Read the book "Blue Ocean Strategy" - helps you find latent customer needs, bigger competitors might not address

Find a really big problem first - then think about a solution - Build an MVP and keep validating and improve your product over time. You need to test if people are willing to pay for your solution early on.

This highly depends on your product or service. The cold calling approach could work if you have a clear value propositions that is easy to explain. However a cold call should be well researched. Who is the actual decision maker and is there a high likelihood that your service is of interest. Then is is pure math. In India a business analyst doing the research and making the calls cost 700 dollar per month. He is able to set up 10 meetings per month, of which 0.5 projects come out. This is for it services, but can give you an idea on the acquisition cost per project. If you are looking for partnerships such as joint ventures, distribution, affiliates, licensing I would always find a trustworthy door opener. Here also you must have a strong well researched concept ready to quickly show a true benefit for the partner. I have seen to many let's meet and see what we can do presentations. Best to provide clear numbers and Ideally a financial commitment from your side, this will move things for sure. For early growth and high strategic value, you could consider and equity stake for the partner with clear deliverables. Then you have to convince him about your growth story. In this event you might have a different person to talk to. Good luck

This is a good question and always pops up in many projects. We always try to look at the customer life time value as the long term KPI. In most businesses 20 % of your valuable customers account for 80 % of the overall sales. It helps to identify those customers, by setting up a clear funnel analytics over a longer period of time and measure each conversion step. : from visit to registration, to sales, to repurchase and so forth. Also take into account the value of each sale. A customer that had to register to purchase, has shown a bigger commitment and might become more valuable in the long run. Many times it is quite easy to get registrations, what counts is the sales. On the other hand with registrations you have a valuable database you can retarget potential customers. I guess you should try, analyse the results and continuously optimize. Moreover this also depends on your kind of product and the traction you want pursue.