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Yup, one friend who had a pre-internet sw biz with many different smallish products (think utilities) told me an interesting story. He started out describing a proposed product and asking if people would be interested and buy it. "YES", no question they liked the idea and would pay money for it. So he went and built it. No takers, lots of "maybe later"s. After a few rounds of that losing game, he started asking not what they wanted, but about specific pain points - 'What is most inconvenient about this?', 'does this task consume too much of your time?', 'what is the biggest time-waster?', etc.. When he listened and built products addressing the complaints, he'd make sales on the first call, even tho no one ever actually told him they were interested. I'd suggest for OP to design a question list around things solved by the proposed product, and related work. Do not tell them that you are working on a product. Talk to prospects and see if those are true pain points - and try to get them to say they're just fine - avoid politeness & confirmation bias (i.e., you really don't want to fall for a few ppl being nice, agreeing that it's a problem, then building something they don't care about}. So, if you try to convince them that there is no problem, and they insist that there are no workarounds, they've searched and it's a PITA that costs them money, then you are on to something. Edit: typos |