[britknight]

You might want to give this a read: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html ("Do Things That Don't Scale").

It's the best piece I've ever read dealing with the question of attracting users to an early-stage startup. The gist of it is this: your first 100 users will be completely different from your last 10,000. The first 100 have to be courted - you're going to have to bend over backwards to make them happy. If that means customer support emails from the founder, so what? Those first 100 users, the ones who are overwhelmed by your support, will be the most valuable customers you'll get, because once they're through the door, network effects can really start to kick in.

The apocryphal story I've heard (but never verified) is of how PayPal broke out in the eBay marketplace. Instead of trying to convert customers with advertising and the like, they pretended to be customers on eBay, offering to buy inexpensive items from popular sellers before asking if the sellers accepted PayPal. This got the first few sellers through the door, and once they started using it the network effects propagated through eBay and beyond, turning PayPal into the giant it is today.

Hope this helps. Good luck!