Products that spread through word of mouth are few and far between these days. Facebook has made sure of that by snuffing out most newsfeed virality (unless you are paying them for it) such that even if your customers want to share your products with their friends, few of them will see it. Growth rarely happens by accident these days.
Do not attempt to even create a product that you are going to depend on for your livelihood without a specific marketing strategy already planned out and ready to execute. That strategy should be able to generate a positive number when when you subtract estimated, realistic customer acquisition costs from their estimated, realistic lifetime value. There is a great podcast called TheTop [1] covering a number of tech verticals where existing companies go into these numbers in specific detail. I would recommend you find an episode about a company in your vertical and listen to their numbers.
Besides the fact that it'll be easier to visualize and present the idea to people, the act of building a proof of concept or a real MVP would be learning experiences themselves.
In fact thinking about what's to be included as part of the MVP and prioritizing to fit within a pre-set deadline would be extremely valuable.
Also plenty of clients will take meeting without an proof of concept. And this is especially true when you have a really good idea.
Makings the cold calls and cold emails felt a lot easier with an app built but at least in my experience didn't make a big difference in response rate.
This is a very, very common failure mode of new entrepreneurs. As long as you don't have any customers, any promises, or any deadlines, you can focus on the best part of being a programmer: programming. Thus people often end up postponing the customer acquisition farther and farther into the future, until they run out of savings, or just abandon the project because the bright flame of new creation has dwindled.
Running a software business sucks. You have to mete out your attention extremely carefully, and without well-vetted potential customers to build things for, building things should be very low on your priority scale.
You can achieve most of your stated MVP goals with a sketch made in Adobe XD, with a fraction of the time spent.
I think of it as something that does the main purpose that looks entirely real (so has a domain and is responsive for example) but doesn't actually function. This can definitely be done in a similar amount of time as the XD sketch. Perhaps slightly longer but it'd look more real and therefore would be taken more seriously.
In fact its most important purpose is to save you from building something that does actually function.
Also, I am willing to take a pay cut if I can work on my idea, instead of working for something else. I don't need a million dollars haha.
Right now, I would be happy if I got something that pays me half as much as I used to make. Heck, if it only brought in $1,000/mo for a while I would be happy with that.