This strategy is simply a component of an overall outreach and SEO campaign for any product. It very much needs to be mixed in with a variety of other techniques for full success.
The reason I shared it was because once you spend the hour or so to set everything up, you can sit down each day with your cup of coffee and spend 15 minutes building some links while interacting with the community in a very easy way. Mix that in with more specific outreach and you have a good strategy for growing exposure to your product.
I agree that this can be helpful, but the way it is framed in this article is dangerous, because it can easily be misinterpreted.
http://serpfu.com/case-study-insurance/
Once again, let me clarify that I don't condone the type of link building here, but I don't think that you can argue that it doesn't work.
Sounds like blog comments aren't the way to go.
They also advertise this service as "Penguin safe." Maybe if you launch your site between algorithm updates. You can definitely rank with these kind of links, but you will get torched eventually. This is not a long or even medium term strategy for what most of consider a startup.
Organic is the key word here. Make links with people not websites.
In general, blog commenting is good to build relationships, which then can get you links that pass value. However, in the short term, they probably do not help. You should build relationships with influencers in your space - however, it's not necessarily true they will come from inputting these keywords in Google's Blog Search.
If you're paying attention at all (you're running a startup in the vertical, right?) you should know who has influence. Start there, add value, connect - the links and secondary sites who may also be interested will show themselves organically over time.