Validation of ideas and demands through paid ads

Ideas and demand validation through ads

I wonder if anyone from the community has tried targeted ads to validate the ideas or apps or for saas products? The basic marketing tutorials suggest segmenting the audience and building possible client portraits similar to what one can achieve by setting up the target on Instagram or Facebook, for instance.

The idea is to spend some (not significant) budget on seeing the feedback, spot-check the most demandable products, and figure out if it makes sense to dive into product development.

I had seen this approach to e-commerce product demand testing when the product was "sold" without having the product itself.

However, if that could help avoid building something that no one needs, would that be worth trying? Has anyone done similar experiments?