Before building anything, answer one question: will people pay for this?
Step 1: Talk to 10 real potential buyers
Not friends — actual people in your market. Ask what they do now about the problem and what they've paid to solve it.
Step 2: Build a one-page landing page
State the promise, who it's for, and an email signup or pre-order button. No signups = your answer before you built anything.
Step 3: Drive a little traffic
Share in relevant communities. A "like" costs nothing and means little; an email or pre-order costs something and means a lot.
Step 4: Read the signal honestly
Zero interest after real eyeballs means change the idea. Don't fall in love with the idea — fall in love with the problem.
The mistake to avoid
Building for months in secret, then launching to silence. Validate first, build second.
A tool that covers all of this: If you want landing pages, email, checkout, and course hosting in one place — with a genuinely free plan to start — Systeme.io is a solid all-in-one for solopreneurs. It's what I'd use to launch lean without stitching five tools together.
Top comments (1)
Good sequence. "Talk to 10 people" is the step everyone agrees with and few do, mostly because booking calls is slow. A fallback that keeps the spirit: send a short set of open questions about what they do today, with a follow-up on thin answers. I built chatform.in for that, and it's free for this kind of test.