Hello and welcome to the Dietitian Boss podcast. This is coach Heather with team Dietitian Boss and one thing you might not know about me is that as a Naturopathic doctor and digital entrepreneur, I have made many, many mistakes in the journey of creating a private practice. Now my private practice included virtual private practice that was online.
It included a brick and mortar practice that I owned and had several other practitioners practicing within my practice. And so it was a little complicated. So today I want to talk to you about the benefits of creating a minimal viable product for your business, especially if you're just getting started out or in my case I didn't start creating minimal viable products until I was owning my own biz for almost seven years and it was something that I wish I had started sooner.
Why did I wish I started sooner? If I had started creating minimal viable products years and years and years ago and right at the beginning of my practice, I would have saved so much time, I would have saved so much money and I think I would have had success much more quickly. So what is a minimum viable product?
So we, at team Dietitian Boss, we consider minimal viable products, just starting a group coaching program or starting a single 60 minute course. Those are the minimal viable products that we recommend in the dietician boss method. Why do we start with these kinds of products? Well, the main benefit of starting with these kinds of products and creating any type of minimum viable product is that it does not take a big startup investment and when we talk about a startup investment, I'm talking about money, I'm talking about time, I'm talking about resources, also, other people to help you run things.
When I started my business, I was already in over my head with employees and online support that ran my email list and my online programs and in retrospect what I started doing towards the end of my clinic time. That allowed me to be in this position of retiring and living in South America and still having a business. I took away all of those complications and simplified and this simple, minimum viable product has allowed me to live more of the freedom based life that I was really desiring.
So it doesn't take a big investment. That's one of the huge benefits of a minimum viable product. So you don't have to buy a lot of expensive equipment, you don't have to have a lot of fancy tech and you can get started right away. So for example, our courses, we walk people through how to use a particular course platform that is for free.
So you don't have to pay anything to get started and you can start getting customers without even making any type of investment. So that is a really important piece. The other thing that is great about a minimum viable product is that you get real time feedback about what you're offering from your ideal client, your ideal client is the person that you want to talk to, right, it's the person you want to interact with and you have a solution for their problem.
Sometimes we create products that our ideal client actually doesn't want. And there are many times in my business where I did this and I was shocked. I was like, but this is what you need, you have cancer, you need this information. And my ideal client with cancer said, but that's not what I want.
I want to know about nutrition, I want to know about blood counts, I want to know this information and I was like, but you need to know mindset, you need to know how to shift your emotional patterns. We know that that's a piece of why cancer cells start growing and it's a huge piece of recurrence.
So I thought they needed something else than what they wanted and it was a mismatch. So people weren't buying what I was offering and then as soon as I shifted and I said, okay, I hear you, I know what you want and started offering what they wanted.
Then they start buying what I knew they needed. So there was a huge shift for me in just giving people what they want and then giving them what they need. But I needed that feedback in real time and why didn't you buy this product? I got to ask my patients and you can ask your Instagram followers and you can DM people and say, hey, what about this offer doesn't feel right for you.
And then when you hit a minimal viable product that does speak to people and they're like, oh, I really want this, I really need this. And they start purchasing. Then you get real time feedback in your group or in a survey after they finish your course.
And you can ask them what was missing or what other information do they need to know? Or how could you improve the program or the course? And through that kind of feedback, you learn, what's the next thing that I could make that people need or what's the next thing I can make that people want and you're more likely to have success, right? Because you have feedback from somebody who's already bought something from you and they're telling you exactly what they want next and you have the knowledge to create that.
So all of your training, all of your background, you know how to speak to what they want next. But sometimes as the experts and as the creators, we get so trapped in all the things that we know that we end up not offering the logical next step in offering things that are 10 steps ahead of where they're at and we forget where our client is at in their journey.
So you can get real time feedback and make it better. You can get to know what people really want and what people really need and in the meantime you're not investing a lot of time or money into creating what you've already put out there as an offer. Another benefit of a minimal valuable product is that in the beginning you can put very little time into it.
I've mentioned this a couple different times, but one of the mistakes I made that I love to save you from is I created a year long program. Such a bad idea, too long of a time commitment for people. And I pre created all of the content and the membership site and I spent tens of thousands of dollars literally on this project.
It was not a minimal viable product. It was like a maximized product and I put so much time and energy and effort into it. And I offered it to my audience and got huge crickets back. Nobody wanted what I offered. And now looking back, there are so many reasons why that was not a good offer.
That is part of what I'm here to share with you on team Dietitian Boss. So you can learn from my mistakes. But I learned from that and that almost bankrupted my business, I almost had to close my business because I invested so much money into this offer that went nowhere. What I learned is that it's so important to, instead of putting a lot of time on the front end is to create an offer this minimal viable product and then offer it to your audience and then when people per purchase it make the product because once you have people who say yes, yes, I want this, yes, I need this.
Then you can start creating the product because what's the point of making something that everybody is saying no to? It's a waste of your time, money and effort so you can get paid while you create it. For example, a lot of our dietician bosses, they start a group program and they don't have any of the content written before they start offering the group program.
But by the time that they have 10 people, 20 people, 40 people go through their program. They have handouts, they have eBooks, they have recipe books, they have so much content for their clients. The cool thing is that they got paid to create that content, they didn't have to do it on their own dime and their audience invested in them making that content and continuing to make their product better and better.
And that's why we recommend starting some of these kinds of group programs at one price point and then working up to other price points and you can learn more about that in the dietician boss method. But the other thing about creating a course is that it can be done with very little time and you can create a short course to get started, we recommend keeping to 60 minutes or less and then you you start selling that product and you start getting feedback about that product and then you can start shifting your course or creating a follow up course that answer some questions that were answered in your first course.
So this helps you get started and that's the point. We all just need someplace to get started and from there we can create more and more success, we can talk to our ideal clients better, we can serve their wants and needs better. And that is the beauty of a minimum viable product. So I just want to recap that there are three things that I think are really great about creating a minimum viable product and why we support this method in Dietitian Boss.
The first one is that it doesn't take a big startup investment. The second one is that you can get real time feedback from your customers to continually improve it and make it better and get to know what people really, really want and what they really, really need and then you can invest a small amount of time in the beginning and get paid while you're creating things for your ideal client.
So I hope this helps you on your path to getting started in your private practice. If you have some ideas, some questions we're here to support you, we would love to help you make your minimum viable course in rebellion or talk you through how to create a group program in our Society Mastermind. And if you have other questions, Dietitian Boss is always here for you.
I look forward to connecting with you again soon.
