There are a number of methods you can use to find insights to the answer of this question. Ideally, you’d like to figure this out in a way that uses a minimal amount of resources (time, money, people) so that you aren’t in a situation where you are trying to scale something up before you even know if its viable.

You can always start by doing some research on the market size (based on your initial assumptions) and looking at the competitive landscape. This can give you some very raw guidance as to if anyone else is having success in the market and how big the current market appears to be (these are not sure-fire market predictors, but can be very helpful).

I’d then recommend doing some form of a “design sprint” which can be a great way to get answers to your core questions and assumptions quickly and cheaply. Id recommend the book Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just 5 Days (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B010MH1DAQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) to learn more about how to do this in detail. In summary:

  1. Find the main question you want to get answered. In this case, it may be something about what the biggest hurdle to people using your product is. Or even some version of your product distilled down to just its core feature.
  2. Sketch a lot of solutions that would allow you to test the question. You should do this by hand and don’t try to make them perfect, just make a bunch of them.
  3. Pick one of the sketches that you and your team feels best addresses the question.
  4. Figure out how to prototype it very quickly. The purpose of the prototype is User Testing, not production…so in many cases, this can be completely faking it.
  5. Arrange user tests with people from your target audience and assess how valuable the product appears to be to them and if it solves your “main question”.

The above is a great framework to get started and try to get answers quickly. But you can even just skip to step #5 and start interviewing potential users before building anything. It can sometimes be hard for people to visualize a product without seeing some visuals and also sometimes people won’t tell you the truth because they don’t want to be mean…but even so, just asking questions can give you a lot of answers very fast. Its incredible how many people avoid doing this.

Another important question to get the answer to if you are working on a technology product is viability and technical constraints. For example, in 2011 I wanted to work on an Augmented Reality product for smartphones. But most of their processors could not yet support very advanced AR experiences. Always better to know that kind of thing beforehand!