Ask HN: How do you know whether or not customers will pay for your product?
Hello, I have some ideas for an app, but I'm not sure if people will pay for it. How can you figure that out?
"Something" doesn't have to be software. It could be "a manual process which consumes staff time", "a real product which could be made unnecessary by software", etc.
(Many car manufacturers solve computer problems with warehouses full of very expensive bits of steel shaped in particular ways. This is so demonstrably suboptimal that the company which licked those computer problems -- using a variety of systems which owed more to algorithms and paper cards as a transport mechanism -- basically took over the world.)
It's what level would they pay ... start higher than you think, and offer discounts til people bite :)