<i>> I don't know what feature to work on or what direction to take the project. Of course I'm eating my own dog food, but my own use-case gets me only so far. How did you get a product that interests people? Ideally I'd like to charge money for this, but I think I'm still far from that point in time / functionality.</i><p>I'm not in your target market, so I don't have anything interesting to say about the product itself, but I do have some suggestions for how you can get actionable feedback to de-risk your project:<p>First, you don't necessarily have to actually charge money in order to find out whether people would pay, you only have to measure whether they click a "buy now" button (or the equivalent).<p>Furthermore, while the folks who clicked the button might be slightly annoyed that the button was "fake", they are then good prospects to sign up for notification when the product is available for purchase, and are decent candidates for user testing your eventual product (but keep in mind that the product you develop based on this sort of validation may be different than the one they tried to buy (also, the more-annoying variation that is actually taking the order and then cancelling the charge is pretty risky unless you use a throwaway business/product name, I've never tried that and wouldn't suggest approaching those folks for anything else).<p>Creating and A/B testing google ads and landing pages will (potentially) teach you which users to target, what features/phrasing potential customers find most compelling, what pricing models to use, and so on, helping you to hone your value proposition and prioritize features (fair warning, you may learn that there <i>is</i> no viable market).<p>There are a lot of decent articles on the web about validating an idea with 'spoof landing page', 'dry wallet', or 'fake door' MVPs, but some of my favorite resources are the following books, which will also give you good context for these and related tactics, as well as 'next steps' you can take:<p>Running Lean by Ash Maurya<p>Validating Product Ideas
Through Lean User Research by Tomer Sharon<p>Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy by Cindy Alvarez