I think that was satire. The entire startup writing world has adopted the idea that you need to ship to actual customers as fast as possible. Developing features in stealth for years is a well-known way to trap yourself into making the wrong thing.

That said, I think the startup book, blog, Tweet, and LinkedIn think piece world went a little overboard with the "ship your MVP early" concept. For a while I was seeing little startups proudly ship things that just didn't work or lacked key features. The only real-world feedback they were getting was that the product was incomplete.

If you burn your early customers badly, you lose precious advocates. In my opinion you're doing the right thing by shipping features for your customers.

It is possible to over-focus on a few vocal customers, though. A common trap for small companies is to get into a relationship with 1 or 2 very vocal customers who will act like they're giving you insights into what the industry wants, but in reality they're just telling you what you want to hear in order to specialize your software for them. It's important to go out and validate the new feature requests with the broader market.