What you should know before your team starts building a new product

There are some questions you and your team should answer before starting out to build a product:

1. Is there a group of customers who would buy this product?
2. Is this a significant pain point for them, or a minor one?
3. Are people really excited about an idea like this or is the response pretty meh?
4. How big is this group of customers potentially?
5. Is there a change or a tweak or a full scale revision to this idea that would radically increase the number of customers?
6. What price might customers be willing to pay?
7. What solutions are customers currently using to solve this problem? Is this solution pretty good or pretty bad? How receptive are people to the idea of a better solution?
8. How much are people currently paying for this alternative solution?
9. How would you reach these customers? Is there a place where they get together? One or more websites they all read? Conventions they all attend?
10. Would these people tell their friends about your idea, or not? (this is a measure of word-of-mouth resonance)

These are 10 basic questions that need a lot of effort to be answered. But the effort needed is way smaller than the pain of building a solution for a problem nobody has.

First thing to do is get out of the building. There are no facts in the building.