As an aside, SendHub isn't really focused on SMS marketing, there are lots of services out there for that - people use SendHub for both interactions within their business as well as communication with customers.
At any rate, this post gives me hope that I'm not wasting my time, so I'll try hard to get the MVP out and see what customers think.
Some of them won't like it, of course. They could be the wrong audience, or the wrong end of the right audience. You should only quit when a) you are sure no significant audience for your product exists, and b) your many discussions with customers haven't led you to discover an audience that you can pivot to serve.
I think there is a market, so I'll post here when the MVP is ready, and see if people find it useful. Thanks again!
If you have gut feeling, I think the right approach is to express that as a hypothesis. E.g., "Small retail businesses need an easy way to take credit cards."
Then you can go out and interview a number of people in that market. If you find a lot of interest, get them to sign letters of intent. E.g., "If you create a way for me to take credit cards on my iPhone, I'll sign up for $10/month plus 4% in fees."
Based on your interviews and your letters of intent plus public statistics, then you do some math to see if there's a market there.
Please do announce your product here. Feel free to email me directly as well, and also consider joining one of the Lean Startup Circle mailing lists if you want to discuss LS techniques further.
So its no shortcut to say 'just ask the customer', you'd have to pretty much build the company to do that in a meaningful way.
Because the question really is not 'do enough customers like this product?', but instead 'can you market this product to enough customers?'
I'm saying that to discover if there is a market for your products, you need to study the people you think are in your target audience through direct interviews. And then get them to agree to buying something once you have it ready.
This is a good proxy precisely because you are marketing it to them. Understanding a customer's needs, showing how your product will fit the need, and then getting a commitment is basically a direct sales process.
This is one of the core messages of the Lean Startup approach: you can learn a great deal without ever building the company in a meaningful way.
So you only learn 'I'm not much good at marketing'. Or 'I need to work harder on marketing'. Nothing really about the product.
How many interviews have you done along these lines? And how many products have you taken from idea to on the market, and by which means?
Its often the same storey - the customer wants a horse that pulls harder and uses less hay. They don't want a tractor, they can't conceive of wanting a tractor, and they object to giving up the reins.
I don't doubt some information is worth something. But what's the success rate? What's the correlation between 'asking a customer' and sales? Nearly zero in my experience.
Your experience as described isn't really relevant to the Lean Startup approach, which would explain why your intuitions mislead you. The people who practice this method are aware of the "faster horse" problem and have techniques for dealing with it.