Take a look at the excel sheet in my blog post. The first and most important step is defining your customer segments. These should be people you’re familiar with and therefore have a good sense of the real life problems and pain points.
Most of the ideas I’ve brainstormed are for customer segments that I have direct experience working in. Very risky to build something for a target audience you haven’t lived and breathed.
From that point onwards, whether you start building an MVP or do more research, this is just semantics in my opinion. If you’re fast at building MVPs then launching one *is part of* your research. You start learning from real customers thereafter.
So I think as long as you have domain experience, you can quite safely answer the question “can I solve this problem gracefully” by yourself. The real question however, is...
“Will people pay to have this problem solved?” the number one way to validate that is by launching it and putting a price on it. No amount of customer interviews or email subscribes can substitute for that.
