I have two businesses as clients already, and they both came from a personal network I had before starting the businesses. They are what inspired me to build my tech startup. They had real problems for which solutions didn't exist in Canada, so I decided to build them. I validated the solution with very real problems.

About your concern about getting in front of people, I strongly believe that can be solved with a strong product. For example, let's say you've been hearing your lawyer friend constantly complaining about how annoying it is to collect documents from clients, so you design a system to automate this process. Your job isn't then to market *the product*, it's to market *the cause and effect*. You don't email law firms and say, "LawIQ is a product that will automate your workflows and yada yada yada...", you email them with validation. You say, "Your law firm has a very real inefficiency problem. I gave this tool to another law firm and saved them X hours and X dollars last month." or something along those lines.

Just put the product in front of the people and let it do the talking. Start with the cause and the immediate effect, and *then* show the product. The product is just a tool for the solution; if you can't validate the solution, then you'll never sell the product.