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Apart from having a landing page and trying to get it ranked for certain terms, I don't think you can validate an idea without being able to show/tell people what it will look like. The quality of the product will be judged upon what it looks like, if I made a 1995's style white page with just two form fields and a 'submit' button, that couldn't be used to validate the idea with.

In my mostly-unqualified-to-comment-opinion, that is.

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Yeah, that's what I did initially with my "daily exercise you can do at work email" site.

I decided to spend a minimum amount of time on it to just test it out: just a form and a little description. The only decoration was that the text was centered and navy :)

Results: only 4 sign ups over 3 months..mostly from friends and family.

Then I made a nicer design, added content, and voila got about 30 sign ups in about 1 month through google search results. Added benefit is that now I'm not embarrassed to promote the site which of course has yielded many more sign ups.

To sum up: an effort invested in design pays off since good looks provide a hint of legitimacy. Generally speaking :)

Thanks for the answers.

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