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You can do a fair bit of work up front to get a pretty good idea though I think. At least about which of them don't stand a chance. People just don't like doing it, including me, because it's hard.

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I have gotten opinions both ways. People who do not want to critique an idea until they see something they can lay their hands on aka demo. And the other side where people who want to make sure the idea has market before they write a single line of code.

I am not sure which one works. Being a coder and as someone who tends to code before evaluating, I would like to know specifics on how to do evaluation before execution.

If a prototype is trivial to build then absolutely. But I don't think there's ever an excuse for not going out and asking people who might have these problems some good questions. "Would you pay for this?" being one of them.

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