Secretive or open dialog when it comes to products-in-development?

“Stealth mode” of product development is in my opinion reserved for two kinds of founders:

1.) Insider Founders. That is, founders who are certain, beyond doubt that they are building something people want. These founders usually have big insight into a small segment of market or particular insight into behavioural patters of a certain groups of users. These founders are usually people who got their experience working in senior management or engineering roles at established companies.

2.) Visionary founders. That is, founders who have had past successful exists and have built solutions for problems people did not know they had.

If you are aware of the problem in a particular market, but do not know yet how the solution looks like — you are much better off being open about the problem you are addressing and how your solution will address the problem. The risk/benefit ratio is shifted in your favour as likelihood that someone will provide feedback and/or insight that will improve your solution is much, much greater than someone “stealing your idea”, unless of course, you are in the pure IP play.

From the PR perspective:

If you are building a consumer product and need a lot of social validation by the way of press — going public with it is the way to go for few reasons:

1.) Everyone loves to break a good story first. Especially if your product shows potential for the “next big thing”. Going public with it will ensure that by the time you launch, you have at least several relationships in place with journalists and media that will continue to cover your startup as the months go by.

2.) You get the leverage smaller press against a bigger one. No one wants to be wrong. If you have been covered in a local paper, chances are that regional paper will be quite interested in covering you (again, because of social validation, “someone else said this is good stuff, so, chances are that this will be a flop are lesser”) and then in turn, if you get covered by a regional paper, you can leverage that to get national coverage etc.

This however, is not true in the case of a visionary founder, where the mystique of “proven child” working on “something revolutionary” outweighs everything ( Simple proof in point — Kevin Rose and Milk inc.)

From the psychological perspective:

It is shown and proven over and over, that delaying gratification results in increased rate of successfully completed tasks and projects.

What that means practically is that by telling people (and press) about the project you are working on and receiving praise and positive feedback will result in you receiving immediate gratification from recognition of your idea and end in a lot of cases with founder being bored by the idea and project (“I already got the praise for minimal effort placed in the project so far, all the hard work I yet have to put in it will not result in the same level of praise again, so I might as well move on to something new..”)

By “going stealth” and keeping the project a secret until the release, you are delaying gratification and increasing the chances that the project will in fact — be completed.