During last week’s wide-ranging conversation about evaluating your ideas, we touched on the idea of “niching”: paring down your target audience until you find the exact set of people you want to help.

So once you’ve taken that step of committing to a core audience and decided who you’re for (and who you’re not), the next question becomes: how do you get in front of those target customers? And, more importantly: how do you figure out what they want from your product?

“[It’s about] lots and lots and lots of living with the customer. Live and breathe the customer – they will show you the right path.”

The dream, of course, is to put together a quick survey, send it out to a mailing list of 10,000 of your ideal users, and come back to find your ...