The thing you can do to make sure you're not caught in a cycle of pointless work is to release the product. Stepping back a bit, another thing you can do is pi

The thing you can do to make sure you're not caught in a cycle of pointless work is to release the product. Stepping back a bit, another thing you can do is pick a market that (1) has a need and (2) is willing to pay for a solution. This works best for markets where you have personal and business connections to powerful people, but those can be built up over time. This is how much of the world's IT fortunes have been made, building a more efficient time clock or equities trading system or shipping logistics system. This is usually not something you can do with "innovative" consumer webapps because innovation targeting consumers generally implies letting people do something they didn't previously know they wanted to do. If you're doing a pre-release consumer webapp, I think your best measure is how excited your team is about using the product. Sometimes this is hard to separate from excitement about building the product, but you should worry a lot if there aren't a few coworkers and friends who are totally in love with the product. Like, using-it-all-day-telling-all-their-friends in love. You can take one spark of true love and work out a message that makes it grow. But you can't take a thousand gallons of "potentially interesting" and turn it into love without some significant new inspiration. And inspiration gets more and more difficult to add the more committed your team is to its existing product direction. Therefore it's very important to short-circuit this commitment by releasing early and making sure everybody knows that the measure of success is not lines of code, but attention and affection from users.