
UntitledStartup.com - The Anti-Stealth Mode Startup - bigstartups
http://www.bigstartups.com/matt/blog/623/UntitledStartupcom---The-Anti-Stealth-Mode-Startup
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idoh
My friend and I tried something similar. It was a site that started off blank,
and then we'd only build some subset of features that users requested.

It didn't turn out so well. I learned that it is a lot easier to request a
feature than to build it, so you get a lot more requests than features that
you actually build, which gives people the sense that you aren't really doing
anything. People would come and request a feature. If it didn't get built in a
relatively short amount of time, they'd never come back and you'd be building
a site for people who don't come to the site anymore.

Also, as anyone in a customer facing role knows, people don't usually have a
well formed idea as to the feature that they want or the problem that needs to
be solved.

But I wish them good luck!

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csbrooks
Sounds like a fun experiment and learning experience, anyway. (Your thing, I
mean.)

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idoh
Yeah, I learned a lot. I sometimes think about restarting it, but instead of
building features people request, allowing people to make any reasonable
contribution to the github repo, and then seeing what happens.

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mseebach
_We've got no products and we're open to anything._

They might not be stealth, but that's like not wearing camouflage when you're
not a soldier and not in war-zone.

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mattew
Let me say I am not a fan of being stealth, but I do beleive that you should
have more of an idea than these guys seem to have about what you are going to
do before you announce you are starting a company and go out and get domain
names and a logo. 2 points to them for being out in the open though.

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webwright
Bah. Check out Hewlett & Packard's goals when they started a company.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard>

Fred Wilson famously says that about 2/3 of the successes in his portfolio
radically change when business they were in between funding and exit. In
short, it's great not to get too attached to an idea.

I don't think these guys are being stealthy because they are defending their
brilliant ideas (almost always a stupid reason to be stealthy), but because
they are waiting for their ideas to gel into cohesive vision.

(disclosure: I know both of the founders but have no clue what they are
working on!)

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mattew
I don't think they are being stealthy at all, which is a good thing. Most
businesses make big changes as they evolve, which is also a good thing. Just
seems a bit strange to me announcing that you are starting a company, but not
really knowing what you are going to do.

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aviel
matthew and mseebach,

Thanks for the comments on Untitled Startup! The 99 designs competition was
from 3 weeks ago. Since then we've started narrowing down our goals, products,
and interests (check out the whiteboard in the first video from 1/6/10).

As we progress and actually start really formulating them and going in a
direction, we'll be focusing on sharing that with everyone.

