Building a product from scratch is hard - and building it in a startup is extra hard (for all the obvious reasons you can think of); having said that one thing that I did learn from working on Virtual Earth at Microsoft and now at Center'd is that if you focus on meeting or exceeding the expectations of your users rest all is taken care of.
So how do you know if you are meeting the expectations of your users? Some times you have to 'listen' carefully (through analytics) and some times get it in your email (feedback emails) but some times though, you see the feedback publicly in blog posts, magazine articles and news letters, and we have been having our fair share of that with our "Local Planning" product that we launched a couple of weeks ago.
As Dan pointed out on our official blog we feel fortunate to have so many folks publicly talking about what we do. So thank you Erick, Erin, Michelle, Beverly and Susan, please keep the feedback coming!
