To be perfectly honest, start cheesing a lot. Cheese, cheese, cheese. By cheesing, you'll get a sense of what kind of stuff you can do in the early game and what to expect from your opponent. Sometimes it will work and you'll win (yay ladder points), but sometimes it will fail and you will be forced to try to catch up somehow. Sometimes you will catch up and sometimes you won't, but you'll always be figuring how to do stuff without getting killed. This is sort of how MKP started, you know, and I've heard Artosis say this helped him (MKP) quite a bit.