jamesroseman

A friend from college and I have been talking about starting a project, but are unsure if we're overly optimistic with how it would fit in the market today. I imagine there must be a better way than cold-call e-mails to network contacts and blind surveys in small pools to figure out the potential of our product.

What tools have you found useful to find product viability in the market? What techniques have worked and not worked for you personally?

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The idea:

We'd like to host programming challenge events in tech companies to help foster feelings of ownership and creator culture. The events would be centered around writing AI against relatively simple games. Competitors would work on their AIs for a week before competing against one another. We'd organize and arrange logistics for the event as well as write the SDKs, games, and infrastructure.

A way to get the ball rolling would be to host events at colleges for free to iterate on the process and see what goes well. This will help us refine the core product as well as see what goes wrong -- but it doesn't help us discover the want for such a product before building it.