Why Bother With Stealth Mode?

I think stealth mode is not just for the fear of your idea to get stolen, there are a few good reasons IMHO to start quiet in the first stage:

1) You may significantly change what you are doing once you actually started working. Maybe you start with a backup company and ends with a file transfers for the masses.

2) People eventually start to get bored about hearing just words without the ability to try what you have to offer. Probably at the release there will be less excitement... so the stealth mode is a good idea IMHO until there is yet not some non-vaporware thing to show.

3) In the first strage of a startup you will likely get crazy with a lot of work. Managing the communication is a very time consuming task, it's better to delay this as much as possible, that is, when you are starting to actually have users.

4) Stealth does not mean that people should not be aware at all of your existence. Actually to have the brand, logo, and a very general idea of what you are doing (just the field: databases, social things, ...) can be good and sometimes absolutely required in order to try hiring other programmers and so forth.

Once you have a minimally viable product is definitely time to release it ASAP: users feedbacks and pressure will be invaluable.

It depends on your market.

If you're entering a competitive space, announcing before launching gives your competitors the option of trying to neutralize you at little or no cost, by announcing that they're going to offer similar features. This clearly does happen sometimes.

It looks like YC has nailed an answer to the "stealth mode" controversy that kind of moots the question: move as fast as you can towards releasing a minimal viable product. The working concept trumps the smoke screen.

I used to be pretty anti-stealth-- in fact, I have a blog post draft attacking the whole idea. Meet the post that turned me around: http://trada.com/blog/2010/03/31/the-stealth-mode-trada%E2%8...

I think a hybrid approach is best. Talk to as many people as you need to to move the ball forward, but don't start shouting from the rooftops until you're ready.

There will almost always be a lot of people thinking about and/or working on the same ideas that one is thinking about. Others working on them might have dedicated certain amount of resources to accomplish a certain pace of progress.

If one makes their plans public, it might inpsire others to bring in more resources to increase their pace and beat you to the market. In such acase all one would be doing is provide free marketing for that product.

Of course, this is just one perspective. Going public also has its advantages, just like going in stealth mode has its disadvantages, one of them being the difficulty of attracting talent.

At the end, what matters is which option one chooses to leverage that option's advantages and what one does or can do to nullify the disadvantages of the same option.

It's not about the idea, or being the first, it's all about execution (and luck). FourSquare is killing it right now, but they were about the 5th major player into the geo check-in playing field. Online coupons have been around for a decade prior to Groupon. Facebook was late to the social networking party by about 5 years. There were hundreds of major search engines prior to Google. StackExchange & Quora certainly aren't the inventors of the online answers market.

Stealth mode is silly, because you need competition to validate your business. You need to learn from your competition and get feedback from the public to tweak your product. If you are the only one pursuing something, odds are it isn't worth pursuing.

You bother with stealth mode when you have an idea that doesn't require stellar execution to be successful. The concept needs to be pretty simple, but original and useful.

I'll say it time and time again, people who think ideas aren't valuable on their own just haven't come up with any great ideas yet.

I agree. Thats what I did. I made spotted.at and just want to get as much feedback as possible. My steath mode = My product sucks and not many people use it. As my product gets better and more people use it I guess im not stealth anymore. LOL

I agree with the author. Stealth mode assumes you will deliver a competitive and popular product in your first try. This rarely happens.

People think it sounds kinda cool, and if Apple if secretive it must be good, right?