MVP Hacking: Minimum Viable Product Success

I grew up lazy as fuck and always got by doing the bare minimum in school, and in life. I hated the concept of work so much that I would often spend 20 hours figuring out a way to do the homework assignment or book report without actually sitting  down and reading something I wasn't interested in. Even at my first job at an ice cream store, I realized how 80% of the tasks we did every day were a waste of time, and that if I just did the 20% that actually mattered quickly and efficiently, everything would be done.

This was before I even heard of the 80/20 rule or what minimum viable products were, but somehow, that knowledge and understanding has helped me create six streams of income bringing in over $15,000 a month. In this post and video, I'm going to share with you exactly how I hack the 80/20 rule and use MVPs with everything I start to get profitable as quickly as possible and how you can too regardless of what business you're in.

What is the 80/20 Rule?

In almost every single business, 80% of your profits and success come from 20% of your products, effort or traffic. I've taken this rule and applied it to starting businesses by identifying what the bare minimum requirements are to prove a concept or start a business.

What MVP hacking is all about, is figuring out what is the Minimum Viable Product and how to use that to start making sales before you buy inventory, worry about traffic, optimize or invest a lot of money or time into something that may or may not work. Watch my talk at the 2016 Nomad Summit where I give you 9 concrete examples of how to use MVP hacking to start any business whether it be a brick and mortar store, restaurant, conference, retreat or online ecommerce business.

Watch and Learn:

Note that this is the final talk after a long day of incredible speeches from nine other entrepreneurs. We're all exhausted, fired up and ready to take action. My goal for this talk was to get everyone to take action on the MVP and not the 80% of things that may be important after a business is already successful, but often prevent people from getting started in the first place.

My talk was directly after Sam Mark's talk on how he built and sold a company for $100 Million Dollars which gives a bit of context on why I'm so fired up as it was the first time he ever shared how he became a multimillionaire while being a digital nomad.  

Takeaways from the Talk:

Regardless of the business you want to start, there are two paths you can take, one being the maximum effort route and the second being the minimal. The reason why I personally always take the minimum and recommend it for most people is because it's easy to run out of time, money, faith or will power when you spend months working on a business that you have no idea if it'll ever become something profitable.

The only reason why I've been able to create as many income streams as I have is because with each one, I figure out what the MVP is, then work my ass off for the 2 months it usually takes to get it setup, before I automate it and let it coast. With my dropshipping stores, instead of spending six months trying to figure it out on my own, I simply signed up for Anton's course, did exactly what he told me to do without overthinking it and made my first sale. That very first sale proved the concept to me, and gave me the confidence and motivation to focus on traffic, optimizing the store and has resulted now in over $774,654 in sales since I first started it in June of 2013.

Final Thoughts:

Other things I didn't have time to mention in the talk include, self publishing my first kindle book, 12 Weeks in Thailand with zero budget, full of grammatical errors and selling 100 copies before focusing on spending time and money designing a professional cover, having someone professionally edit the book, etc. 

The podcast interview where I mentioned the guy who sold meal prep tupperware through ebay arbitrage was Episode 102. 

Whatever you do, I hope this post and my talk inspire you to take action on whatever business you start. If you didn't have time to watch the full talk yet, bookmark this post and come back later as the information inside of it will definitely help get you on the right track and hopefully inspire and motivate you to start and scale your online business and join us at the next Nomad Summit wherever that may end up being.

Want More?

Download the 2017 Slides at StartPDF

Warm Regards,

Johnny

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