[cliftonmckinney]

I think--potentially--it matters a lot more if you're not funded and/or if it helps you to get "discovered" by both users and folks who might fund you. We got covered in Mashable very early in our product evolution. It helped us a ton. We're a small startup in Memphis, TN and the coverage gave us some much-needed exposure and, at least partly, an air of legitimacy with VCs. Post-funding there are many more mechanisms for getting the word out about how awesome you are, but before that event happens there's nothing better than a little free advertising from a major tech blog.

And in the end the coverage has helped us become a better company. We have many many more users now than we did before the feature, and the exposure helped us gain quite a few "champion" users whose feedback has been invaluable to us as our product evolves.

Key thing for us was to make sure it was stated explicitly that we were pretty brand new. Huge props to Jolie O'Dell for working with us on that. We got a lot of new users from the article and for the most part they've been patient with us as we improve. And best of all we've started relationships with tech press that will hopefully help us out when we release super awesome feature x, y, and z.

My two cents...