Marketing Survey App -- Do We Need One?

Hi.

A lot of people/devs want to start building. However, unless you really know your market/have potential "psuedo-real" people/customers/testers, you're really doing a hope/prayer.

So, there are solutions that exist to do basic Marketing/Survey/Crm types of solutions, but they're kind of costly if you want to roll out a few to target customers for different projects.

So, I'm interested in what the site/users use for this process. How do yo determine if the idea is reasonable? Aside from cold calling, what do you direct the user to, to let them have a sense of what you want to create/why it might make sense/etc..

Feel free to tell me/the site what you do! Select any of the below, or feel free to add your own!!

Things off the top of my small brain!

Cold Call/Email
-gets a live potential person to "pitch" to
or at least have an initial conversation

Combination Idea/Survey/ProjectMap/Crm Site/mobileApp
idea would be to present the project to the user
problem you think you're trying to solve
why you're doing it, what you're doing
pros/cons to user

The Idea portion:
   tries to give user short/concise section/text on 
     the problem/issue you're trying to see if there's 
     a market for? or if your "potential" soln would 
     make sense
 Need to figure out a "way" to ask if this is even a pain point!
 If it's not a pain point, what do they have that it, if they 
    can describe that to you!

 Tell them why you're targeting them - why you think this 
     might be an issue...
     -you've talked with others -- who've said this is an issue
     -other similar people/operations have said this might be 
      good idea
     -etc...



 is this even a real problem to the tgt user/business
 what are user pain points in this area
 what tools/processes does user use to solve this now

 to the user: i know these are "Basic" questions/etc
     would it be cool to have a followup for a better
     understanding (survey)

what's the user info
   name/email/cell/etc..

is there a "better" person that I can talk to about this 
   can you pass this to the person/resource?

CRM proces..
capture the "survey" data to go over later
build an initial "funnel" list call/target users

have a process to put the webapp/mobile online for users to access...

The idea would be to have a more or less repeatable process that
can be used without too much hassle by anyone to get a pretty
good idea if something should be built.

At the same time, if the process works, the project would have an
initial list of potential test users, as well as paying customers.

Thoughts/Comments?

thanks