I wonder why that is. There are definitely more ideas floating around than capable entrepreneurs, which suggests that spilling the beans on your idea isn't a big risk. Being secretive about your statistics is even more confusing to me. Is there some sort of upside to valuation that I'm missing?
* If you're entering a competitive space --- and particularly if you have a direct sales model with medium-long sales cycle (ie, you sell to companies) --- your competitors can neutralize you without copying your features. All a company with a shipping product has to do is "roadmap" your features for you to lose competitive advantage.
* There's what Joel calls "The Marimba Effect". As long as you keep quiet about what you're doing, your failures and missteps don't count against you. Once you launch, prospects can start to form an opinion that's hard to shake off.
I can't say that these are dealbreakers if you're starting some social calendaring service for pets, or (like most YC'ers) considering some kind of social network code autoindentation product for MzSchemers. But we are not awash in examples of companies that opened up early, launched small, and went on to huge success.
I just watched a talk by Mac developer Wil Shipley, whose advice is "Don't announce until it can be downloaded. Don't let it be downloaded until it can be bought." Otherwise you spoil a lot of perfectly good hype.
There are, of course, some exceptions to this rule in the webapp world -- for example, if you're starting Ptacek's social calendar for pets, you can't even build the product without having customers, since social networks without members are completely useless. So you're forced to bootstrap.
- Nobody liked it. Your idea is probably unspectacular.
- People responded well to it. Your idea, which just got validated, is now also available for public consumption. This is troubling because the idea also has a stream of positive comments, making it that much more attractive.
Neither of these outcomes are good, which is probably why start-ups are secretive.
You should add to that what REALLY happens when people respond to it. They start talking about it. They bury you in great ideas that never occurred to you. They sign up to be notified about your private beta. You are incredibly energized and motivated all of a sudden. You are no longer fearful that your idea will totally fall flat. Recruiting gets easier. Good developers who are interested in your problem/space seek you out. Investors (who know all of this) don't think you are a total noobcake. You don't have to invest time or money in stuff like NDAs or other secretive measures.
Stealth mode is 95% of the time totally ridiculous, with the risk of being out there totally eclipsed by the reward. There is the 5% case, I suppose, where you've truly invented something unique rather than just making something suck less.
I'm also absolutely FLOORED by your statement that the "...Nobody liked it. Your idea is probably unspectacular." scenario is not a good outcome. That's a spectacular outcome compared to pissing away months or years building something that you later realize nobody wants.
(IMO)
I'm not trying to be petulant.
For you guys, awareness may convert directly into users, and users to a shot at VC funding (though, if you're up and running already, god I hope not).
And on the flip side, in my field (security), there's an obvious need for secrecy; we're a bunch of cutthroat motherfuckers over here. So my experience doesn't translate to yours directly.
Just saying, the answers to questions like these aren't always straightforward.
1) We got crazy excited and worked our asses off and ultimately set aside great jobs to work on this full-time. I don't know if we could've sustained the energy if we didn't have our users (and potential users) dragging us along. 2) We applied to YC. I honestly don't know if we would've done this if we didn't have such a great response to our "this is what we're building... coming soon!" page.
3) We got accepted to YC. I dunno if it mattered, but it certainly is easier to say "we're building something people want" when we've got a line of thousands of people who have signed up for the beta, contributed ideas, blogged about us, etc. Showing "love letters" from users was huge, IMO. 4) the product is HUGELY better than the original vision IMO, because we've been buried in several thousand emails from people who want certain things that never occurred to us or didn't want things that we thought were important.
For VCs and for internal morale/energy, traction wins. There is simply no substitute for being able to say, "people LOVE us" and being able to prove it. There is nothing that keeps you working harder than users applauding your featureset and clamoring for enhancements. At least for me.
Regarding funding beyond YC, we currently aren't looking for investment but we might be eventually. We have been approached by several investors. Ask me in a few months. :-) Either way, I think being out-there helps on this front, and stealth would hurt us.
ty in advance if can/do.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070509002443/http://www.rescuet...
You can look at the live site and get the jist of how the images/css would look like (it's not much different).
We detailed the process here:
http://blog.rescuetime.com/2007/07/05/web-biz-how-to-have-40... (4,000 turned out to be a much lower number than what we eventually launched with)
On what do you base this claim? Can you, for example, point to several threads here where someone declared the plans of their startup and there was a strong, valuable response leading to favorable business results?
The "Don't bother with secrets" meme is something of a permathread, but there seems to be scant tangible evidence for what many people claim (either for or against keeping mum).
Google is another fine example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google
Reading "Founders at Work" is a good exercise... Not a lot of stealth mode mentioned there.
Doesn't seem scant to me, though I'll concede it isn't particularly scientific.
I read most of Founders at Work; I don't recall much indiscriminate broadcasting of ideas and intent, but it's been a while.
For myself I find it useful to kick around ideas with a small local group of developers and business owners. The collective Bozometer is very handy, and indeed people are good about suggesting things I would not have thought of.
I'm not so sure that scales well to the general Internet and infinite strangers, but I've nothing concrete to back that up. Just more gut feeling.
Most, however, are selective as to who, what, and how they reveal. If you've met a few times with a startup founder and gotten to know them, they'll tell you a lot about their future plans. It's great to get feedback, after all. You're expected not to blab that info about, but that's why they bothered to get to know you before telling you stuff.
There's no point to indiscriminately spewing your vaporware all over the Internet. If you don't have a demo or UI for people to react to, you probably won't even get good feedback, and it'll lessen the impact when you actually do launch (case in point: Arc). But if you do have something for people to react to, or you have people in a similar space that know your target market, you can gain quite a bit from sharing your idea.
That being said, previous commenters have pointed out that getting ideas stolen isn't exactly the point.
Yeah, okay, so this comment is basically an excuse for me to spout a favored quote, but really, it's one that's definitely helped me get over secrecy paranoia in developing my own ideas.
There certainly are benefits to it in some cases, but in most it's probably best to just open your doors ASAP.
Mind you, I'd love nothing more to be able to answer people openly when they ask, "so what are you working on anyways?"
However most entrepreneurs seek a one solution fits all and try to follow the foot steps of others success. When in reality every idea/start up is different and what might work for one startup will kill the other.
I've been working on a project now for almost 5 months. I've been more free to discuss my project lately because I think to myself that most are not going to be as motivated as I've been nor are they going to sacrifice the long hours and weekends I've poured into it.
I commend the creator of Pageflakes...if you read this guy's blog or articles the guy practically hands it to you on a plate...yet I haven't seen many take advantage of it. Except maybe Yahoo :).
I also believe that if your passionate about your idea you don't want it contaminated with others ideas and views. Now, this definitely plays a role in the future phases, but in the beginning you want to create your own idea...not someone elses. We all want the credit, so we keep it under wraps until the time is right.
You could be non-secretive without being interactive or not taking opinions. But that seems like burning PR early for a product you will be releasing soon anyway.
Do talk with people who's opinions you already value. But you aren't Microsoft so pre-announcing a product won't intimidate others into not competing with you and it won't whet potential customer's appetite. Make something you know you would use and then see how others like you respond.
And lack of any saying "We're looking for a business idea guy!"?
I'm suspicious of projects described by appending that word "out" after "build." It implies the speaker is underestimating the importance of execution. In the best projects, execution is not merely important, but even flows back into design.
I think build out is perfectly valid way to explain building more functionality on a idea.
google didn't build ad functionality into from the start their search engine it was built out afterwards. I come from a family of builders so this makes sense to me.
I also don't agree with being secretive, ideas are a dime a dozen so no need not to share.
Why? Because of all the details. When I first saw this obvious micro-payments problem I thought about it for about 30 seconds but did not come up with anything significantly different than PayPal. I moved on, but someone decided to spend more than 30 seconds on it.
Edit: I meant Mosaic, not Mozilla.
Anyway these points are off-track; in conclusion startups are secretive because while execution may be crucial, so is being realistic enough to realize you're not in the best position to execute properly and that it's best to keep your mouth shut until you are, lest someone who is in a better position to execute than you are run off with "your thing." And there are plenty of people who can/would run off with your thing, take the credit for it and not think twice about what happens to you as a result of their behavior.
http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.ht...
"I'd like to propose a new, optional HTML tag:
IMG
Required argument is SRC="url".
This names a bitmap or pixmap file for the browser to attempt to pull over the network and interpret as an image, to be embedded in the text at the point of the tag's occurrence."
Mosaic was open source from its earliest days. Marc was not just one of many students working on it, he was the most prominent developer on the project. That's my recollection, but it's also what I find when I look for sources to cite:
http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0262.ht...
Seriously have you never been in a work situation where your boss took credit for your work and claimed he was the most "prominent developer" of something YOU did? I can't be the only one who appreciates Dilbert ...
Second, the email I cited was written in 1993, before the WWW was anything big. If, as you claim, Marc was one of many students, then he was improperly crediting the work as that of himself and one other. Someone else from NCSA would have spoken up on the www-talk list to set things straight.
If you want to change your story from him being one of many students to him being the boss who took credit for his underlings' work, please be explicit about it. Also, please cite a source.
Second, one email signed by two students doesn't mean anything. He never says anything in the email you cited other than he and another person are looking for feedback. For all you know his professor could have given him and that other guy that task as an asignment. Nowhere in the email does it say anything to the effect of, "Oh and BTW, I'm the guy who wrote all the code for this."
Third, for all you know there could have been plenty of responses to the effect that you said. One out of context email doesn't "prove" anything, especially if it was written by the guy in question. Not to mention if he had the balls to run off with his professor's work, I'm sure he was smart enough to leave a paper trail, or in this case, an email trail. Give me your personal email - I'll send you a pre-dated email "proving" that I invented YouTube.. There you go - I just sent you an email, nobody on the internet is contesting my email, so according to your logic, this is "proof" that I invented YouTube.
Third of all, I'm not "changing my story" - since I doubt you've ever been in an academic environment where somebody took your stuff and ran with it, I was trying to cite something that was more likely in terms of people taking credit for other people's work - something I thought you could better relate to.
"Also, please cite a source" - if you bothered to check my other posting I cited 2, and if you google "Lawsuit", "Netscape", "University of Illinoise" you can find plenty of evidence to this effect. I just did and plenty of stuff comes up relating to this. If you're too lazy to find any info on this yourself, well I'm not going to sit here and argue with you.
They got sued, the lawsuit involved theft of intellectual property, copywrite infringement and license violations, which would suggest that it was not 100% open-source - it was available conditional to the license, which Netscape clearly violated when they decided to release it for free over the net without compensating U. of Ill. with royalties. They settled out of court for millions, which is similar to saying, "We're wrong, we just don't want any legal judgements against use for being wrong, so here's a bunch of money to go away."
I don't know what email you're reading but the one I'm reading just has him and one other guy signing off indicating they're members of a group; nowhere does it say they're the only members, or the most important members, or the members who did most of the work, or anything other than 2 people looking for feed back.
Let's say you got an email from "Sue" from Apple requesting feedback on your recent iPhone purchase. Does that imply that since sue works for Apple and she signed off on the email, Sue is the most important person at Apple, responsible for most the important parts of their more successful projects?
No, of course not.
You could also try reading Tim Berners-Lee's Weaving the Web, where he gives them credit for Mosaic. They're probably not the only members (few projects have no outside involvement), but it's pretty clear from Berners-Lee's account that they're the ones pushing things forward and implementing stuff.
"Netscape has buzz but also faces perils. The University of Illinois is alleging that Clark and Andreessen have stolen the intellectual property for the browser and the Mosaic name, and is threatening to sue."
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/...
and
Copyrighted by the University of Illinois, Mosaic could be downloaded for free by individuals and by companies wishing to use the Internet for internal communications.
However, the NCSA did not want to become a help desk for commercial applications, so in August 1994, the University of Illinois assigned future commercial rights for licensing NCSA Mosaic to Spyglass, Inc., a local company created by NCSA alumni to commercialize NCSA technology. The goal was for university researchers to continue developing longer-term technology and standards to be incorporated into browsers, while Spyglass would help license the technology to companies addressing immediate customer needs such as support, speed, and security. Spyglass began widely licensing Mosaic to computer companies including IBM, DEC, AT&T, NEC, and Firefox Inc., who was working to integrate Mosaic standards into Novell networking software for the personal computer.[8]
Watching Mosaic from the Bay Area, Silicon Graphics CEO Jim Clark, a veteran of the UNIX standards wars, understood how much money could be won if a company could take control of the standards of this new Internet tool. So Clark left his company and set out to destroy Mosaic and replace its government-backed standards. He met with Marc Andreesen, a member of the Mosaic team who had been hired at a Bay Area Internet security firm called Enterprise Integration Technologies. Out of that meeting in April 1994 was born Mosaic Communications Corporation (later to be called Netscape). With Clark putting up the capital, Andreesen recruited five other Mosaic team members from NCSA to design what they called in-house Mozilla, the Mosaic-Killer. In six months, Clark's team had created a powerful browser, which the team called Netscape. It had easy-to-navigate features and loaded graphic images faster than NCSA's Mosaic. But Netscape did something else--it included the ability to display text formatting that did not even exist in the HTML standards embedded in the NCSA Mosaic browser. This meant that Web pages designed to work with Netscape would not be readable by all the other Mosaic-based browsers. This would encourage people to use Netscape browsers and, as Netscape developed them, would encourage Web designers to pay Netscape for the server software that developed Web pages using their modified standards. It was in this later market of selling Web design tools costing from $1,500 to $50,000 where Netscape intended to make their money.[9]
And then Clark and Andreesen compounded their fracturing of the NCSA standard by giving their version away over the Internet. The University of Illinois had demanded that Clark's company pay for a license before selling their version. Clark later said that he refused because the university was demanding an ongoing per-copy royalty: "I didn't tell them, but we had intended to allow people to download it, and they were going to charge me. The amount varied, but nothing is innocuous when you're talking tens of millions of people."[10] The point of the licenses by Illinois had been, along with collecting a little revenue, to control the standards and make sure that the only free version available was the official NCSA standard.
http://www.netaction.org/opensrc/future/breakdown.html
Oh and btw, it's not an "accusation" if it's been well documented through legal channels. Tell me, are you one of those people who believe that Bill Gates is a super-mega genius just because his company spend who knows how many millions in PR trying to convince you of this notion?
Anyway, I'm not getting paid to win this debate and since I could care less whether or not I can convince anybody on this board of a historical, well-documented event, feel free to post as many post-comments as you'd like. Far as I'm concerned this is done.
Your second quote is from a web page that clearly has an axe to grind, but subsequently admits that the only thing NCSA could enforce was trademark rights. Had there been a copyright violation, NCSA could have enforced it. It isn't even clear from that page that there was even a copyright accusation. It only says vague things about "standards".
B.) I have OCD so I tend to get baited on flame wars; you on the other hand seem to just have waaaaay to much time on your hands.
Here - I know how to satisfy you: You're 100% right, I'm 100% wrong, you're the greatest, enjoy the free Ferrari that comes with being right on the internet over things that don't really matter too much to me but obviously are life and death issues to you.
We're now pretty far removed from Pmarca "letting himself into" a lab while no one else was around and stealing the source of Mosaic, aren't we? Really, you should be more careful before trashing people's reputations.
I mean this in all honesty when I say I hope it never happens to you guys like that, but something tells me if it did you'd be writing an article proclaiming something to the effect of, "That's Bulls@#$!!! People should respect other people's hard work!"
In conclusion all I'm really saying is "proceed, but with caution" since in the end there are a lot of VCs who'll more than readily copy your idea and give it to a friend or two they'll fund to "execute" your startup on their terms and not care twice about the bad reputations they develop as long as they make enough $$$.
And apparently by one of the most recent postings on this board, ie, "An Engineers View of VCs" or something to that effect, I'm not alone in this impression: