How do you determine what people want before making a whole course?

A simple method that I've used for a client that helped him generate 6 Figures in just a month.

Start with doing Surveys. The only perfect person to answer your question regarding as to what they want is your target audience.

I'd probably recommend you joining Forums, FB groups, any channels where your target audience resides.

Then message at least 10 - 20 active people on that forum privately.

And ask this question:
When it comes to (your topic or course you're planning to produce), what has been the one biggest struggle you have encountered?

Example:
When it comes to outsourcing to remote designers, what has been the one biggest struggle you have encountered?

Why would you ask them about their struggle?
Because according to Cialdini persuasion principle book, it's easier to find bad experience as compared to good experience.

And at the same time, your goal is to gather data and their problems.

Once you have gathered the 10 answers, collate them and count the problems that most of those people have also experienced. And create a course based on those problems.

Now you'll avoid the guesswork because there's a high chance that other people like them have the same problem.

Tweet ideas or nuggets of value. If those get traction make it a blog post. If that gets traction add it to the course?

Not sure if that would work, but that came to mind.

If you want to do it the lean method before paying money for ads you could do a simple survey of your customer population. Ask your assumptions to people who you think this course would be best for. It can be as simple as: "How do you feel about this software?" or even "How is your learning experience with this software?".

I would also keep it open-ended to make sure your assumptions are correct. If you ask leading questions then you won't get the results you need. Try to remove as much bias as possible to obtain the best results. After talking to a couple of hundred people you'll know where your audience is then you can proceed with targeted marketing to collect emails in the process of creating the course.

Normally what I would do is create a sign up page to notify your potential user base and measure their interest. Afterwards you create an ad that targets your audience. See then the percentage of sign ups vs visits. Using something like https://betanotify.com you can do this :)
Notice: I'm the creator of betanotify, please let me know if you like it!

A couple of ideas:

• measure the keywords analytics on search engines
• See if there are groups on social media about this software or if it's being talked about in other more generic groups
• Ask the people you know if they have been searching for courses on this software and how they currently learned about it

You could create a landing page(or several versions of it), drive traffic to it through targeted PPC campaigns and collect some leads to gauge interest.