Advice. What about free market?

I am building a social network website. Is it important to build the core idea as a prototype first and get it tested on the market, or is it better to seek advice and discover what can be changed and added on first before testing the market?

• Will it be a waste of time to seek professional advice to discover additional changes and features that can possibly benefit the website idea BEFORE testing out the core idea? In other words, will it be a better idea to find out more possible features that can be added before even testing if the main infrastructure works?

• Answer:

  1. Do your research by talking to people and more people and more people 2. Build your product with few features, keep it simple. Let your user help determine the new features you build. 3. Let people use it take feedback and iterate 4. Let more people use it, take feedback and iterate