Death to the Cult of Stealth Startups

Old Battlebots story, when my team was competing we would talk to other teams in the 'pit' area. There were a number of teams that kept everything covered up and hush hush until their first fight. Then there were teams like mine who would tell you anything you wanted to know about our bot. The stealth guys never did well in their first appearance, and if they came back the following year and stayed "stealthy" they didn't do well then either. It was the back and forth of multiple ideas and questions that helped people prepare for something which was essentially part chance, part strategy, part build quality.<p>Over the years Startups seem to have a similar path. I've known some which were ok but started out stealthy, but most that start stealthy seem to launch, and <i>then</i> pivot after getting some real world experience and feedback. The ones that are pretty open seem to come out swinging and they already have answers for most of the questions thrown at them (which gives them credibility).<p>Perhaps notable, perhaps not, in the 30 years I've been watching I have yet to see a single startup that was open and that resulted in someone else "scooping" them and getting the prize. But I have seen startups that execute poorly not move fast enough once their market is proven to avoid damage by a nimbler opponent.

Good stuff. There are some ideas in that post that I want to crib / borrow from!<p>We are already about as far from "stealth" as you can get, in that all of our products are Open Source (Apache Licensed and on GitHub), we blog a lot, and we have a public facing website that makes it pretty clear what we're doing and aiming at.<p>That said, it's a sort of "static transparency". Anybody who cares to know, can come to fogbeam.com or our github site, etc., and learn a lot about us. But this post makes me think about a more "dynamic tranparency" where we push ideas / thoughts / code / whatever, out and more actively <i>solicit</i> feedback and interaction around that.<p>Of course we already solicit feedback, talk about the roadmap, etc., <i>in private</i> when meeting with potential customers in Customer Development interviews... but we could probably get more people involved and generate more good ideas that way.

Why add unneccesary noise channels? Not everything is black and white. Open up when it makes sense to be open, and be stealthy when it's appropriate.

One reason NOT to share everything with everybody:<p>With the new patent laws, you only have a one year window to file from the time something is first disclosed publicly.

At <a href="https://starhq.com" rel="nofollow">https://starhq.com</a> we've made our roadmap public (link in footer) and let people vote on items to bump up their priority. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. However I've found it important to use the number of votes and feedback as a guide, with us making the final decision on what we roll out and in what order.

But to what end are you serving by following this propaganda? Is there irrefutable empirical evidence that shows this, rather, extreme approach to product development actually yields better results? To me it is just part and parcel of some "do everything in public all the time" meme. Ironically, the view being proffered here is <i>much</i> more like a cult than the view of being more, well, reasonable.<p>What I'd like to see from people like this is 24/7 webcams in offices programmers worker's mic'ed up, with some sort of peanut gallery available for viewers. :)

Nice move! Just about the only nitpick I have is that there's no such thing as a cult of stealth startups anymore. That was a 2005 kinda thing. I think most people got the memo by now.

The very reason we started <a href="http://willthisfly.net" rel="nofollow">http://willthisfly.net</a> :)

Oh and tl;dr I've decided to put all my bootstrapped startup's prototyping out in the public, declaring death to the cult of stealth startups. Would you do the same? Are you doing it already? (edited typo)

I agree but not all start-ups are for mass public consumption. Also what you're essentially talking about are marketing channels, this can be time consuming if not managed properly.

Wow! Kudos for that move. There should be a place for discussing and reviewing click-dummies and mockups somewhere on the web, if there isn't already such a thing.

So true! Finally someone said it.