But it is still good advice. What I do is send out an occasional email to update users on any issues we've had and upcoming updates, and I always encourage them to call me anytime if they're having trouble or need or thought of a change or new feature. And I generally make light of it, telling them "Hey, I get lonely sitting here coding all day, so any excuse will work for me" (Maytag man).
The point is I try to make it very easy for them to contact me. I make a point to tell them "It's always my fault if you're having trouble". And when they call I make a point to listen.
At the beginning of this year we shut down 3 old versions of our app after setting up accounts for all those users on our new app, so I got to talk to a lot of users who'd procrastinated and I made a point to ask them if there were any changes or new features they wanted or needed and I got a lot of great feedback, but in most all of those cases they contacted me and I made a point to follow up with emails and phone calls.
During the months leading up to shutting those old apps off I made a huge number of bug fixes and tweaks and added some new features to the new app, all based on user feedback, and it is a much better app now. So the importance of that is spot on.
In fact, now again my phone and email are quiet. Pretty much only new users and just a few of those contacting me. For me, that's a relief after having a very hectic previous year and it's indicative of the app maturing and working as expected for users. But I couldn't have done that without them. And it was pretty overwhelming because there were a lot more bugs than I expected.
So now I'm able to once again spend some time "marketing". The product is polished enough for promoting now and I have some ideas on who and how to market it to.
Developing is my passion so that's hard for me. I am going to take a crack at it though.