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So we are in the final stages of producing our product – CrowdSend. It has been a long, complex and often stressful journey to get to the point we are currently at and it is equally frustrating when the journey involves some ’stealthness’ in relation to what we are doing. Vivek Wadhwa wrote an interesting post about startup companies remaining stealth – or not disclosing what they are doing – and his comments provide an interesting perspective. Of course, each companies circumstances are different and what is best for one is not necessarily best for another. CrowdSend is something that we – Fluc Media – have been working on for around 12-14 months now and is quite a complex piece of software which has been built with the help of BizSpark – a great initiative from Microsoft that we are extremely proud to have been a part of for when it first started back in 2008.

While it’s true we are essentially stealth, in that no one even knows what we are doing, we have tried to remain iterative throughout the entire process and engaged a small subset of users who have provided us with valuable feedback as to what works and what doesn’t. This is essentially what Vivek puts forward as the key problem of remaining stealth – software solutions are built for consumers, and without consumers to provide you with feedback in relation to what you are doing, then you are building ‘blind’ in one way or another. What you think consumers need, may not be what consumers actually need, want or would like to interact with. Of course, as the software product becomes more inherently complex – the ability to simply ‘launch at first iteration’ is not always possible if the product simply doesn’t work – there is nothing to interact with or the product is so buggy that its just too frustrating. Website users typically form their first impressions of your website and your product within as little as 1/20th of a second and this means that if it doesn’t simply “work” then you just lost a user, a revenue stream or at worst – a negative blog post or press article.

Of course, this is also relative – if your website has sufficient ‘buzz’ then users will ‘want to explore’ the site and be willing to ’spend time’ to engage in your product. This is a key aspect. I would argue that the Facebook is not an inherently simple piece of software to join, learn and understand as it takes a considerable time to setup and establish your presence – just ask your mother or father if they are able to get onto the site and use it without asking you for at least help and understanding. Users are willing to engage in - and spend time on – Facebook because it has sufficient ‘buzz’ and because most people now use it. Of course, this may be attributable to the fact that in the early days young students were willing to spend time with the product in order to communicate with their friends and it served a purpose, drew sufficient buzz and is now equivalent to the 6th largest country on the planet at 350 million users. If the site launched and was only targeted at the elderly, I am not convinced that the same level of engagement would have been achieved because age is highly correlated with frustration as a function of time.

Importantly, we have not remained ’stealth’ because we are ’scared’ that competitors may steal our idea – we have filed intellectual property for that and while we don’t rely on it absolutely, it’s still a barrier that may deter some. Instead, we have remained stealth primarily because we have reiterated the product so many times relevant to the feedback we have received from our current users. Being stealth is, in my mind, highly correlated to the geophysical barriers. You may be stealth online – but not stealth to a community of people in your local area – as we are. We also believe – as Vivek suggests in his article – that our technology is a little unique but this doesn’t by any stretch of the imagination mean that others are not, or could not, doing similar things. Both Youtube and Twitter have been cloned and replicated in more forms that you can imagine – but they simply got it right the first time and made it simple for users. We are certainly hoping that we have made our product simple to use for those that interact with it. Most importantly – and I absolutely think this is the most critical aspect – is the feedback that users provide. Launching is exciting, but user feedback dwarfs launching 100x fold.

Relevantly, it is foolish to think that popular products won’t be cloned – I would suggest that products which are popular will always be cloned in some manner because it’s part of the iterative process and it’s in peoples nature to copy the idea and attempt to replicate success from it. Much of this inherent logic exists in the age old axiom – imitation is the greatest form of flattery. If you are a startup – accept this – don’t attempt to fight it too greatly but rather put barriers or ‘road-blocks’ in place that stop any potential ‘idea theft’ from occurring such that if competitors become large – then you can take appropriate action. It’s in the execution – not in the idea. Ideas don’t make products, successful execution of ideas does. Importantly, at least in my mind, going public from ‘day one’ in relation to your idea is not necessarily the best idea either. Build time is the greatest barrier to any sort of ‘idea theft’ you can have. The more code that is written, the harder it is to simply ‘clone’ – even though it may appear that way prima facie. Of course, the big problem here is that the longer you build – the less feedback you are receiving from consumers and users of your product. This all means that there must be a balance between the two which fairly attempts to rationalize each respectively. I suggested to a friend the other day who asked for some advice up to this point and I said the key is

Don’t build too long, don’t launch too late, don’t fail to engage users along the way – regardless of whether you are stealth or not. Ideas don’t make products, successful execution of ideas do.

So what is CrowdSend then? Well, I’m not going to reveal that just yet. You will find out soon enough either this month or next when we finally launch. Either way, launching is going to be fun – we get user interaction and we want to work on improving our product every single day from this user feedback.

Bring on 2010 I say.