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Having just been recently laid off, I would like to give some attention to an idea that's been incubating in my mind for a while for an information-based product. This is similar to the model of Internet Business Master Academy, where your product is courses/material on some specialized topic; your free content is useful, the premium content is the how of it.

My question is how do I evaluate (in the most cost-efficient manner):

  1. If there's a demand/market for my product
  2. The pricing point of my product ($5 or $500?)
  3. If it's useful to people (related to #1)
  4. If it has a potential of reaching $5000/month of revenue (or conversely, if it's fundamentally flawed in a way that would prevent this from ever happening).

The worst case is "build it and see what happens." I'd rather not invest 100+ hours into that without knowing up front that it has some shot at making decent money.

I should mention that I have something of a good background in my product domain (game development), albeit that I'm not nearly an expert.

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1 Answer

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There's a concept that goes something like this

craft some html and throw it up on a web page and measure how many times people click the ‘Buy’ button on your website, or how many times people even read your about description. Maybe try to capture their e-mail address in the process. This gives you estimates toward measuring the demand of your market and your product, without having written a single line of code!

from Tricks Learned from Lessons Learned - Lean Startups

You can also drive some traffic to it with Google Adwords. Measure everything, and make the site look real, and when the user clicks the Buy button, tell them 'the product isn't ready' or it's on back order or whatever you're comfortable saying.

I've heard though, that it's illegal to charge them for a product that doesn't exist yet, so you might not want to do that.

You might also want to look into the following

Good luck.

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Marketing is very hard for me. But maybe the key that I was missing was using Adwords to (hopefully without spending a lot) drive traffic and measure demand without committing too much. – ashes999 Apr 22 '11 at 14:10

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