keeping motivated across a product life cycle is so difficult. the biggest motivator for me is continually speaking to people who use the product - less lonely and usually indicates i am doing something useful.

I think I answered in chat. But, here is the gist. For me separating building the product from marketing activities is important. It helps me to focus and to move quickly and within budget.

Start writing or doing some other content that resonates with your market. That way you create awareness of the product and you, as the product maker. Offer an option to signup. Personally I think sending people straight to a pre-launch page might be a less effective than an opt-in via your site (it is a better UX).

If your customer is developers or hosting companies, SaaS would make sense.

Not sure if I would be helpful, but happy to take a look at it.

WordPress is my choice. Ghost is really cool, but I do not have the technical skills to install it, and do not have the inclination to learn. The hosted option looks interesting and something I might try. A couple of other reasons 1. WP is great for a blog, and has excellent integrations with email marketing and payment processors 2. With managed hosting overall cost of ownership is relatively inexpensive for security, caching, backups etc 3. For a person with my limited coding skills, the learning curve is relatively low as I can usually find a plugin to do what I need it to do.

Estimate a lifetime value. Something like a)user will use the service for X number of months and than cancel. b) if i know that the user will be around for x number of months, what would that normally cost c) maybe offer a discount and (d)work out how much you will reinvest . (have not done this but I understand that if you subtract card processing fees, you can offer a good discount and still make something on the deal).

I stay in South Africa so maybe not relevant. From my experience, best to register at the very beginning and take time to setup systems that (a) separate out personal and business expenses and (b) be tax compliant. I started without registering and got myself into several issues related to taxes, and this has proved expensive. The irony is that had I started out with a registered company I would have had a much smaller tax liability. The other advantage is that you are forced to record finances, which means you have to have basic financial systems in place. But, what is VERY important, is to do the registration as quickly as possible, and cheaply.

Have used Clicky before. Easy to setup and useful. Have started this course on Google analytics www.jeffalytics.com/courses/a…. So far, excellent.

Too long. I can get a prototype / MVP/ MUP out very quickly (in a couple of days). Turning that into something that I can launch takes months and months. I am always tinkering with it, and never really launching. My biggest goal is thus to launch and in doing so, commit to that project for an extended period of time.