[tmaly]

I once tried the following approach and it saved me a ton of development time. In reality, it validated that there was not a good pattern for a problem to be solved in the space I was looking at.

Figure out who your target audience is first. You might have to talk to a lot of people. Get good at listening and asking open ended questions ( see book Mom Test )

Once you have a rough idea who your audience is, try to find about 30 people in that audience to talk to face to face. You can use a script like in the book Running Lean. You want to keep good notes on each conversation. Build a table/matrix of all things you uncover across these 30 or so conversations. If you can see a clear pattern in the problems a majority of the people have, that could be the idea you build a product for.

[dotvignesh]

I'm targeting content creators. Trying to solve the media deplatforming issue. The problem reaching out to my audience regarding this is that majority don't realize all their audiences are the ones they've rented from the social media platform they're on. So I end up telling them the issue and how my solution is what they need for long-term sustainability. I'm not sure if that's the right way to validate my idea.

[ipaddr]

This strikes me as recipe for ending up in a startup you hate.

Why not build something you would pay for? It would give you more drive to deeply care about making the product happen.

[tchock23]

That could be true if you have no affinity for the audience you're targeting.

If you choose an audience you are part of then you are less likely to end up hating the end product.

Building to scratch your own itch carries the risk of you inadvertently building for an n of 1.