Build the product and focus on building 1-2 core features that constitute the unique value proposition of your idea. Then show that to your core customers.

Core Feature. Core Customer. That means don't worry about silly trivial things like spacing between pixels. And don't even talk to friends and see what they think.

Building the site with core features will take time. We want to validate our concept before building too much.

Is a website with screens and no working features sufficient?

Why shouldn't we talk to friends?

What recommendations do you have to getting the concept to core customers?

talk to people who have the problem you are trying to solve. Get inside their head, and understand their pain point. Then build a MVP to solve that pain point. you find these people thru forums, offline, networking, etc. it depends on what your product is - it is an entreprise app? consumer app?

Consumer app. We guess that we need to spend more time on 'getting inside heads' before doing too much more. If we better understand the pain points then we should have a stronger argument for building our MVP.

then you will need to validate 2 things: the concept and your marketing tactics. There are many consumer app ideas that many people would love, but if you have no way of reaching that, it'll all be naught. So you need to come up with tactics for marketing, whether it be getting bloggers to write about it, spreading it thru forums, SEO, etc, and test those tactics. See if they are viable long-term strategies.

I guess it depends on your niche. If you're solving a reasonably common problem check out searches & potential traffic using Google keyword tool. You need to brainstorm potential phrases used by your customers, see if you've hit on something that is easily described in google search terms

We believe the idea is niche but will solve a common problem.

We will check out search terms but feel we need more of a demo to prove the concept and our assumptions.

Make some fake screenshots, throw up a 'coming soon' page, collect email addresses.

Consider ~10% of those email addresses sales.

A youtube video would be a plus, but would be hard to demo.

Why would a video be harder to demo than screen shots?

You can validate demand with simple landing page and adwords to drive traffic based on features and benefits..

What kind of data would you need to validate/invalidate your idea?

websites are an experience good. build some sliver of your vision to test the water. eventually youre gong to have to build your product, so any time spent doing something other than that is waste.

just do it. youll be happy you did

True, but is building the wrong product not a waste of time?

You are assuming that it's a binary outcome--it's a right or wrong product--when it's shades of gray and an opportunity for learning more about your customers' needs. Consider proceeding by a sequence of prototypes that become "less wrong" over time or even "good enough."

True. I guess we are trying to find something "less wrong".

Our objective is to i) validate our concept by receiving input from potential customers and ii) with input build an "okay" prototype to take forward.

We want to do the first bit with limited development costs.

Values of OK may range from 1% of the final version to 80%; the real test is if the prototype advances your understanding of customer needs by triggering additional insights through conversation. If you are not surprised you are not learning and if you are avoiding conversations for fear of failure you are learning much more slowly than you could by taking some prudent risks.

Thanks. Some good advice.

Those all sound like great ideas. You should choose one and the share your results.

landing page for SEO and first beta users DB ?

Wordpress & wufoo ? Wordpress and MailChimp ?

All helpful tools. However how do we use them to test/validate idea?