Let’s look at the root issue here.

The root issue is, we need people that have needs, and we need people who are willing to spend money.  The easiest way for us to look at this, in fact, is to through an offline example: 

I want you to imagine that you’re thinking about opening up a restaurant in your town.  The first place that you would go to find out if maybe you needed a new restaurant in your town is to look and see what’s happening with the restaurant scene. Are people filling up the seats in at least some of the restaurants downtown?  Now, if some of the restaurants are empty, and some of them are full, that doesn’t tell you that there are no more hungry people.  If some of the restaurants are full, it tells you the food is probably bad in those empty restaurants.  But, if there are a number of restaurants that are full, it probably indicates that there’s a demand for good food in your town. 

That’s the first step.

Okay, some restaurants are full, so there must be a demand.  There are hungry people.  You sit outside with the binoculars and you watch how many people are coming around. You sit outside, you’re downtown, you set up 100 yards away, 50 yards away, you set up your binoculars, or telescope, and you watch 10 restaurants, and you just count how many people go into each restaurant.  At the end of an hour you know 970 people have gone into those combined 10 restaurants.  There are 970 hungry people on Friday night between 6 and 7.  This is a fact!  We know this now.  We know that there are that many hungry people at that time, and there are 10 restaurants.

If you open a restaurant, and yours is as good as everybody else’s, you’ve got a shot at generating 1/11th of all of that business.  You know this. 

Next you go granular.  You say, ok, we know we’ve got 10 restaurants catering to 970 people.  What if we sit somebody outside the door of every one of these restaurants?  We hire 10 people to work maybe an hour.  We just tick it off, how many people entered this door? How many people entered that door? And if you find that there’s a 970 person average on Friday night, some restaurants have maybe 300 people, some restaurants have only 5.  What does this allow you to do?

It allows you to realize those restaurants have better food, or food that people like.  Maybe there’s a Chinese restaurant, and Indian restaurant, American restaurant, French restaurant, Italian restaurant.  You may say, well, the Italian restaurant is getting more customers while the Chinese restaurants are not getting as many customers.  Then maybe you have to go sample the food.  Is it good food, or is it bad food? 

Do you see where I’m going with this?

The only way that you’re going to be able to get information about whether or not your niche is going to be profitable, and whether there are needs, without actually selling in the niche, is to do some research in your niche.  I gave you this illustration because offline is the illustration that we can all really relate to.  This idea of how we would determine if there’s room for one more restaurant.  You realize that offline that you need to do the work.  It’s the same online.