There's only one way to make sure your product will solve the problem you're focusing on: to get your hands dirty and build a prototype.

It doesn't matter if you don't have much technical experience-- you don't need an engineer to build a great prototype . Instead of choosing expensive and time-consuming prototyping techniques, you should aim to keep things lean.

Once you've built the prototype, you'll begin to run tests with users to gather feedback and learn as much from them as possible. Before you build the 'real' product, you want to be extremely confident that your prototype is solving the right problem.