As usual, I'll give Patrick of Bingo Card Creator as my example. He has been completely transparent with us guys about what he's doing and how he's doing it. We have a complete blueprint for how to compete with him. None of us are going to bother, because it's a very small market opportunity and Patrick's business relies upon generating lots of data, lots of inbound links and the Googley momentum that comes with it.

Imagine if his position was slightly different. Imagine if Patrick had discovered that a very specific group of people were prepared to pay him good money for very trivial software. There are plenty of examples if you go looking for them - software that took days or hours to develop but that sells for serious money because it solves a real business problem in a low-tech industry. The value in the business is the domain knowledge needed to identify the market need.

If you're selling a web app to nerds, then stealth mode makes no sense. You need to engage with your market as quickly as possible, and chances are that someone is developing the same product anyway.

If you've spent good time and money on researching potential market opportunities, you'd be a total idiot to give away the results of that effort just because it's the done thing. I love getting to see the innards of so many businesses, but it makes me cringe at the stuff people will make public.

I don't think many of us realise that the rest of the business world considers our culture of openness to be absolutely fucking crazy. Just look at Apple - not even Jony Ive is allowed to speak freely. We see that as weird and Orwellian, but the rest of the business world calls it "not blabbing all our trade secrets to the press".

For an example closer to home, did you never wonder how RMS working alone was able to put Symbolics out of business? Because he waited for them to discover what users wanted, the hard part, then he simply copied the implementation and gave it away for free. If they'd gone stealth, maybe we'd all be using LispM's today. Now we'll never know.

If the hardest part of your business can be so easily copied by someone else, then you do have a problem. If it can't be copied then you might not have a problem

Twice.

Intentionally doing things the hard way can sometimes make you much more resilient, as long as you reach the endgame in one piece.

Prominent recent example: ipad 2010. It was rumored alright, still I bet it led to significant constipation at Plastic Logic, Microsoft, or Amazon, not to mention all those netbook builders. To think that Plastic Logic thought they could get away with a price point of more than the iPad's 500 USD for a mere reading device... Now they are scrambling, and perhaps they will find a viable strategy in the future, but still, they are all "behind the curve", and that has as much to do with Apple's execution as with the fact that Apple didn't announce its plans for the iPad 18 months before introduction.

Of course you could trickle out ideas and then launch, but that risks being regarded as "old news" when you finally do release a product. That's totally unfair but often does happen.

Our company is in "stealth mode". We were funded in April, but we would prefer to have our one-time 15 minutes of fame in October, so we'll be waiting until then to "exit stealth mode".

It's a PR hack, essentially.

Having an idea for a better mousetrap, as a trite example, isn't by itself worth much. It's only valuable if you can build the better mousetrap, build it at a profitable pricepoint, convince the world they need a better mousetrap, etc.

But if you're already in the mousetrap business, the information that a new competitor is planning to launch a better mousetrap might be very valuable information.

The ironic part is that the idea itself is not what is invested in. Often there is an attribution error where we hear that "he's making X, so we should make an X clone." However, the important thing invested in is not the idea X, but instead X+the team+the business plan. Of course, the media often does not mention the latter two.

Talking about ideas actually make them better since you learn if it was really that great.. or you only thought it was great but it's just bad.

Last thing, you start with an idea.. but as you work through, it changes a lot. So, even if someone would start with the same idea, the end product would be totally different. That's also another reason to publish really fast.. you see if your idea was worthwhile and you can improve on it with feedback.

And, real last thing, from my experience, sometime it isn't that bad to be in stealth mode for the "general public" because if you show them something ugly visually, they might just ignore it by thinking it sucks. So what I do is, I show sketches and prototypes, but not the evolution of my prototype. So, people say "Wow" instead of "Hmm, that could be interesting. (Thinking, ugh wtf is that.)".

So sometimes stealth mode is a good idea in order to make yourself get developing, rather than in order to keep the idea itself from the outside world.

If you go public, you might be less motivated to actually make progress. I've found this to be true for myself, but I can't remember where this idea came from... I wish I had a citation for you.

I cannot emphasize too strongly that you should tell no one just what the words on the cards mean nor give anyone an inkling of what you desire. To do so may end disastrously for you. When you get a better understanding of this science, you can understand how thought vibrations -- conscious or unconscious, because of envy or some other cause -- can be set up to counteract your own,

To illustrate this, I am reminded of a doctor friend who applied for a commission in the Navy during the early days of World War II. He closed his office, told everyone that he was joining the Navy, and found himself the recipient of many parties and gifts. "It taught me a lesson never to tell anyone of my plans or desires," he laughingly told me later. "It was two years before I received notice of assignment, and meanwhile I had to go back into private practice, It certainly was embarrassing to get all those various farewell gifts, only to cool my heels at home for two years."

The truth is that when you talk about what you're going to do, you scatter your forces. You lose your close connection with the subconscious, and unless you do as directed here, you will frequently have to start all over again in your program of achievement.

"Go and tell no man," still holds true. -- The Magic of Believing - Claude M. Bristol; pg. 87

Here is a fantastic essay on this very topic: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/01/achieving-failu...

If that's the case, why are some startups in stealth mode?

Ok, that's asinine, I hope we didn't really say that. Execution is almost always the part where value is created (i.e. where you get paid), that is the hard part. The part where skill is involved. But ideas aren't valueless. In fact the control of information is power. Which is why people keep secrets.

Search Google for "who will buy my idea". The second result is a short tongue-in-cheek where I offer to buy ideas for $0.02. I get phone calls and emails on a regular basis from people actually wanting to sell ideas. They get to me because no one buys ideas.

The exception? Nuclear secrets maybe. Even then it is not the idea, but rather the schematics, etc.

So, to the original poster's question, why don't stealth mode startups at least put the problem they are solving on their homepage? I think the answer is fear. My take is usually that if it is that easy to replicate then they shouldn't be doing it. If the reason they are doing an easy to replicate product is because they are masters at sales and marketing, then I would think they wouldn't be that afraid of someone out selling them.

"Stealth Mode" used ignorantly means, "we're unwilling to discuss our idea with anyone for fear they'll steal it."

Big difference.

Also, if two people execute the same idea, because products change so much in implementation they will likely end with different enough products that they will not be directly competing by product launch.

First, we needed to give ourselves breathing room, where we weren't distracted. Requests for demos before you're ready, requests for interviews with the press, requests for information by potential investors all take time, which is time that you should better be spending building your product.

Second, we didn't want to alert our competitors to what we're doing. While we didn't believe that any of them could innovate faster than we were, we didn't want them to know what our marketing and technology direction was, and thus try to poison the market's mind to our message before we could give it in our own words. Otherwise, by the time we DID give it in our own words, people would have predisposed to think badly of it.

There's also the non-customer competition to think of: recruiters (we're in a hyper-competitive market for talent), who will know what you're doing and target your employees; VCs who will at least ponder the notion of grabbing a team and overcapitalizing them and say "do that idea and get it to market before the other guys." This might seem far-fetched, but if you don't have any real benefit in opening to the world, they're definite potential downsides.

Finally, we needed to make sure that we had something very tangible to show the world (i.e. customers) when we do come out. If we had made a big display of our story, and then gotten customers interested, and then said "thanks for your interest; come back in a year when we have a demo to show you" it would have been a complete turnoff. Most of the people who we think of as prospects will find out about the company now, and we're ready to come in and give a professional display of what we're doing.

What we DIDN'T do was go completely dark. People who we knew and trusted we've worked with the whole time. People who we felt could add value we sought out. We didn't just go into a bunker, but we didn't splash our wares out there for anyone in the world to see.

Stealth-mode is definitely an option for the right firm.

The "ideas are worthless" meme is hyperbole and groupthink.

In those examples, it really isn't worth revealing your idea because someone else will execute before you.

Ideas, of course, are not worthless. Ideas are information, and if the internet has told us one thing, it's that information (and the control of information) is very, very powerful.

Think of it this way: most, if not all ideas have already been thought of by somebody else. Are you damaged by those people having thought of the idea first, or are you damaged by them having executed it first? If they don't execute, then it's just an idea, and therefore it's of no value and of little concern to you. If they do execute, then they have something of value and it's something you should be concerned about.

The thing about ideas is that they are usually very one-dimensional. People will think of "foursquare for dating" like byoung2 mentioned but rarely think past that initial idea to things like what the competitors are, what are the barriers to entry, what will attract users, what type of design will work best, which framework should it be built on, has it been tried before and if so why did it fail, etc.

Of course, once you've answered all those questions you now have more than just an "idea." You have a plan of attack, a strategy, market research, design concepts, historical data, etc. In other words, you actually have something worth protecting.

As far as the bias on Hacker News is concerned, I think a lot of that stems from a couple of things:

First, there are two types of people in the startup world: ideas people and builders (not mutually exclusive, mind you). I think builders get frustrated by ideas people when equal value is put on the thinking up of the idea as the actual building of the idea. I can personally attest to this; I am constantly running into people who have a "great idea" but just need someone to build it (for equity, of course). It's hard not to get angry at those types of propositions. Every now and then I'll run across someone who has genuinely put in a lot of work on the non development/design side of things and has really thought about the ins and outs of an idea, contacted the right people, formed the right partnerships, etc, but it's rare.

Second, everyone on hacker news has ideas. Hundreds of them. I myself come up with at least one good idea a day. Also, a lot of us have acted on quite a few ideas and learned how much more difficult it is to be successful than one might initially assume. We also learn that lot of the mistakes we make with these ideas as we build them out could have been avoided had we subjected the idea to public scrutiny earlier in the development cycle. So when we run across people who are protective of their ideas it makes us scratch our heads - they're missing out on a critical component of becoming successful.

I could probably come up with hundreds of examples of sites that weren't first to market but now dominate, the most obvious being Facebook and Google. If ever there was a better argument for execution over ideas, I haven't seen it.

One final point: most people who have the capability to build good apps would rather work on their own idea, not yours.

So, are you effectively saying that the answer to the opening question is that startups in stealth mode aren't really protecting ideas, but are protecting the plan of attack, the strategy, market research, design concepts, historical data, etc?

This could be true, but do startups which are not in stealth mode really divulge all that info (plan of attack, strategy, market research, etc) to the public? It seems that the difference between stealth mode and non-stealth mode is simply in telling the public what you are working on. This is the knowledge that is deemed, by stealth startups, valuable enough to keep secret, i.e. the knowledge of what they are working on.

Where "what you are working on" is presented in broad, nebulous terms ("ebay for dogs", or "online video editing").

The previous post mentions Google as an example of execution over ideas, but the idea for Google was not "search engine", but "search engine that uses the following algorithm ..." And there was good reason to keep details secret.

Design concepts are ideas. Plans of attack are ideas. There are lots of ideas based on specific data and current opportunities, and these are the ones people keep quiet about.

When people say ideas are worthless, they mostly seem to be referring to worthless ideas (e.g. "ebay for dogs", which is more of an idea for an idea ), not the ideas behind a tangible implementation or the ideas for successful marketing.

That's pretty shallow don't you think?

A startup's stealth product is unproven, and it may turn out that it has little or no value.

Hence: whether or not information has value depends on the information in question.

If I was a high profile entrepreneur working on a top secret project, I still wouldn't do a private beta. Instead I would block IP's belonging to tech savvy states like California and countries like China. Actually I think it is a good idea to block all of Asia. The majority of clones of my apps are created by people in China.

Since we already said "We're in stealth" it then became weird to say "Here's what we're doing" without actually launching at the same time. However, we have dropped enough hints that most people following totally get it.

Someone has actually already copied our idea (doing the same thing, with a similar name, exact same pre-launch strategy, etc) I'm 100% sure it's a copy because too many elements are EXACTLY the same and I know for sure the person was following the blog and twitter well before starting his own. In that respect, being MORE in stealth would have actually helped ward off copy-cats like that until we were ready to launch.

When people say that, they are usually referring to an untested bare idea. That is worthless (or has negligible worth) because it has not been tested. If a startup is in stealth, then maybe their "idea" has been tested, or they have proof it's worth something. But a random idea by default is not worth anything because it requires proper execution to test for its worth.

So let's say I told a guy hey I got this cool idea for a website that let's people upload videos and share them. Let's pretend no element of this idea has been tested, that, there has been no indication in society that people like to watch videos. Let's say I did this 10 years ago. To some untrained person, there's no difference between that idea and an idea where people can share photos of their underwear. To a sufficiently untrained person (let's say the average person is sufficiently untrained), both ideas are equally worthless because no element of either idea had been tested at the time. So if two ideas have the same starting point whereas no element of the idea has been tested to be potentially successful, then both are worthless at that point.

However let's say I have another idea, and it revolves around letting people video chat with each other online. So in this hypothetical universe, watching videos has no predetermined usefulness, however it turns out people like to chat with each other. So the element of this idea revolving around chatting with strangers has established value, but the part pairing it with video is new. So it has some possible value now, unfortunately it's common knowledge people like to chat with each other, so because of the ubiquity of that idea element the value drops back down to zero. But let's say it wasn't common knowledge that chatting was popular, and instead through some tests we discovered that. Now the idea has value because we've proved it has value but only we know about it. We would probably proceed to stealth mode to implement such a thing to take advantage of this discovery.

Heck, I even have an idea that would change the way politics in general is viewed by the public. Its revolutionary and could have a huge influence on changing the world, but I currently can't develop for it because I don't have the time. Its an amazing idea and I wish it was out there, but I would rather wait till I personally can change the world. I don't want someone else doing it, so I keep my idea private until Im ready to start working on it.

But only after you've tried to execute them (and failed) will you discover that its not as easy as you think, and that your million dollar ideas were garbage.

Going to your grave with a pocketful of possibilities is not only a disservice to yourself, but also pretty selfish.

This probably isn't always the case and I think most of s probably err pretty heavily on the side of caution, I know I can be secretive at times for little real reason. Just would hate to release something then around the same time have a competitor steal the limelight with a release that addresses everything you were doing to differentiate your product.

ReadWriteWeb had a great article on this with this fantastic quote: "I always liked the saying that the early bird gets the worm. However, the second mouse gets the cheese."

http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2009/05/first-mover-advant...

Thus, if you were wide open some "entrepreneuring" company comes along, replicate it, and gain the first-to-market boost, while you are still trying to finish.

With a "stealth mode," a company can make a polished product and spring it on the market all at once, leaving no time for half-assed copies.

So, I'd say it upholds the thought that it's about execution, not the idea. The stealth enables you to release better execution without competitive pressure to release.

It is not as important when you starting out.

The idea is the execution. An new idea is worthless. It's the refined ideas you arrive at after you've executed a prototype that are worth something. It's because those ideas can be tested and played with and refined. You can't refine a idea without building something first.

So it's not that execution is everything and ideas are nothing - it's that truly good ideas are the result of iteration and execution.

On a serious note, some ideas can produce multi-billion dollar businesses while other ideas have limited, niche potential. Hence a greater incentive to keep the idea secret.

An idea has no value to you if you can't execute, but it has long-term value if you might be able to do so in the future, and it definitely has value to competitors who may wish to execute it now.

[Edit: Also, "ideas are worthless" sounds like the speak of arrogant VCs who want to downplay the importance of entrepreneurs... I've never heard an entrepreneur make such a statement.]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_State_Quarters

"The idea of a circulating commemorative has been around the hobby for decades, but frankly, good ideas are a dime a dozen. Far more rare is the ability to move an idea to reality,"