Thanks Pagan.
I've registered 3 keyword(ish) .com domains today and made an offer on a premium / more brandable domain. I'm also waiting for some managed VPS hosting to be set up. It was not super cheap so hopefully it'll be good enough to start.
Do free site lists and tgp sites still get people submitting? Most sites I look at seem to be linking directly to the sponsor or other sites within the same network, which I'm guessing are owned by the same webmaster. (don't answer if you're gonna be giving away any trade secrets
)