Sometimes it's really hard or not worth to get proper feedback even when you have a userbase.

If I believe a feature is interesting or may be useful, I'll just spend least effort to create UI and make the feature barely useable for the simplest use case. Pretty much like a demo feature to hook up the users. It's actually pretty helpful to have bugs and limitations. If users find it could potentially solve their problems, or care about it, they will reach out and the ball can be rolling.