Yes, I did exactly that a few years back. A friend of mien and I launched a site with minimal functionality that was really just a landing page. We offered the opportunity to pre-buy a year's subscription to the service by allowing users to set their own pricing. Within the first 24 hours of the site going live, we had enough paying customers to validate the business and inform our iterative development cycle.

Ultimately, we decided it wasn't a big enough business for either of us to get really excited about but it proves that it can be done.

I also did that in my current business with a landing page that generated literally thousands of leads and hundreds of very qualified customers, which resulted in paid pilot contracts before the software was fully built.

Build something that people actually *need* and you'd be surprised at what they're willing to do to get early access to it.

Happy to talk about it in a call in more detail