Personally, like everything, I think it’s a balance. Sure you want to listen to your customers, specifically about anything that is annoying or painful with a product.

You need to be careful listening to customers when it comes to missing features or additional functionality - often these ideas can be crackpot at worst, and at best things that sound good but when you do them no-one ever uses.

For feature additions I wouldn’t talk to customers about the Tactile per se, but more generally about their business, what are the issues their having, etc, and maybe what other software or systems they’re using, and what they like and dislike about those.

So I would ignore anything that isn’t smoothing the rough edges on the existing product and addressing the business concerns of current or potential customer markets.

I wouldn’t worry too much about coverage from TechCrunch - I doubt it’s driven by how many or what features you have, but more likely how much VC funding you have and how much traffic. Keep plugging away and telling your story and eventually you’ll get on their radar.

I also think that with the advent of things like Twitter and Facebook combined with news outlets like RRW and TechCrunch the line starts to blur a bit particularly with the speed these things move.

We do do a certain amount of traditional PR - press releases to news outlets, although many of these tend to be online - how do you go about finding trade press and talking to people like PR Week and Marketing Week to write an article. I have always heard editorial/articles are so much more effective than adverts/advertorials etc.

The product itself works across a number of markets, talking to people they really like it and the feedback is always great - its just getting in front of them. I think also that the US market has a bigger adoption of web apps and the sort of people that read RRW and TC tend to have a lot of clout in this space and help to drive targeted people - http://webworkerdaily.com/ is another good one - this is more targeted and they will write about us more readily.

As a PR professional though, I did have a wry smile to myself at the ease with which you lump the words ‘PR’ and ‘marketing’ together. It’s worth remembering that PR (unlike marketing) is not just something that you do to get new customers. Indeed, the whole PR process should involve listening to existing customers, modifying the product in line with their feedback, and maintaining that 2-way conversation with them. So, even going for the smaller ‘useful features’ is a form of PR in its own right. If you can encourage them to say good things about Tactile CRM then better still.

Don’t forget the value of more traditional PR too - press releases to trade mags, for example. Who are your customers? Articles on ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch will give you publicity but only to a niche audience. Will that publicity convert into business if the people who are most likely to become your customers don’t subscribe? Strikes me that your product has vast application for many sectors and a more targetted approach into media reaching those sectors could help too.

Great dilemma though - perhaps you should be approaching Marketing Week or PR Week with that dilemma as an idea for a features article!