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Depends on the idea, but there's a lot you can do before you write a single line code. 1. Of your friends/network, pick 5-10 people who could be potential customers. Ask them. 2. Think of a way to scrape emails addr of people who could be potential customers. Ask them. 3. Same on Linkedin. 4. Build a landing page, buy traffic from G and FB, look at time spent on your landing and CTRs to a signup page which then collects emails of interested parties ("We'll let you know once the Alpha is out"). 5. Find a blog with potential customers, pay money to run some article on it that relates to your idea, with links to your landing page. Look at open rates of the article itself, and CTR to the landing, CTR on the landing, etc. 6. Create a public group on FB for people that could be potential customers. (Try to) create content for it, try to get people to join (maybe with ads). All of these are highly noisy, but it's something.
Also you could learn something unexpected, like: "oh, I get your idea, but we use already use X for that", and you didn't know about X, or you didn't know it could be used for that. This happened to me several times. Don't be overconfident in your Google-fu, it's a long tail world, and you may not be able to guess all the relevant keywords/marketing/angle that a competitor could be under. |