[tedmiston]

I view the acquisition as a tradeoff in whether you'd like to exert a lot of effort upfront or down the road.

If you exert a lot of effort upfront, you can collect a few high-paying customers and provide more tailored support to their needs. Of course the fewer customers you have means each has a greater proportional influence in affecting the direction of your product. That is, assuming customer feedback is something you're interested in, which I acknowledge is not necessarily always the case.

If you would rather exert effort more "constantly" and gradually down the road, than the many customers approach is good. Many apps which end up in this situation do so because of a massive user spike at the point when their app "goes big". In that case, the short-term growth is clearly not gradual, but the long-term growth leading up to that point may be.

My personal preference would be a small to medium customer base to provide more tailored support.