6 Building and Testing an Early Offering

Plan the offering

An early offering is not meant to include every planned feature. Its purpose is to test whether a defined group of customers has a particular problem, values the proposed solution, and will use or pay for it. A minimum viable offering (MVO), often called a minimum viable product (MVP), should be quick to develop and test, yet useful and reliable enough to produce meaningful evidence.

Start by specifying the customer, the problem, and the intended benefit. Then write down the assumptions the venture depends on:

• Desirability: Do target customers experience the problem, and do they want the proposed solution?

• Feasibility: Can the team deliver it with available skills, technology, suppliers, and time?

• Viability: Can the offering generate enough revenue or other support to cover its costs?

Prioritize assumptions that would seriously undermine the venture if false and for which little evidence currently exists. Define the smallest offering that can test the most important assumption. A test need not use a finished product: it could use a working prototype, a limited service pilot, a manual process, or a sample available for presale. Customer discovery can help evaluate customer needs, product-market fit, and the wider business model.

Set boundaries before development: the target users, core function or service, delivery method, test period, budget, and what is deliberately excluded. Do not remove essential safety, privacy, accessibility, or reliability requirements just to make the test smaller.

Example: A team considering a meal-planning service for shift workers could manually prepare one-week plans for a small group and ask users to pay a modest pilot fee. This tests whether the target customers value the service enough to try and pay for it before a full app is built.

Design a useful test

Turn the most important assumption into a specific, falsifiable hypothesis. For example: “At least 8 of 20 shift workers who try a paid one-week meal plan will renew or request another plan.” Decide in advance:

1. Participants: Who will take part, and how will they be recruited?

2. Experience or task: What will participants experience or be asked to do?

3. Evidence: What will be recorded, such as task completion, repeat use, referrals, deposits, or purchases?

4. Interpretation: What result will count as success, failure, or an inconclusive test?

5. Next decision: What action will follow each possible result?

Choose a test proportional to the risk and available resources. Interviews and prototypes can reveal needs and usability problems. A pilot, presale, or observed use can provide evidence about behavior and willingness to pay. Customer opinions are useful for learning, but actual choices—such as using, returning to, or paying for an offering—provide different evidence.

Recruit participants who resemble the intended customer, rather than relying only on friends or people who already support the idea. Ask neutral questions, observe behavior, and record unexpected responses as well as successes. Avoid changing the offer or success criteria midway through a test without noting the change, since that makes results harder to interpret.

Learn and decide what comes next

After the test, compare the observed evidence with the hypothesis and the threshold set beforehand. Record what was tested, what happened, what was learned, and what to do next. If results are mixed, look for patterns by customer type or use case, and consider whether the test reached the right people or measured the right behavior.

Use the evidence to choose among three broad actions:

• Persevere: Improve or expand the offering when evidence supports the key assumptions.

• Iterate: Adjust a feature, service process, target segment, price, or delivery method, then test the revised assumption.

• Pivot or stop: Change a central part of the business idea—or end the effort—when important assumptions repeatedly fail.

Treat each cycle as a learning loop: form a hypothesis, build only what is needed to test it, measure customer response, and decide what to change next. A small or biased test is not proof of broad market demand. Continue testing before committing to major development, hiring, inventory, or marketing expenses. The aim is to reduce uncertainty through successive experiments, not to make an early offering appear finished.