interest in the idea.
Ten minutes down.
In the next ten minutes I chose a website template. I build websites for businesses, so I know what I’m doing here and that definitely saved me some time. But I rarely build websites from scratch, because much smarter, more creative developers have created amazing templates for me to edit. I chose the most simple template I could. Space for an image on the left, a form next to it, space for text, and a form at the bottom.
I stripped out all colours and graphics to keep it clean for my target audience.
For the record, I build my websites using WordPress, and I use something called Divi Builder, a popular drag-and-drop page builder plugin for WordPress.
20 minutes in.
I spent the next half hour in Canva – which to be honest took longer than it should have. I needed to create an image that looked like a screenshot from one of the videos. When you see the final result, you’ll wonder what I was doing for those 30 minutes. I tried a bunch of different ideas, with a bunch of stock images until I settled on my final idea. The final image probably took me five minutes to create – the first 25 was spent making mistakes – which is probably the most important part of the whole process. The final image is a trainer doing some stretching with a young girl with Down syndrome. I had to use one of Canva’s AI features to remove a third person from the image. In the top corner is an insert of someone using sign language, and the entire image has been dropped into a tablet to emphasise the fact that it’s taken from a video.
50 minutes down, and I’ve got a website template and a picture. I still needed to write the copy for the website and market the idea.
The next hour was spent writing the text for the website. Usually when I write marketing copyI like to draw heavily on elements of behavioural psychology – mental triggers, biases, nudges and heuristics. But for this copy, I went with a different approach. I wrote an open letter to parent, carers and support workers to share my vision for the idea. I introduced myself and my credentials and experience in this field, I outlined the problem I was seeking to solve, I gave an overview of the idea and how it would work, and then I finished with three questions to the reader: Would they use this service? Are they a decision maker who would be interested in exploring options for the project? And would they mind sharing this page with any contacts in the space?
I finished with a form where people could contact me.
I set this simple landing page live.
My next job was marketing – spreading the word about the project.
The first 15 minutes of marketing was spent reaching out to my existing network via email.
There’s a statement here that I need to share with you which may be the most important thing I say in this article and the key to making a new business work – it’s something I say at least once a week during my consults. “Dig the well before you’re thirsty”.
If you’re dropped in the middle of the desert, and you wait until you’re thirsty before you start digging for water – it’s already too late. You need to start digging before you’re thirsty.
The single biggest mistake I see people make when launching a new business is that they haven’t spent any time building authority, reputation and network. If I know I’m going to be running an event for business professionals, I’ll spend at least 12 months before the event building reputation. If I could give my 20 year old self one piece of advice, it would be to invest more time and energy into building a network.
It was this network that I reached out to now. I emailed health professionals who I knew who worked in this space, parents of kids I’ve worked with who have an intellectual disability, and industry contacts.
The email was simple, asking for their input and sharing the link to the landing page I’d created.
The next 15 minutes of marketing was on social media. I posted organically on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook. Specifically, on Facebook, I posted not only on the pages I manage and on my personal profile, but importantly, in Facebook groups. I’m convinced that Facebook groups are a vastly under-utilised marketing catchment. I’m the member of five groups for NDIS participants, carers, support workers and parents. I posted in each of these. Incidentally, I’ve been posting valuable content in these groups for the last few years to build reputation in this space (digging the well).
The message in the social media posting was simple “If you’re a parent, carer, or support worker for an individual with a disability, I would really value your opinion on a project I’m working on” – then I included the link.
Ok, I’m now inside my last hour, I’ve done two hours and 20 minutes of work, 40 minutes to go.
I do a quick check of my email, and there are a few form submissions coming through already with people expressing interest. There are also some replies from members of my network with feedback on the idea. One email in particular had potential. It was from the CEO of an organisation involved with advocating for individuals with an intellectual disability. We’d worked on a project together previously. She was asking if I was free for a chat. I told her I’d be free in 20 minutes – figuring I could quick launch some paid advertising I that time, and still squeeze the call in before my clock ran out.
I jumped into the Meta Ads Manager and created a quick ad. I let Meta’s AI feature worry about the audience targeting, and focussed on the ad creative. I used the image from the website, and wrote a quick piece of marketing copy based on the longer ‘open letter’ from the website landing page. I gave the ad $300 for a week – which will be long enough to know if this idea has legs.
With 20 minutes to go, I jumped on a Zoom call with the CEO of the organisation who’d replied to my email. I went into this open minded, and gave her a quick five minute pitch to sell the vision. She had some constructive feedback which I updated in real time on the website during our call. The big take-away from the call was the opportunity for this organisation to seek a government grant for the project, and then hire me as a consultant or contractor to build and launch the project. She’s going to reach out to some of her contacts and get back to me next week.
I hung up the phone and with two minutes to go, checked Google Analytics for my website. 113 page visits to the new landing page – so the word was getting out. The idea has legs.
Three hours. $300. One very young new business with some potential.
Alright, let’s take a step back and let me tell you what this three hour, $300 business process is all about.
In those three hours, what I built was an MVP – a minimal viable product.
As the name implies, a minimal viable product is all about doing the least amount of work possible to test a business idea.
When I speak to the people I mentor about building an MVP I tell the story of a trip my wife and I took to Vegas – obviously pre- kids! I know what happens in Vegas should stay in Vegas – and I’m definitely going to keep most of that trip between my wife and I, but there is one thing I want to share – and it’s not how much cheesecake she ate!
We were sitting by the pool at The Venetian where we were staying and the strangest thing happened. The entire 20 story building next to our resort shimmered. Maybe that’s not the right word – it actually rippled like when you throw a stone into a lake. The windows, the balconies, the entire structure. You know like that scene in The Matrix? That’s what happened to this building.
I looked closer and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. For the last three days I’d been looking at this building and hadn’t noticed anything unusual – but it turns out, it wasn’t a building at all. It was a 20 story high shell of a building that was being renovated – basically scaffolding. And so they didn’t upset the whole Vegas vibe, they had printed out a 20 story high picture of the facade of that building and stuck it to this scaffold. Like most of Vegas, it was completely fake. It was a facade, with nothing inside but construction crews.
And that’s an MVP – a minimal viable product. From the outside it looks amazing, but there’s nothing inside. No substance. From the outside, it’s perfection. On the inside it’s just an idea. On face value, it looks great, but there’s no substance behind it. No systems, no refinement. No real ‘product’. It’s just an idea, all dressed up to look like a business.
So, the big question is… will this idea work? I’ll be honest. Probably not. I give it a 30% chance of going further, and a 10% chance of making more than $10,000. And I’m fine with that. Because it only took me three hours. If I spend 3 hours each to build ten different MVPs for ten different ideas, each with a 10% chance of success, chances are, one will work. That’s 30 hours of work for an expected $10,000, at a rate of just under $350 an hour (with the potential for much more).
My most successful MVP in the last few years now generates $83,720 a year – a nice revenue addition which far exceeds $10,000 – so the potential upside is pretty healthy.
I personally think that churning through multiple MVPs is a pretty good business start-up model.
And it reminds me of a video I once saw on YouTube from British illusionist and mentalist, Derren Brown.
Brown appeared on camera and casually flipped a coin. Heads. He did it again. Heads. And again. Heads, heads, heads. Ten in a row. Then he casually walked off screen.
The YouTube comments section lit up with people claiming to know how he did it. A weighted coin, heads on both sides, camera tricky, and some people were even convinced he had perfected the amount of force to put into a coin flip so he could perfectly control how it landed.
He later explained how he did it, and the answer (to me) is more impressive than any of those guesses.
He set up a camera, pressed record, and started flipping the coin. When he got a tail, he stopped, and started again. And again, and again, and again. He repeated this for months. And eventually, as demanded by the law of averages, he flipped 10 consecutive heads. Months of work had gone into this five minute video.
For me, that’s more impressive than any magic trick, because there’s no trickery, only persistence.
If you flip enough coins, you’ll eventually flip ten heads.
MVPs are the sample. Eventually one HAS to work.
The main push-back I get from people on this concept is that I’m not working hard enough on any idea to see whether it could really be built into something great. I agree, and some great potential businesses may get aborted before they ever have a chance. But I don’t want the ideas that require hard work. I don’t want them to pull me away from my family, cause me stress and have any negative impact on my life. Business is hard, and I use this process to filter out both the bad ideas, and the ideas that could work – but only with a huge amount of work and sacrifice. What I’m left with are good ideas that aren’t too difficult to implement.
There are two things that stand in the way of this business strategy. An aversion to failure, and perfectionism.
Not only is a reluctance to fail the enemy of business, but I believe you actually need to pursue failure. Move in the direction of it. The chances of your first idea succeeding are like flipping 10 heads on your first attempt. Possible, but very very unlikely. If you spend six months building a business before you launch it, you’re flipping two coins a year. If you spend three hours a week building and launching an MVP, you’re flipping 52 coins a year, meaning you’ll have conducted as many experiments in one year, that most people would in 26 years. 26 years is a long time.
And if you feel the need to be perfect, maybe this strategy isn’t for you – because you simply cannot be both perfect and quick-to-market. You’re going to have to choose.
Two quotes from Reid Hoffman (the founder of LinkedIn) spring to mind…
“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”
and
“An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down.”
Just because an idea isn’t a financial success, doesn’t mean it wasn’t successful. The things you learnt mean that your next MVP is incrementally better, and the next one better again. Building businesses is a skill, and the more practice you get, the more ‘reps’ you do, the better you get at that skill. Who knows, eventually you may even eventually learn the exact force to put into a coin flip to land a head every time.
If this business-starting strategy appeals to you, here’s how I’d implement it into your calendar. I’d be using a version of 20% time. 20% time is a concept used by Google where they give their employees one day a week to work on their own projects – paid by Google. And because they’re paid by Google, Google owns their ideas. Smart. I think you can learn from this. Each week (or every fortnight or every month or every quarter), have a three hour block of time set aside to build an MVP. Be strict with that calendar time blocking – the temptation is to let that idea bleed across into the rest of your week. Only allow this to happen if the market tells you the idea has potential.
So now it’s your turn. Start with the ideas. Then, build your MVP. Release it into the world. Does the world think the idea has potential? Go all in! Is the world not impressed? Move onto your next idea and repeat.
Maybe it’s just me, but I find this concept really exciting, and a lot of fun.
Get to work!
