Ask HN: How to stay 'stealth', but get enough user/market feedback?

Your startup is likely to fail if you are not shouting it from the rooftops. Only established brands are able to pull off stealth effectively.

That isn't saying you aren't capable or your idea isn't good, but go with the numbers and don't try to be stealth.

From personal experience, it is generally hard to get people to listen to you about your startup initially. So what you learn is generally you are doing it right when you talk to every person that will give you 30 seconds. That is how you revise your pitch, revise your positioning etc. If you aren't saying it enough then you will fail.

Worse yet, the failure of a "stealth" startup is usually slow because you get focused on product first, client second which is not usually how you will make a software startup successful. You also won't have gotten enough feedback to keep you from spending money in the wrong places, and you won't have enough traction to really convince people you are doing something worth paying attention to.

The couple startups I can think of that were stealth and are doing good now both had reasonably well known founders, significant monetary resources and in at least 1 case had already landed large enterprise clients they were working with before they even started writing code. So they were stealth only in that they were not making announcements or doing the common startup marketing things we all have come to expect. But they weren't stealth in that people knew basically what problems they were trying to solve, and knew they already had clients.

An advisor told me once not to worry about the guy trying to steal your idea, just keep inventing and working harder as someone will always "borrow" your idea or come out with a competing product etc. And competition in the end is good for you if you keep executing. Executing well solves almost all problems.