Stealth Disease
I am a member of the Lean Startup Circle group (was searching for the Lean Software Group which I still haven’t found). The conversations there are amazing and I highly recommend joining if you’re remotely interested in entrepreneurship (becoming one, helping one, or finding one). Anyway, a fellow group member referenced Eric Ries’ recent interview with tech crunch where he states plain and simple that you’re doing yourself a disservice by having a long term “stealth mode” for your startup. It prompted me to reply as follows:
I think that [keeping your idea a secret] is the first thing to get over as a startup. I see so many people saying, "I'll tell you what I'm doing after you sign an NDA." I'm sorry, I'm not doing that because I might already have the same idea or a similar one and I'm not going to preclude myself from executing on that idea because you might argue I've stolen it from you down the road.
Unless you're talking about some really deep technology that REALLY pushes the bounds of what we do (think Project Natal from Microsof), you most likely aren't the only one doing what you're doing. In fact unless you can name five competitors in your space, you should stop what you're doing and find them. If you are on the lines of Natal, why the hell haven't you filed a patent to protect your work?
The sooner you get a working product that your users can play with. The sooner you can get feedback and in many cases ideas that will significantly improve your product. Going stealth I would argue is a Waterfall startup (opposite of Lean). Think about it in terms of software development. With Lean (or agile) one primary goal is to get a working application in front of your stakeholders quickly so that they can provide feedback as the application is evolving, it avoids the problem of spending a year working on a project only to get feedback at the end from the customer that you totally missed the mark.
If you want to kill a startup, the quickest way is to spend a year developing a product that no one wants because you were in "stealth mode". Especially when your competitor announced their product before it was even available, got feedback on the alpha a week later, and adjusted the trajectory for the beta a month later all the while building a huge viral buzz from previewers who "get the vision" and like it. By the time you've announced a product your competitor has beat you to market without you even knowing they exist.
By letting people know what you're doing, you're likely to get a lot of feedback that you'd pay a lot of money to get otherwise. Such as "this reminds me of...[insert competitor you didn't know of]" or "I'm building something similar, want to team up to make a unified product" or "I like [feature x] but I really wish I could do it by [method y]". All of this feedback can be used to help you adjust your launch trajectory "how can I improve [competitor x's] product", "this guy has a great foundation this would make my product better to integrate our solutions", "it will be simple to add that new method for achieving feature x" to provide a product that better meets your users' needs.
That's the true definition of Lean. And even the largest vendors (think of Google with gMail, Wave, Android, and ChromeOS) can benefit from taking this approach.