NB: Most marketable ideas do no appear so in skeleton/demo/prototype form. Support, documentation, community and UI can often sell a product more than its own core functionality.
If your product doesn't have much functionality on its own, try to make it into a plugin for a popular package and try to gain some foothold (or enough licenses for ramen) that way first.
Along with developing it, you will also have to seek out the initial users and inform of them of its existence. I prefer corporate clients for this, it only takes one of them to get enough cash in hand to bootstrap the project.
Yeah, this is the closest to how I do things, too, fwiw. All the other stuff, to me, is procrastinating.
Get idea -> If I have time to implement a rough working version of the idea, then schedule it and do it; else, do not do it, and possibly file away in brain for later.
I'm horrifically busy at this point, so I don't have to bother with most of my ideas right now.
It helps that I've finally broken the bad habit of talking about ideas.
I can't speak for the GP but I agree it's a bad idea. Maybe not for everyone, but for a certain type of person, definitely.
The problem is psychological. When you talk about an idea, you feel like you've somehow accomplished something by doing so. You hear other people's positive reactions and instead of validating that your idea should be done your brain interprets them as satisfaction in and of itself. You feel that little less "hungry" and yet you haven't even done anything.
Also, talking too much clouds the vision and you tend to expand the scope even as you talk. Your companion will have their own opinion and their feedback and ideas will merge with what you think until you're left with a union of both party's concepts, your version 0.1 getting that little bit harder to ever reach. Or worse, that person might later claim you stole their ideas.
I come from the school that believes that with very few exceptions mere ideas are nearly worthless in themselves. Anyone can imagine anything. Actually doing things is much, much harder. Talking is not doing. Don't talk to anyone until you've got at least a prototype, IMO. With modern web frameworks you should be able to whip up at least a crappy, incomplete prototype outline in a day or two. Sitting down and doing that will hone and focus your thinking. And if you can't be bothered spending a day or two implementing just the skeleton of your idea - then you obviously don't really believe it's a good idea at all, so go and think harder : D
From my experience, ideas are worthless because they don't exist. Sounds obvious but think of it is this way:
Everything can fit neatly and beautifully into anything else whilst it exists in your head. "How do we monetize this...? Easy! just do xyz!" The answers are clear, the solutions are elegant, and everyone and everything is holding hands, dancing around in a circle, singing their hearts out.
As soon as you actually get to work, and you make the transition from fantasy to reality, well: shit instantly hits the fan, and you've got a mess of a mess of a mess, and that's what really counts. Nothing works right, nobody wants it, you deal with endless bugs, its never ready, all your "plans" don't really mesh with this thing called reality.
It's kind of like fighting in a video game. You can fantasize all you want about how badass you are at street fighter. But get yourself into a real street fight and you won't ever think you know anything about anything ever again.
Step 2: See what happens next and react to it.
Step 3: Repeat step 2 until the idea becomes a success. Or give up if its clear it could not possibly succeed.