I studied entrepreneurship at USC, and this was one of the big lessons. It's a whole school about startups from a non-Silicon Valley POV, and the point they dr

I studied entrepreneurship at USC, and this was one of the big lessons. It's a whole school about startups from a non-Silicon Valley POV, and the point they drill home more than any is to get out and validate your concept in the market as early as possible. Talk to people in your target audience before investing in building a product. Every class in the program requires interviewing 25/50/100/etc. "strangers" in your target audience. In fact, USC's online graduate program for education started this way. They were trying to decide whether to do it or not, so they put up a landing page with a broken buy button and bought AdSense against it. When they realized how many people were trying to buy, they decided it was a market worth satisfying and built the program behind it.