I guess that's the luxury of keeping your day job. If the product doesn't sell, oh well. Bills are still paid. Try again. If you're banking your entire livelihood on the product, you have to know there's at least some chance of success, even if it means alienating potential customers with bullshit
It breaks your heart? To spend all kinds of time building something, figuring out the best way to solve a problem, tweaking stuff, banging your head against a wall, all to announce it to the world and then? Crickets? (Source: been there.)
Put another, more bloodless way: opportunity cost?
Not to say you can't have fun making a product no one wants, but it's more fun to make a product that people want.
I hear what you are saying about landing pages lying, but if it says "coming soon" is that a lie (assuming you really plan to build it soon if the demand is there)?
I suppose I would never want to start a business with a product that I didn't at least get some intrinsic benefit out of building. Worst case scenario I learn new skills that can be applied to future endeavors. Besides, if you solve a problem and no one is willing to pay for it, well at least the problem got solved. Maybe that tool will be useful later in some other context.
Plus I don't like relationships built on sand. Fake-it-till-you-make-it is to business what steroids/doping are to athletics. Sure maybe it's necessary at the Cutthroat-Business-Olympics where everyone's doing it and you won't win if you don't, but most businesses aren't playing at that level, and do the equivalent of taking Lance-Armstrong-Style blood transfusions to win their local bike club's weekend race.
That's an interesting perspective. You aren't lying when you post "coming soon" originally but later it turns into a lie?
Frankly, not sure how you solve this chicken and egg problem in a way other than what we've already detailed:
* put the chicken first: build the product (at least as minimal of a product as you can). Invest your time.
* put the egg first: suss out demand (and don't build it if you can't find any). See if anyone will bite based on words, not product.
You can try to split the difference. By building a bit, using low code tools, for example, or by being transparent that you are thinking about building this and talking to potential customers about what they'd want.
I think that "coming soon" if you don't plan to build the product at all is a baldfaced lie; we can probably both agree that is bad.
Personally, I think that "coming soon" as a way to assess demand, especially if you send out a message saying "things changed, sorry I won't be building this" (not that I've ever gotten that kind of message) is not a lie. Things change all the time.
Have you ever left a job? Typically one doesn't say out and out "I'm leaving" until they submit a resignation letter. Is being part of the team and being enthusiastic about the company and product even if you are interviewing lying?
You can also lower the impact on your users during the "coming soon" phase by
* refunding their money if you charged them (this is a no brainer, hopefully everyone agrees with this)
* providing some additional resources (presumably you have some insight into the problem space you could share, even if you don't build the product) during the "coming soon" exploration process
* asking for emails rather than $$$ while you are unsure of delivering the end goal. You could ask for emails first and then $$$ later.
Being transparent would be something like Kickstarter/Indiegogo, where you have stated objectives and if those objectives aren't reached the thing doesn't happen, or happens to lesser degrees. I'm not sure how you would translate that into a market-research product page, as you'd need a way to positively spin the fact that the product doesn't actually exist yet. You're basically seeking funding more than marketing a product.
Emails would probably be the best happy middle ground. People sign up for news/info regarding a product that's under development, no promises are made, hell if you decide to start development you could even publish a dev blog documenting the experience and providing updates, depending on how technical your audience is.
I've just read so many startup-advice blogs that seem to recommend bait-and-switching the customer just to gauge interest. That seems counterproductive to me in the long run. Sure maybe the world is big enough for software that you can afford to screw over some people and there will be plenty more where they came from if demand is good. All I know is despite moving some distance away in recent years my family still goes to this one independent mechanic we discovered. He's gone out of his way to save us money when he could have screwed us (I requested repairs that were unnecessary), takes time to explain the repairs he's making and why, charges a decent rate (frankly I'd pay more if he asked) and hasn't broken anything. That's the kind of relationship I would want with my customers, and sure enough he gets every oil change from us despite being a 35 minute drive away.
The overhead of actually building the product is WAY more than just making a landing page.
Plus, knowing that there are people who are willing to give you money for a thing is very motivating.
Also, having pre-customers while you are building is a great way to know which parts of the product to focus on. The features you think are important may not be what your customers think.
Certainly there is a range of approaches in between vaporware and building in secret. But if you actually want to make money, you should start selling as soon as possible, even before it’s ready.
Granted you should establish hard criteria for an MVP and not try to make everything perfect, the temptation for feature creep as you further explore the problem space is real. But if I'm offering someone a shovel I at least want a competently built V1 of a shovel, not a pinky swear that I'll have an awesome shovel for them in 2 months.
Features are a little trickier. Whatever the customers say they want may or may not be what they actually want, depending on the specific context of course. Or the customers say they want X, but they aren't actually willing to pay for X. There's a lot of noise that looks like signal. You see it in startup blogs all the time "I thought customers wanted this, and they kinda did, but it was actually this other variant that we didn't discover until we analyzed data from the first year of sales" Rather than debate on what may or may not be on the other side of the hill, I'd land on the side of going and taking a look, even if that means some extra time/effort/money climbing said hill. You'll at least get a good workout and be stronger for it even if there's nothing of value on the other side. Meanwhile your day job covers the downside risk :)
I guess it comes down to your last line "if you actually want to make money". At what scale and to what end? Waiting to start selling until you have something to sell might technically be leaving money on the table, but if it makes enough money and results in a better overall product, and you have a more long-term outlook, can be worth it. Granted not every sector and objective is amenable to that strategy, but there are so many in this space who dismiss it outright as naive, as if business with physical products don't do it all the time.