Fortunately, you don’t have to create the entire offer/product before you start selling. A Minimum Economically Viable Offer (MEVO) is an offer/product that promises and/or provides the smallest number of benefits necessary to produce an actual sale.

A MEVO is essentially a Prototype that’s been developed to the point that someone will actually pull out their wallet and commit to making a purchase.

It doesn’t have to be complicated.

Fitbit’s MEVO was a Prototype, a description, and a few computer renderings. All you need to do is convey enough information to convince a real potential customer to buy.

Creating a MEVO is useful because it’s impossible to predict 100 percent accurately what will work in advance.

You don’t want to invest a ton of time and money in something that has no chance of working, and the faster you can figure out if your idea will work or not, the better off you’ll be.

Since Feedback from prospective customers and paid-in-full orders are very different things, creating a MEVO allows you to start collecting data from real customers as quickly as possible, directly testing the idea’s Critically Important Assumptions (CIA) and reducing the risk of making a business-ending investment decision.

This simple process can be done quickly and cheaply, and will reveal a great deal about the real-world accuracy of the business’s CIAs. Spending a few hundred dollars to pretest critical assumptions is a very good use of money, particularly if the findings prevent the investment of larger sums of money in a business idea that’s doomed to fail from the start. The purpose of starting with a MEVO is to minimize your risk.

By keeping the investments small, incremental, and learning oriented, you’ll be able to quickly discover what works and what doesn’t. If the idea is promising, you’re in a great position to make it happen. If your assumptions don’t hold true, you’re able to cut your losses without losing your shirt or your dignity.