Do you have lots of friends whonare dentists and would use software for dentists just because you asked them to? Great! Now figure out if there's something they all need.
You should have friends and family lined up to use a specific prototype before you write a single line of code.
I was having problems keeping up with all the new vinyl releases that were coming up so I built a tool to collate them into one easy to navigate place. A couple of years later this turned into a customer-facing website.
Then I realised that once I found the record I wanted it was hard to find a store that had it in stock as most of the records i wanted were very limited releases. So i extended the site to do a real-time stock check of my favourite record stores to show me which had the records in stock.
I now have record shops coming to me wishing to be listed in the stock check feature and I charge them money to appear, either through a monthly subscription or a CPA basis.
Juno showed expected search results - actual page of the record; hardwax was queried for the label name - total stasis - ok; hhv showed completely irrelevant results although they do not have that record in stock at all; deejay.de query was malformed. An attempt was made to search for "total stasis" (label name) but ended up in searching for total 20stasis.
I've noticed that deejay.de expects to query with whitespace being replaced by a plus sign /total stasis ends up in /total+20stasis and /total+stasis is a correct param that gives the expected results
8 months later, and I'm glad I did it.
How did you get the word out when you were starting out? Was it just basics like adwords, etc?