When is the right time for a startup to come out of stealth mode? – My answer to this question on Quora (q&a site)

http://www.quora.com/Startup-Advice-Strategy/When-is-the-right-time-for-a-startup-to-come-out-of-stealth-mode

When you need the public exposure (e.g. need more customers that you can’t get without the public exposure, Need to raise more money and the exposure might help raise awareness from VCs, you are having a hard time hiring employees because no one knows you and the market is competitive.). While The trend today is the “minimal viable product” and tell the world as early as possible what you are doing, I would argue that this advice assumes a consumer web services orientation. First you need to ask yourself what are the pros and cons of telling the world what your start-up is up to. A few cons to launching as soon as you have your first “viable product” would be:
1. You might not be able to process all the feedback you get and even those early adopters who wanted to use your products might be discouraged.
2. You need a few cycles of customer iteration to be able to explain the world what your product does in their words
3. If you do have a good product and interesting vision, by launching too early, you are might miss the opportunity to have a coordinated planned launch and these things tend to have more impact if they are covered simultaneously.
4. We are not in the business in which any coverage is good coverage and having your first coverage a negative one can be something that can take a while to recover from.
It’s not black or white and you can get feedback and customer engagement without coming out of stealth mode. For example, if what you want is to get customer exposure, you can still work with early design partners (especially if you are selling enterprise software) or selected alpha/beta testers. If need a proof that early is not always better, look at serial (successful) entrepreneurs and you will notice that as their achieve more, they become more calculated with how they time their move from stealth to public launch and time events they can control to their benefit for maximum impact

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