I recommend working in reverse and picking a target market/niche that you want to serve, and then finding and interviewing people from that industry/market. As

I recommend working in reverse and picking a target market/niche that you want to serve, and then finding and interviewing people from that industry/market. Ask them what problems they face on a day to day basis. Find out how painful those problems are and find out how they're solving them now. If the problem is painful enough and you can solve it better than how people are already solving it, people might very well pay for it. (Patio says every time you find a problem being solved with passing excel sheets around, a SaaS angel gets its wings). Then brainstorm a solution to the most painful problem or two that you can solve with software, double back to your interviewees and see if they would pay for it. If a decent percentage are willing to pre-pay for it, you've already got your early adopters waiting for you and you didn't have to write a line of code. If nobody is interested, you may have saved yourself a ton of time and effort and now you can easily move on to researching the next problem/target market. More info: http://www.smoothconversion.com/blog/why-you-don-t-validate-your-product-idea/ http://www.smoothconversion.com/blog/why-you-don-t-validate-...