Asking potential clients is absolutely critical in today's environment. As RichardK puts it,
You can't create in a vacuum but building a product that's a moving target isn't any better. Today's market moves much faster and as others have stated that anything of substance typically takes more than 90 days from concept to product.
But the way to do that is to start with a mockup. Yes, use what ever you can to get a set of screens to show someone and simply ask them what they would change. The process is to change the demo and improve it until it works enough to get someone to buy it. Yes, this is a different way of developing: use RAD for the screen work and structured development only for the parts that really need it.
What happens is that few established companies buy it. I put together a demo of one product and most established companies want to buy the full 6 figure product (at a 5 figure price). So, I am having to market it to unestablished companies - ones that want a product for a slightly different market, a market that the established companies are not willing to go into.
Finding such customers is much more difficult. This is where the web marketing comes in.
Remember that Ford did not develop the assembly line until other companies had proven that the market existed and would be profitable. We don't have that. We need to find what would be profitable to build. Ergo, instead of "production development", we need to be in "how can we cut the costs of our marketing when customers want to see working demo's?"
