UntitledStartup.com - The Anti-Stealth Mode Startup | Hacker News Reader

UntitledStartup.com - The Anti-Stealth Mode Startup

bigstartups.com

16 pointsbigstartups8 comments

My friend and I tried something similar. It was a site that started off blank, and then we'd only build some subset of features that users requested.

It didn't turn out so well. I learned that it is a lot easier to request a feature than to build it, so you get a lot more requests than features that you actually build, which gives people the sense that you aren't really doing anything. People would come and request a feature. If it didn't get built in a relatively short amount of time, they'd never come back and you'd be building a site for people who don't come to the site anymore.

Also, as anyone in a customer facing role knows, people don't usually have a well formed idea as to the feature that they want or the problem that needs to be solved.

But I wish them good luck!

Sounds like a fun experiment and learning experience, anyway. (Your thing, I mean.)

Yeah, I learned a lot. I sometimes think about restarting it, but instead of building features people request, allowing people to make any reasonable contribution to the github repo, and then seeing what happens.

We've got no products and we're open to anything.

They might not be stealth, but that's like not wearing camouflage when you're not a soldier and not in war-zone.

Let me say I am not a fan of being stealth, but I do beleive that you should have more of an idea than these guys seem to have about what you are going to do before you announce you are starting a company and go out and get domain names and a logo. 2 points to them for being out in the open though.

Bah. Check out Hewlett & Packard's goals when they started a company. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard

Fred Wilson famously says that about 2/3 of the successes in his portfolio radically change when business they were in between funding and exit. In short, it's great not to get too attached to an idea.

I don't think these guys are being stealthy because they are defending their brilliant ideas (almost always a stupid reason to be stealthy), but because they are waiting for their ideas to gel into cohesive vision.

(disclosure: I know both of the founders but have no clue what they are working on!)

I don't think they are being stealthy at all, which is a good thing. Most businesses make big changes as they evolve, which is also a good thing. Just seems a bit strange to me announcing that you are starting a company, but not really knowing what you are going to do.

matthew and mseebach,

Thanks for the comments on Untitled Startup! The 99 designs competition was from 3 weeks ago. Since then we've started narrowing down our goals, products, and interests (check out the whiteboard in the first video from 1/6/10).

As we progress and actually start really formulating them and going in a direction, we'll be focusing on sharing that with everyone.

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