I germinate in paper towel then once I see a nice long root, straight onto the netpot already filled 3/4 way with hydroton, then i carefully place individual balls around the open seed allowing a small opening for it to pop up through. Then after a few days and its reaching for the light, i fill in the net pot so the cotyledons are just above the surface.
This is how I will do it for DWC from now on.
The 3 photos below,
The first photo has 4 plants, The big one at the back was a male I tried to harvest some pollen from. The smallest one at the front is a tomato seedling, can hardly see it. The other 2 were germinated at the same time, there are 2 weeks old here. The smaller one had just been transplanted from coco that day.
The seed I put straight in the hydroton, nearly 10X bigger.
The last photo is 1 week into flower and 7 weeks from sprouting.