Building in Public vs. Building in Stealth

One of the largest and fastest growing company pages on LinkedIn isn’t a real company, but you probably know someone who “works” there:

Maybe you’ve even considered joining “the company” yourself (hilariously, it does have a Glassdoor page too) and building your startup in stealth.

At the same time the “build in public” movement has grown to the point of spawning its own fellowship program.

Why are both of these very different paths for startups growing in popularity? Shouldn’t it be clear at this point which is better? What are the tradeoffs you make with each?

This week I compared the two philosophies and highlighted a third approach that gets the best of both worlds 👇

Build in Public vs. Build in Stealth

Definitions

Building in stealth → Keeping your startup’s plans, product, and vision private. Only sharing outside of your team on a need to know basis (i.e. partnerships).

Building in public → Sharing your startup’s progress and challenges very transparently in public, often through content.

Differences & Tradeoffs

It’s common to downplay the risks of building in public.

Just sharing your idea is not a big deal — execution is the hard part. But it’s a lot easier for someone to execute well against you else when you hand them information about your business.

Not only can someone learn what worked well for you and copy it (that’s actually less of a risk), but they can also see where you’re struggling and in some cases how fast your revenue is growing and how much cash you have.

Information is the currency that drives strategic decisions. You can’t outflank someone if they know where your troops are positioned but you don’t know where theirs are.

Like life, startups aren’t about being a knight on horseback — each one is a fight for a knife in the mud.

More practically, building in public isn’t useful if your customers aren’t frequently making purchase decisions from social media. Or you’re unable to quickly grow your following. Then you’re just shouting into the void and getting a low ROI on your time.

With that said, building in stealth has many issues.

First and more importantly: your product will not sell itself.

Founders underestimate how much time they’ll need to spend selling, and how hard it will be even with a good product.

If it’s impossible for prospective customers to find out any information about your product until you tell them yourself, you’ve 10x’d the difficultly level of the challenge for yourself.

Building in stealth makes growth, hiring, partnerships, and general serendipitous connections much more challenging because people won’t just come across your startup and see what you’re doing. You actually have to tell them yourself. But you won’t know who already scrolled past you on social media, and people aren’t going to mention it to their friends.

Also it’s extremely hard to keep knowledge of what you’re doing away from your competitors anyway. It’s more likely than you think that they’ll hear about you and be able to get some details about what you’re working on.

Both systems are flawed. But there’s a better way.

Best of Both Worlds

The actual problem with this argument is that both sides have actual merit.

Building in public is great because you lean into user feedback and can build up trust and brand equity while your roadmap nearly gets written for you by your users.

But building in stealth allows you more flexibility to explore the problem space on your own terms (especially if you actually do have something truly novel, or if your startup is in a regulatory grey area).

I think of both building in stealth and building in public as extreme approaches and they’re both on the edges of a spectrum.

Instead, focus your strategy on your users and their level of natural involvement in your product development process. I like to think about it in concentric circles:

1. Power users → Super engaged with your product. Maybe they’re even sharing it with friends or coworkers.

2. Casual users → Occasionally use your product. Not obsessed with it but still contributing to your business.

3. Potential users / rest of the world → Anyone who may be interested in your product but is not currently a user.

No matter what stage your startup is at, you always want to have open dialogues with your power users. They care a lot and will tell you what will make the product better.

You should be transparent with them when you have new ideas. If they’re truly in this group, you’re not going to scare them away just by sharing an idea or having a dialogue about where the product could go from here. Let them help keep you on track.

You should also spend time talking to casual users. Most importantly, learn why they aren’t power users. Is it because they’re not your core target persona or is the product missing something that’s stopping them?

Don’t engage casual users about everything, though. Especially early on in a startup’s journey, before the path to it becoming a big business is entirely clear, the ratio of noisy information to useful information is very large.

It’s something like 100 to 1.

With power users (who are, again, in the actual persona you want to build your product for) it’s likely under 10 to 1 (meaning early power users are 10x more likely to tell you something useful for the product).

It’s hard to overstate the impact of this. Trying to decipher which 99 pieces of information to ignore vs which 1 to consider is an impossible task for a busy founder.

So rather than build in public or stealth, consider:

1. Building openly with your power users, especially early on

2. Looping casual users in later and when making bigger updates

3. Not looping in the general public until things are ready to ship

I don’t have a name for this yet but it feels like a more robust framework than the existing two — reply and LMK if you have a good name for it.

💡