Stealth Mode is for Rookies
Two sure signs of a rookie entrepreneur: building in stealth and asking me to sign an NDA to talk about their idea.
Whenever I see somebody who has building in stealth mode in their LinkedIn
profile,
if I'm drinking a cup of coffee like this, I often spit it back in the cup
because I just
think that this is a horrible idea and it will almost certainly ensure that
your startup will fail.
Number one, no one is going to steal your idea. Who could actually execute your
idea? Anybody
who has the ability to go out and actually do something, which is not many
people, they are
already doing something. And that thing that they're doing, they think is worth
more than your idea.
I promise you. Number two, you actually need feedback. And two types of
feedback are the type of
feedback that I am looking for, right, who is doing totally the opposite of
building in stealth,
as you can if you're following me on LinkedIn, you know, number one, I'm
looking for feedback
from my ideal customer profiles. Santo, should I have literally been on 200
calls since Labor Day,
as we've been building this tool, talking to people who fit a very tight
profile of people who we
believe will be our ideal customer profile in six months, we have learned an
unbelievable amount
from them. It has given me so much more conviction in what we're doing. And we
've changed the trajectory
of it given those conversations than if they wouldn't have happened. The other
type of feedback is from
founders who are ahead of you. We all make this a set of very similar mistakes
the first time around.
And even though you're going to make a lot of them regardless of what somebody
tells you,
it's very helpful to hear guidance on prioritization and what you should be
focused on,
that a more experienced founder can give you. Number three, I heard this saying
long ago,
ideas are like assholes, everybody's got one. Whatever you think your big
secret is, there is
another team already working on that secret. That's just the reality of it.
Like information is
flowing so freely and like every invention, you know, it's kind of like a
combination of what's
before it. So please do not think that what you have in mind as this genius
idea is in any way novel.
What is novel would be your ability to go out there and make it into a reality,
which is the whole
you know, journey that entrepreneurs are on ideas are just multipliers of
execution. If you
typed that phrase into Google, this guy Dan slivers was an entrepreneur. You
wrote a great book and
he's got a table that's basically like, however good you are at doing stuff, a
great idea will
just accelerate your ability to do stuff. If you have not proven that you can
execute yet,
an idea is literally worth nothing, which anybody who is in the position of
entrepreneur for many years. That is why they are not going to steal your idea
because they
appreciate what they had the war that they have been through to get to the
point that they are.
And they're so deeply engrossed in it that like, they're just not not going to
do it. Building in
stealth, in my opinion, in this day and age, and this could change with chat G
PT, but it's still
definitely the case now, it just makes it super risky to build software because
what you really
need to be doing, and I encourage everyone is listening to this to read and
follow word for word
four steps to the epiphany by Steve Blank. You need to be as you're developing
the product,
you need another team out there developing a customer base for that product. In
validating
what you're building, as you are building it, Barkbox is now a publicly traded
company.
I talked to the founder in 2011. They literally walked around Washington Square
Park with
not even a website, a picture of a website on a telephone and a square plug
into the phone.
And he swiped 50 credit cards without even a website or a product or nothing.
The best indicator
of early stage product market fit is that. Are people willing to pay you for
something that does
not even exist yet? Another great one is this company called Single Platform,
which got bought
for $100 million 18 months after lunch by a constant contact. This guy, Wiley S
irelli, was
walking around to restaurants and getting physical checks for $750 off of a
pitch deck.
And then when he they handed in the check, he said, well, we don't have this
yet, but when we do,
you're going to be the first customer. If you have the discipline to do that,
it will serve you
very well, right? Figuring out what somebody will pay for even before you start
building
is like the lowest risk way. What we're going to get into trouble is if you
spend a year and a half
building something, and then you go to launch it and people don't like what you
built.
And unfortunately, that happens more often than not because that's the
intuitive way to do it.
Our intuition is a terrible indicator of market viability, even doing this for
10 years.
One out of every four ideas I have is worth pursuing. It takes hundreds of
conversations
for me to figure out even with the intuition that I've developed that it's
something worth
deploying resources to. I try to be way down the road of knowing that that's
probably the case
before we allocate any development resources to it. The sure sign, in my
opinion, of a total rookie
is someone who tries to get you to sign an NDA to share their idea. Anybody who
you're going to,
who knows the game and what goes into making an idea of reality will probably
laugh in your face
for this. So spare yourself the embarrassment. Don't ever ask somebody to sign
an NDA to share an
idea. Talk to people. That is how you're going to be successful.
being an