Yeah, YC advice about contacting users is pretty aggressive. What they want to see is your project having the potential to go "viral" but that doesn't really wo

Yeah, YC advice about contacting users is pretty aggressive. What they want to see is your project having the potential to go "viral" but that doesn't really work for all projects. But it is still good advice. What I do is send out an occasional email to update users on any issues we've had and upcoming updates, and I always encourage them to call me anytime if they're having trouble or need or thought of a change or new feature. And I generally make light of it, telling them "Hey, I get lonely sitting here coding all day, so any excuse will work for me" (Maytag man). The point is I try to make it very easy for them to contact me. I make a point to tell them "It's always my fault if you're having trouble". And when they call I make a point to listen. At the beginning of this year we shut down 3 old versions of our app after setting up accounts for all those users on our new app, so I got to talk to a lot of users who'd procrastinated and I made a point to ask them if there were any changes or new features they wanted or needed and I got a lot of great feedback, but in most all of those cases they contacted me and I made a point to follow up with emails and phone calls. During the months leading up to shutting those old apps off I made a huge number of bug fixes and tweaks and added some new features to the new app, all based on user feedback, and it is a much better app now. So the importance of that is spot on. In fact, now again my phone and email are quiet. Pretty much only new users and just a few of those contacting me. For me, that's a relief after having a very hectic previous year and it's indicative of the app maturing and working as expected for users. But I couldn't have done that without them. And it was pretty overwhelming because there were a lot more bugs than I expected. So now I'm able to once again spend some time "marketing". The product is polished enough for promoting now and I have some ideas on who and how to market it to. Developing is my passion so that's hard for me. I am going to take a crack at it though.