How to find out whether anyone wants it

You now have an idea and a buyer. The next question is the one most people skip, because the honest answer can take the idea away from them: does anyone actually want this?

There is a trap here. Asking people whether they like your idea does not answer the question. People are kind. They will say it sounds great, they will say they would definitely use it, and then they will not use it. They are not lying. Predicting your own future behaviour is genuinely difficult, and saying something encouraging to someone who is clearly excited is the normal, decent thing to do.

Look for behaviour, not opinions

Opinions are free. Behaviour costs something. So look for places where people have already spent money, time or effort on this problem. That is the only reliable signal available to you before you have customers.

• Somebody is already selling a version of this. Competition is the best news you will get. It means a budget exists. A market with no competitors is usually a market with no buyers.
• People are hiring for it. Job adverts are a public record of what companies are willing to pay to have done.
• There are complaint threads. Forums, review sites, community groups, replies under relevant posts. People describing the problem in their own angry words is worth more than any survey.
• People are doing it badly by hand. A spreadsheet held together with hope is a product waiting to happen.
• Somebody searches for it. If a phrase describing the problem gets searched every month, people are looking for a way out.

How to read a competitor properly

Finding a competitor is the start, not the conclusion. What you want from them is the information they have already paid to learn, and most of it is published.

• Their pricing page tells you what the market has been trained to expect, and which units it is sold in: per month, per project, per seat, per location.
• Their list of what is included tells you where the work actually is, because nobody enumerates the easy parts.
• Their case studies tell you which buyer they found easiest to close, which is usually the buyer they started with.
• Their reviews tell you where they fail. Sort by the lowest rating and read every one. Those complaints are your opening.
• Their job adverts tell you what they are about to do next, several months before they announce it.

Read three competitors this way and you will know more about the market than most people who have been in it a year, for the price of an afternoon.

Where the complaints actually live

Vague advice to read forums is not much help. The places that reliably contain unpolished descriptions of a problem are specific.

• Review sites for your competitors, filtered to one and two stars.
• Subject-specific subreddits and the trade group on whichever network your buyers actually use, which may be a very unfashionable one.
• Question sites where people describe a situation before anyone has sold them a framing for it.
• Replies under posts by people who serve your buyers. The post is marketing; the replies are data.
• The support or help pages of adjacent products, which list the things people kept asking about.

Copy the sentences out verbatim rather than summarising them. The summary is your words; the original is theirs, and theirs is what belongs on your page later.

The strongest signal you can get

Somebody tries to pay you before you have built anything. This happens more than you would expect when you describe a real problem to the right person. If it happens, stop validating and go deliver. Nothing you learn from more research will beat it.

The second strongest is somebody asking a question that only a buyer asks. How much is it. How long does it take. Can you start next month. Do you work with companies our size. These are not polite noises. They are someone working out whether this fits.

What weak signals look like

• Lots of likes and no replies.
• People saying the idea is interesting without saying what they would use it for.
• Friends and family being encouraging. They are rating you, not the idea.
• A large number in a market report. Market size tells you nothing about whether this particular person will pay this particular price.

If everything you have is weak signal, that is not a verdict. It usually means you have not talked to enough of the right people yet, which is exactly what the next article is about.

On the market being too small

This worry arrives early and is almost always misplaced at the start. The arithmetic is worth doing once, because it is calming.

An illustration, not a benchmark. Suppose there are two thousand businesses of the kind you serve in your country, and you charge four hundred for a piece of work. Reaching one in forty of them, once, is twenty thousand. Reaching one in forty of them on a small monthly retainer is a living. Two thousand is a market most companies would ignore, and it is more than enough for one person.

The markets that are genuinely too small are the ones where you cannot find a hundred buyers at all, or where the problem is worth so little that nobody will pay to have it solved. Both are visible from the research above, which is why it comes before anything gets built.