How do you test an idea before building it?

Sell it first. Take orders, take deposits, or take pre-orders with an honest date — then build. The awkwardness of that is the point, because it is the only test with a cost attached.

The reasoning

For a product business the version that works is a single page, a small advertising budget, and a checkout. If nobody buys at the price you need, you learned that for a few hundred dirhams instead of a container of stock.

What most people get wrong

Test whether people will pay before building anything. A hundred people saying they like it is worth less than one paying.

An idea is worth almost nothing on its own. What is scarce is somebody who will keep going after the first version does not work, which is every first version.

The best ideas usually come from a job somebody already had. You notice a problem because you lived inside it, not because you brainstormed.

How an app changes it

If the idea is a shop, the sequence matters: sell first, prove people come back, then build the app. An app before the customers is a cost with nothing to do.