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I found a recurring problem. How do I know if it deserves its own product?

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This is my first attempt at validating a product idea before actually building it.

I live in France, and in Russian-speaking communities I constantly see people asking for recommendations for a nanny, doctor, lawyer, repair professional, teacher, cleaner, beauty professional, and so on. I started tracking these posts in one large Facebook group. There are many real requests. Some get plenty of recommendations, while others get very few useful replies or none at all. That made me think about a service for finding local professionals who speak your language. But here’s what I’m unsure about: people already use Facebook and Telegram groups for this, and sometimes they work perfectly well.

So I’m trying to understand: how would you validate whether this problem is painful enough for people to use a dedicated service rather than relying only on those groups?

So far, I’ve only made a simple no-code form to collect real requests. I haven’t built the product yet. If you’ve validated or built something around local services, recommendations, or communities, I’d really appreciate your perspective.

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Your answer is already in the facebook group imo. Some requests get replies, some die with zero. Count how many die per week, thats the real number. If most requests get solved the groups are good enough and people wont switch. The form measures interest but the group measures failure of the current solution, which is what actually pushes people to a new service.

thanks, this is a really helpful perspective. I agree that measuring unanswered requests is probably more meaningful than just collecting interest through a form. I started manually tracking requests in one group, but I think I need to look at it more systematically: how many requests appear every week, which categories are the hardest, and how many stay without a useful answer. I also started thinking about this because I personally had this problem. I posted questions that got no answers, then had to search on Google, ask friends, and join many different groups to find someone. It was quite frustrating. I would personally love to have one place where I could find professionals in my city who speak my language. Thanks for pointing me in this direction, I think this is a better way to validate the problem.