In the past, I've wrongly thought that launching to the wordpress.org directory was "making it." With my latest plugin project, Edupack, we've decided to reach out to users we think will love it before launching on WordPress.org. So far, the strategy has been great. We've found a key "braintrust" of vocal users who are helping us define features. We hope our braintrust becomes our evangelists when we're ready to launch to the masses.