IANAL You should first talk to your HR about how your company treats side projects. In some companies, any work that you do automatically belongs to the compan

IANAL You should first talk to your HR about how your company treats side projects. In some companies, any work that you do automatically belongs to the company (even if the work is done during weekends). This also depends on your local laws. A large company should definitely have policies around this. It's very hard to talk to your market in an anonymous fashion. Especially when you are just starting out. However, you can gauge some preliminary interest by setting up a good landing page and buying some targeted traffic from Facebook/Adwords. Describe what problem you are trying to solve, and have an email sign up form. Find out how many people sign up. Send follow up emails to these people. For this to work, your landing page has to be informative and should have a clear value proposition. You can have a great idea, but if you can't communicate that to your visitors within their first few seconds, then you're not going to be successful with this approach.