I must respectfully disagree. You can ask people all day, but unless you put them in front of a product and say click here, then it will be very hard for them to see its value.
Otherwise your prospects will be picturing your application in their head, and noone knows how they visualize it.
If you are confident about your product, build a simple prototype in a short amount of time and ship it for feedback.
What you are saying is exactly what Customer Development says to do, so you're agreeing with the post, not disagreeing. Although perhaps I should have been more explicit :) Its all in Steve Blank's book.
Concurrent product development and customer development is the way.
I guess so. The Customer development model (customer discovery > validation > customer creation > company building ) works best when you have a niche market for enterprise applications. If you consider consumer apps, then how do you go out and talk to consumers? "ASK HN:..?". Consumer applications, read free, are doomed to follow the painful "Customer Acquisition and Adoption Model" . In other words how fast do we sign up new users and how much do they use the product.
If you are confident about your product, build a simple prototype in a short amount of time and ship it for feedback.