If you're reading this, you probably will never give FogCreek a dollar. That's the hard truth of the matter. We literally give the product away to startups (Student and Startup Edition, free forever for 2 users) because a) in aggregate startups demonstrably don't spend appreciable amounts of money on this, often preferring OSS or "we can totally duplicate that 100 man-years of development in a weekend" and b) dedicated effort at making sales to you doesn't make any sense relative to dedicated effort at selling 20 seats to an insurance company in Idaho.
But do we care about the community liking us? Oh heck yes. The average reader of HN is very link rich relative to e.g. the project manager for the IT team at an insurance company in Idaho. Producing stuff which you like enough to link to gets us higher on the Googles and thus into the line of vision of people who can spend more money on bug tracking than many startups spend on everything. Similarly, if you feel good things about us, you might recommend us internally to someone who has ability to make decisions about which product to purchase.
FC knows that FB is a tool that will show itself after a long time (hence 45 day) trials. When we start using FB our company was only 2 people now we are 9 and also we are a paid customer of FB.
For these reasons I don't want to believe that FC is not using channels like SO,Joel's blog as a marketing tool. That would be a waste of awesome free marketing.
I actually work for a remote insurance company that would really benefit from FogBugz :)
(but I have fairly limited influence and no decision power)
What great news! I've been using the EpicWin iPhone app for issue management and DropBox for source control up to now. Every time I thought about it for any length of time, I'd get really nervous. :)
Signing up right now.
Edit: Also, this made me so happy, I signed up for HN, after lurking for over a year, just so I could say so. Now that's great marketing.
Anecdotal evidence against the assertion that people reading this will never give FogCreek/Atlassian a dollar: we will.