M.G. Siegler:

All of this leads to my seemingly counter-intuitive advice: avoid being featured by Apple in the App Store when you first launch your app at all costs. Apple may hate me being honest in this regard, but they shouldn’t: it behooves neither the app makers nor Apple to have a bunch of apps featured that aren’t going to provide long-term value to users. It’s the short-term gain for long-term pain trade-off. Big picture: it won’t be worth it.

While it’s a lot less sexy, what you should do is quietly launch your app/service and rely on some distribution that isn’t Apple’s firehose of mainstream users. Ideally, this would be natural, word-of-mouth growth.

No doubt. Too many users too early in an app’s lifecycle can be bad news. Good words from M.G.