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Comment by etothepii | Hacker News Reader

I used to be a polyphasic sleeper so this article interested me but I find myself stuck on the final paragraph.

> My velocity has increased 10x and I'm shipping features like a cracked ninja now, which is great because my B2B SaaS is still in stealth mode.

Does someone have a good book I can read on stealth mode startups?

My B2B SaaS is only small (about $1.25m ARR) but I can't imagine shipping features without someone to use them. We could definitely write a lot more features if our users didn't point out the ways that what we were doing wasn't quite right or didn't fit with the problem we thought we were solving.

I can imagine doing the business part, regulatory part or hard tech part of a startup in stealth mode - but what would does it mean to ship features in stealth mode?

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I think that was satire. The entire startup writing world has adopted the idea that you need to ship to actual customers as fast as possible. Developing features in stealth for years is a well-known way to trap yourself into making the wrong thing.

That said, I think the startup book, blog, Tweet, and LinkedIn think piece world went a little overboard with the "ship your MVP early" concept. For a while I was seeing little startups proudly ship things that just didn't work or lacked key features. The only real-world feedback they were getting was that the product was incomplete.

If you burn your early customers badly, you lose precious advocates. In my opinion you're doing the right thing by shipping features for your customers.

It is possible to over-focus on a few vocal customers, though. A common trap for small companies is to get into a relationship with 1 or 2 very vocal customers who will act like they're giving you insights into what the industry wants, but in reality they're just telling you what you want to hear in order to specialize your software for them. It's important to go out and validate the new feature requests with the broader market.

The best products solve a problem that's so hair-on-fire bad that people are willing to work around the most awful bugs because they need it so bad.

The worst products never move past that stage and just become rentiers. I think you probably know a couple buildings those companies have built.

It means 50% of your features will be useless, or harmful.

I'm almost certain that it's parody or satire to some degree, but these days it's very hard to tell.

> I used to be a polyphasic sleeper

Why? If you don’t mind me asking.

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