Founders should build in stealth longer

Launching your startup too early is actually the lazier thing to do — founders should build in stealth longer

Ask any startup founder or marketer when to start building out their marketing and distribution channels and they will all tell you the same thing: yesterday.

• Build a brand.

• Launch a waitlist.

• Create a category.

• Be a thought leader, start building buzz.

These are the marketer's playbook for a new product launch.

But announcing too early can kill startup, for 5 reasons.

1. Losing narrative and momentum. Andreas Klinger said the two most important qualities of an early stage, venture-backed startup are Narrative and Momentum. You need to have a tight story that is human and memorable (and quick and easy to tell). Once your story starts getting traction, your momentum begins. This is what investors look for. If you launch, you’ll get a surge of interest, but your product might not be ready. Your launch will fade and your waitlist begins to fizzle, requiring even more time for external marketing to maintain the hype. But this is a distraction. See next point.

2. Launching too early distracts you from your #1 focus: Building a great product. External marketing takes a lot of time/effort to do for a small team in the early days. As a founder, your focus is limited. Marketing is easy, building a 10X product is hard. Sam Altman says, build a great product first, and marketing will be 10X easier (and more cost-effective). A waitlist is not a business. Stay in stealth to focus on building a great product.

3. Pre-product market fit pivots. In the early stages, expect pivots. It’s easier to pivot in stealth. Once announced, people have expectations that you’ll need to reshape, which takes work. What you initially marketed at launch (i.e., what you branded your company as) could turn out to not be true — resulting in confusion and potential loss of credibility. Stay in stealth so you can remain nimble during pre-PMF.

4. Negative word-of-mouth cycles. Early stage software is rough around the edges and buggy, so when you hype up what you’re building for too long and follow it inevitably with delivering a half-baked or clunky product experience, people may be let down and won’t be as excited in an honest conversation. Stay in stealth to ensure your have enough aha and wow moments built into the product.

5. Team and investor disillusionment. People believe in your vision and what you’re building. You don’t want to tax this belief any more than you have to. It’s easier to sell an idea than a product because a product has cold hard data, like acquisition, activation, and retention, that you can be measured by. An idea is big and imaginative, but extended amounts of stalling erodes belief. The longer it takes you to find PMF and the more changes you make to your business, the more unbought in your team and investors may become. A story with too many twists and turns will lose people. Stealth lets you build with focus and prepare your product to put on a show.

I was the founding marketer at a unicorn startup that raised over $1B and now I'm a cofounder of a startup that we haven't announced yet. The marketer in me desperately wants to announce as soon as possible. That’s what I feel most comfortable doing because that is my default.

But I received some guidance from our investors about not announcing too early, for many of the reasons above, and while I’m so glad we haven’t, I can tell our product is getting better and better, pulling us naturally toward launch, instead of forcing it artificially. Great products take patience.

Thanks for reading.

Dave

PS. If you work in marketing or an agency, I’d like to speak with you. Hit reply — I’m here.

Top Medium Reads (Friend Links)

Take a look at these great stories from our top writers published in Entrepreneurship Handbook on Medium:

1. What Comes After A.I. — Connor Beem’s primer on the next hottest investment industry: Deep Tech

2. Saturate Your Customer-User Journey With “Aha!” Moments — Avi Siegel shares dozens examples aha moments from successful products

3. 5 Honest Reasons Why Founders (And Investors) Ghost You — From a Founder Who’s Ghosted 1000's — Rachel Greenberg gives clear, practical advice on how not to reach out

Little Links

📺 Watch our podcast on YouTube.

📖 Read 8 years of our content on Medium.