Stealth mode startup company

Image credit: Coravin

This was what happened for OpenKit, a social-gaming platform company in San Francisco that only recently left beta. Last year, as part of a concerted effort to gauge developer interest, co-founders Suneet Shah, Lou Zell, Todd Hamilton and Peter Relan announced their flagship product before they actually sat down to figure out how they’d put it together.

The result: Interested parties have turned out in droves to support the effort.

“We figured if there wasn’t enough interest, we’d shut [the company] down or do something else entirely, ” remembers Shah, the youngest of the bunch at 28. “The reality was that we were able to validate and get access to early customers before we were able to start writing code.”

Limits feedback opportunities
Another benefit of embracing openness as part of the development process: Unsolicited feedback.

Coravin’s wine accessory that enables wine drinkers to access wine from a bottle without removing the bottle’s cork.

Image credit: Coravin

Danielle Cassley, president of Red Bird Studios, a consulting company in Granite Bay, Calif., learned this first-hand in a prior life as co-founder of an online gaming company. That company, Aurora Feint, which has since been acquired and renamed, opted to go stealth during launch, and ended up going to market lacking valuable customer and market input, at least according to Cassley.

“When you go ahead and talk about your company, people come out of the woodwork to weigh in on what you’re doing, and you find out a little bit more about who your competitors and potential customers might be, ” says Cassley. “This information can spark dynamic growth.”

Pros:

Allows for oh-so-precious anonymity
Still, secrecy has its perks. Jason Chicola, the 34-year-old CEO and founder of Rev.com, a creative-services provider in San Francisco, says that operating in secrecy for most of 2012 enabled the company to solidify a strategy to add new capabilities, rather than expend resources and funds into branding before the company was ready.