[kirso]

If it would have been easy, we would probably have millions of micro-startup founders out there.

I have been doing customer discovery professionally for over 10 years as a sales person and PM and there is no 1 method or silver bullet to predict whether the product will be successful.

Talking to acquaintances is terrible, because they are biased (see MOM test). They will tell you all kind of stories, but ultimately what matters is:

Are they going to pay?

Excitement has nothing to do with revenue which in the end is the blood of a business.

To extend this - there is a patter now on Twitter where indie devs are selling to their twitter friends, but is it a viable business beyond that? I don't know.

What I do know is that the only way to validate a product is to get paid and the market will tell you the truth.