I'm really glad you asked this. I've seen the cost, time and effort when professional market research firms or consulting firms do this. But their typical clien

I'm really glad you asked this. I've seen the cost, time and effort when professional market research firms or consulting firms do this. But their typical clients are larger companies thinking about launching a new product or making an acquisition, and even after they hire a market research firm or fancy consulting firm there are still products thats flop big time. So I've always been curious how startups do this. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of various product/market evaluation techniques and what the success ratios are. I can tell you how I would do it but it would first depend on what the product or market or idea is. Evaluating B2C or B2B, software vs hardware are very different. As another comment mentioned nonpaying general users vs enterprise customers are totally different.