Determining Feasability of Information Product

Having just been recently laid off, I would like to give some attention to an idea that's been incubating in my mind for a while for an information-based product. This is similar to the model of Internet Business Master Academy, where your product is courses/material on some specialized topic; your free content is useful, the premium content is the how of it.

My question is how do I evaluate (in the most cost-efficient manner):

1. If there's a demand/market for my product
2. The pricing point of my product ($5 or $500?)
3. If it's useful to people (related to #1)
4. If it has a potential of reaching $5000/month of revenue (or conversely, if it's fundamentally flawed in a way that would prevent this from ever happening).

The worst case is "build it and see what happens." I'd rather not invest 100+ hours into that without knowing up front that it has some shot at making decent money.

I should mention that I have something of a good background in my product domain (game development), albeit that I'm not nearly an expert.

There's a concept that goes something like this

craft some html and throw it up on a
web page and measure how many times
people click the ‘Buy’ button on your
website, or how many times people even
read your about description. Maybe try
to capture their e-mail address in the
process. This gives you estimates
toward measuring the demand of your
market and your product, without
having written a single line of code!

from Tricks Learned from Lessons Learned - Lean Startups You can also drive some traffic to it with Google Adwords. Measure everything, and make the site look real, and when the user clicks the Buy button, tell them 'the product isn't ready' or it's on back order or whatever you're comfortable saying.

I've heard though, that it's illegal to charge them for a product that doesn't exist yet, so you might not want to do that.

You might also want to look into the following

• Minimum viable product (wikipedia or Eric Ries's blog )
• The #leanstartup hashtag on Twitter
• Videos by Eric Ries on YouTube

Good luck.