reflect's comments

This is a loaded question but to try and be helpful I would say just focus on finding your early adopters - who is actively looking for a way to implement your solution, or who has cobbled together an imperfect solution on their own, or who has the extra budget to easily justify your solution?

Now where can you reach these people? Where are they on the internet? Play where they play. e.g. You already found this large group of potential interested parties - why not post a Show HN? Subreddits? Betalist? etc.

As the quote goes “If you don't build your dream someone will hire you to help build theirs.”

There is always a need for business research, especially in sales or investing. The question is can you make a better product than existing competitors such as Crunchbase, CB Insights, Pitchbook, etc. and give it a a viable business model? Mattermark couldn't.

Interesting, I had also read she created it. Maybe I missed it in the story, but who did actually create and popularize these silly things?

/Startups has a "Share Your Startup" each month which is great

For us ( http://www.startupdaybook.com ) a few things have been very effective -- but it did take a lot of trial and error to find those few things.

BetaList and Reddit have been a big driver of signups as they have the exact audience we are looking to help (startups) and a wide audience.

Blogging has also been a big part of getting signups. Creating helpful posts on Medium with a small product mention at the bottom brings in a good amount of the right people.

Twitter is great for driving traffic to the blog posts which then in turn gets people interested in us and our product. Buffer is awesome, and Quuu is a great service that has a community retweeting your tweet for a nominal fee.

Overall our landing page conversion rate is 29.8% right now, so driving the right traffic really matters.

Thanks for the feedback. The levels relate to the Lean Startup process e.g. Document your best plan, validate the plan, run experiments, launch a minimum viable product etc.

It's really more of a straight forward way to follow the prescribed process faster and easier without getting overwhelmed or off track.

I follow a morning routine regularly which includes:

-10 Minute Meditation

-10 Minute Writing/Journal - business quotes, ideas, etc.

-10 Minute Drawing (I'm not good, but the repetition has helped. I bought a book called "642 things to draw" which makes it very easy.)

-10 Minute Reading

-10 Minute Exercise (simple do it at home exercises)

This type of routine is discussed in books like The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod and Level Up Your Day by S.J. Scott and Rebecca Livermore.

Once you get into the swing of things it keeps you on a good schedule for sleeping and waking up early. This gives me a lot more energy each day and stimulates my creative side.

This was my first linux distro, I used it back in the mid 90's and it was such a great learning experience. Amazing how long it's been already.

This is mainly about creating your own wealth. The first basic question is how do you want to spend your time? Since we are creatures of habit, having a scheduled 9-5 job with someone else directing you can be very comforting. It takes a special kind of person to go off and schedule your own day, work hard towards a goal, all while fitting in your normal life in between. With a job, you are forced to go to work at a set time, then when it's done you go home and continue your life for a few hours. Not everyone wants to spend that time creating wealth.