pg says that making something great sells an app, but he also hired an expensive PR firm and said they were worth the money.
I hired a PR firm in 1997. Things have changed in 11 years. And also, we were fairly established at that point: a year and a half old, with roughly a million in funding in the bank. When we were in the OP's position, we just focused on making users like us, and that was the right thing to do.
We got our very first users through friends of friends, or by cold-calling them. The first two users were two technical bookstores. One was run by a guy who'd worked at Interleaf at the same time as me. The other one we probably cold-called.
We started working on Viaweb in July 1995, and I think we got the first users in November or December. We didn't publicly launch till January, though, because we felt we had to have 5 or 6 stores already online before we launched, or we'd look lame.
I hired a PR firm in 1997. Things have changed in 11 years. And also, we were fairly established at that point: a year and a half old, with roughly a million in funding in the bank. When we were in the OP's position, we just focused on making users like us, and that was the right thing to do.