Is Stealth Mode Stupid? | Hacker News Reader

Is Stealth Mode Stupid?

blog.eladgil.com

74 pointseladgil22 comments

I think "Stealth Mode" covers a pretty large range of behaviors. We're far from stealth mode; we tell pretty much everyone everything that we're up to. We have no secrets and we handle all chats/negotiations/everything with all of our cards face up.

However, we only reveal all in face to face conversations, never in a broadcast. This gives us more opportunities to refine our message, collect feedback, forge real connections, and affords us the ability to do those things without burning opportunities for first impressions and without risking one skeptic from taring the collective perception by a group.

Using this strategy, we've been called "Stealthy" by people on the fringe of our current network. For some, that adds a little bit to the mystique and excitement, so they become willing to take a meeting with us. This strategy has been pretty successful so far.

EDIT: And if you're a super smart developer in the Seattle area looking to join a funded, early stage startup, we'll buy you a coffee/beer and reveal all! Email me: brandon@thinkfuse.com

That is an interesting point. When we were in the "stealthy" part of Mixer Labs' lifecycle, telling people "we were not telling most people what we were doing" made people want to talk to us more. E.g. recruiting sometimes went more smoothly, as people took the call just to find out what we were doing. :)

I agree. When I think of "Stealth Mode," I think of people who won't tell anyone what they are doing or what their startup is about, and you actively discourage people who know from talking about what you do.

I think that the Google behavior described doesn't fall under "stealth mode" for me. People knew what they were doing, they just didn't know how lucrative it was.

Might be a small distinction, but I think it's a meaningful one if you're trying to have a discourse about strategy.

Rather than "stealth mode", "low profile mode" is best for companies in a market that might attract a lot of attention. The most important thing is to balance the need for attention to fuel growth against the risk of inspiring competitors.

In other words, don't hype your startup if it will do more harm than good. Patience is a virtue for a reason.

Not being willing to talk about what you're doing to anyone is probably foolish, yes, but Elad's got some gems here, particularly around creating unnecessary competition.

In early 2008, when I was raising for Pinch Media, we got a bit lucky and managed to attract some name-brand investors extremely early in the life of our company. We hadn't figured out the business model yet, hadn't brought in a dime in revenue, and had barely launched, but I prematurely decided to make a big deal out of our funding from Union Square Ventures and First Round Capital.

In retrospect, this was stupid. Not every company that ended up competing with us did so because the USV hoopla introduced them to the opportunity, but a handful did. Worse yet, our competitors made the same 'give it all away for free' mistake we did, which made the mistake hard to fix. It's tricky to start charging for something that five other companies are giving away.

If I could do it again, I would've asked USV / FRC to keep quiet about the funding until we'd learned a bit more about our business - this isn't always possible, but other companies in their portfolio have done so. (Kickstarter, for example.) An extra six months or so of product development before the 'run as fast as you can to keep ahead of very similar competitors' phase would've been nice.

I think we should be careful with all the generalizations. I agree that stealth mode is usually stupid for the typical web startup.

But there are certain types of startups where it is essential to have everything working perfectly before launching to a wide audience. Things like BankSimple come to mind, in that launching a half-assed 'minimum viable product' of a bank would be far worse to their reputation than staying in stealth for years while they get everything working perfectly. I think healthcare probably works this way too.

If your company 1. deals with people's personal data, 2. deals with thorny legal/regulatory issues, 3. requires an extra level of trust before customers will sign up, or 4. is in an unusually litigious space... stay in stealth until you work out all the details.

If you think about it, building a company takes about 5 years (if everything goes right).

So essentially for someone to "steal your idea", it implies that they have to commit their next 5 years to it.

So really you can talk freely about your idea to anyone who hasnt already started a company and is working in a similar space or someone who has a vested interest in a company which is working in a similar space. Thats basically it.

Another thing google did was to never give out specifics - even the number of computers they used was a secret for the first 2 years after they became successful.

No. As the writer points out a more nuanced approach is necessary. IMHO one of the reasons that the 'it's all about execution' meme has become so dominant, particularly in SV, is that VCs won't sign NDAs (for good reason). Hence it is absolutely in their interest to inflate the importance of execution and play down the significance of ideas. This has assumed the status of conventional wisdom but such a one sided position is just crass.

Agreed. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2235218

Stealth mode is stupid for many reasons.

Stealth mode is usually preceded by "overhyped". Companies that go stealth seem to think that making one big, dramatic entrance into the startup world will be their key to success. In reality, software is buggy, servers go awry and crash, and support teams get overwhelmed. Unless deployment goes flawlessly, there's more room for creating a very bad, long-lasting negative impression if things don't go as planned.

Stealth mode is dependent upon people knowing named company is in or was in "stealth" mode. Stealth mode is a form of hype in and of itself. But the wrong kind of hype -- generates more hype for or about names, rather than the product.

I think so. Most startups are not that impressive in their earliest days, and almost nobody is going to care if they even know you exist. Sooner or later you're going to reveal what you're doing and it's never going to be too late for your competitors to react if you actually get their attention at all.

On the other hand on a community like HN you can get lots of feedback, help and support by being open about what you're doing and what problems you're facing.

Apple, anyone? Although they aren't a startup, the fact that they are hush-hush until the product launches is good enough (for me) to at least consider stealth mode.

I would argue that the only time that true 'stealth mode' actually helps is when either your brand is already well known (as in Apple's case) or when you have an employee or founder who is already a celebrity in the field (certainly true for Steve Jobs).

If you're a high profile established player in a competitive space I can see it making sense, especially if you need the element of surprise for a launch. An example of this would be Nintendo making a phone.

However if you're a startup and nobody knows who you are it seems a bit foolish. By the way I would assume that anyone who isn't well know who is in stealth mode doesn't quite know what they're doing yet.

You really don't have to worry about competition until you get users/customers.

For the most part, people copy (or at least pay close attention to) what people buy/use.

Though, perhaps people prefer to be in stealth mode until they get some traction behind the scenes, to stave off embarrassment.

If that's the case, I think being in stealth mode serves a useful purpose.

Stealth is really stupid. Back in the day, it became difficult to charge for website services because more and more sites were giving services away for free. Now, it's hard to even give stuff away for free because there's too much free stuff. So, how are you going to give away your free stuff unless you start talking about it early, and talk about it often?

Depends on the problem you're trying to solve. If you are chasing a vision without a well-established problem, you won't have the capable people discuss it before actually making that change to the world as you dreamed, stealth can help you stay on that path.

If the problem is well-established and you are just shaking it, revisiting it with new eyes or fixing it forever, people will "get" it easier and will help you alot more.

For the most part yes but, what about ideas that are extremely simple but not so obvious? As in, some competitor with the resources can shell out a feature in maybe a few months, but a team of 2 would take about a year. Is that valid grounds for stealth or is stealth still dumb?

This seems like one of the few cases where full on stealth mode makes sense, and even then, only if the team is slow and the work so far amounts to nothing more than an elevator pitch.

If the idea is something a bigger competitor would actually want, they are probably better off letting the team do the ground work, then either acquiring them outright or copying what they did. I would guess the biggest threats are from other motivated small teams that could execute the idea faster to achieve the aforementioned acquisition exit strategy.

It is if you call it stealth mode.

Yes.

I think it depends on if you're investing a lot of time and money into something that your competitors might be able to beat you to if they see you coming.

Everyone likes to have very black-and-white yes/no answers for this but it really depends on the idea, the competition, a million factors that are different in each situation.

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