Mark, you've highlighted two great reasons for a startup to be high touch. One, to guide product development and two, to acquire customers/users etc. As for the customer acquisition piece, there's a saying in the consumer web world that, to build a category leading service, founders need to personally sign up the first 10,000 users for their service manually (i.e. one by one you need to convert them and sign them on to your service). Happy, satisfied early users are the best evangelists for a fledgling company or web service. Like the old shampoo commercial, they tell two friend who tell two friends who...and so on. That is how services like Twitter are propagated and become ubiquitous.

Mark, another good post.

My two cents is to prepare for a VC pitch in a similar way that you would prepare for a customer pitch. Research your audience and tailor your pitch accordingly (don't just use the same pitch deck for each VC you meet). The entrepreneurs that always stand out to me are the ones that have clearly done their homework. Talk about why you are a fit with a given VC's investment strategy (right stage, right sector, right geography etc.), talk about some other deals they have in their portfolio that have relevance to your deal (deals that were done at same stage, similar founder backgrounds, related-but-not-competitive deals…), talk about who you and the VC know in common etc. etc. etc.

I personally use funding pitches as a proxy for how an entrepreneur will perform when the real work gets started (i.e. how they will perform in front of customers). Also, many of the more proactive (read: better) VCs I know will have done a bit of homework on you prior to your pitch (checked out your web site team page or Googled you or asked around about you). It is to your advantage to "level the playing field," so to speak. Remember, information is power