I'd like to discuss how the good people of HN go about this issue.
Do you talk to the people around you, do you put up a landing page and use adwords, or maybe you start building the product right away ? Something else entirely ?
I'm mostly interested in the validation phase, but I'm open to anything that can come up.
Usualy the validation goes in 2 phases : market interest and MVP.
The first phase is about faking it until you make it. Create your landing page presenting your product (don't spend more than a day on it, you don't care about design/ branding), post in your audience's facebook group, go to their meetups, shadow them to affine your concept. The goal is to have proof of traction and the assurance the market is ready / big enough. The best metric is usualy an email list you can reuse later.
Second phase, if the first is successful is building the MVP (main viable product). It's about having the most minimalistic version of your product that you can sell. Usually it's your main feature. You MUST hack it yourself, don't spend money yet, you'll lose it. The goal is to iterate quickly to have what's called a product market fit.
Product market fit is when you can write an equation like : "when a number P people see my product, there is a conversion of C% that get me X money". Then you can launch and the rest is about scaling.
Do not spend any money (aka > 1000$) until the product market fit. Not in ads, not in freelancers, not in consultants and especially not in PR.
If you product is expensive to make or need a big chain of production, sell it before building it. If you succeed it will be you proof of product market fit
It's difficult to make a standard advice since it depends a lot of the context but key insights are :
Your market is king, refer only to them.
Make them believe 80% of the job is done when you really just have a landing page
When proof of traction hack the main feature of the product and sell it.
If you have a product market fit, congratulation you have a business / startup.