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.