How do you validate your ideas?

Hey all 👋

How do you usually validate your business ideas?

I've known few steps as below and please comment how successful below are for you and if there are any other steps you follow to validate..

⚬ Talking to friends and other colleagues in your network
⚬ Setting up a landing page and getting few subscribers for customer interviews
⚬ Checking similar ideas on the internet and how they worked out?
⚬ Build a Prototype or Proof of concept and check how users respond to it?

⚬ Ranking your idea based on these 3 attributes & going with the top ranked idea
Investment (Time/Work & Money)
Personal Interest
Potential Revenue & Profit

⚬ Creating survey forms or questionnaire's to gather customer feedback on landing pages or POC.
⚬ 1-1 Interviews with people outside your network (Would be interested to know how you found these people?)

I do have few questions and it would be helpful if you could share any feedback on these..

1. Where do you find your first set of customers to validate your ideas? (IndieHackers, HackerNews, Reddit, ProductHunt or any other communities?)
2. When validating ideas with your friends and family, do you take their feedback at face value or ask more questions to understand their reason behind each answer?
3. Do you ask 'why' during customer interviews? to get different views of a customer on your product?
4. How helpful were the online communities in finding new users to discuss, validate and interview your potential customers?
5. How many number of users you would roughly interview or discuss with before you mark your idea as a potential business?

Also, would be helpful to know your valuable feedback on our upcoming community (https://www.probstack.io/)

Launching very soon and excited to share it with all of you. The above will surely help me position and market this community better.Looking forward..

Thanks,