However, as they say, it's "a capital mistake to theorize without data"; and I believe if the goal is limited to "creating a viable online business", and we have a target market set -say, "professionals doing professional stuff"[2]- we can do better.

By asking well-phrased, well-framed questions to a small (but statistically significant) partition of the target market, we can pull out product hypothesizes right from the market.

So, my question is: which questions to ask, if our goal is to limit the answers to have good scaling characteristics?

Why you should care: finding an answer to this problem would contribute to massively de-risking startup creation.

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/venturehacks/customer-development-4-customer-discovery-part-1

[2] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-business-on-5-hours-a-week/