Have you tried cold calling prospects before building a product?
danl: When my business partner and I were looking for idea of what to build we came up with the idea of building an online candidate tracking app for recruitment firms. It was going to be aimed at small 1 - 5 person agencies and would have a cut down feature set compared to the big, and expensive, desktop packages available.I cold called around ten small recruitment agencies who I would expect to be our target audience and explained how the system would work to them. Of the ten, only one thought it was an excellent idea, whilst most of the others told me that the features we were planning to leave out of our app would be needed if the app were to be of any use.With this advice ringing in our ears we dropped the idea and continued on to other projects. The good thing about the cold calls was that we got valuable feedback on the app without writing a single line of code. This saved us a few months of coding to get to the same conclusion.