Why Bother With Stealth Mode?

Ok, first I'll preface this with if you've already got investors and a team on board before you start building because you're a hotshot ace with the "in's" on angel investors and VC firms, sure it probably makes sense to go stealth mode and make a huge splash. But what about the rest of us? When I first started working on unscatter.com I was all about stealth. I didn't want anyone to steal my ideas and worked away in my bedroom just telling people I'm "working on something big". It was a frustrating time. I was working on all these great ideas I couldn't really show anyone who could understand it. As I got further along into it I was able to get "oh that's neat" from people like my wife and such. I suppose if you have a team or at least a co-founder then you might be able to work in stealth mode a little easier, for a single developer it was frustrating not having any feedback loop at all. Finally, I just put it up on a webserver and got people to go check it out. Very quickly I found out I was wasting time writing it on Appengine and that the format wasn't really interesting to most people. I rewrote it, started blogging about the process and occasionally asked for reviews from sites like Hacker News. Since then it has morphed into the site it is today, with new features coming as I find time to work on them. What I've learned is that if your idea is easy to steal and implement then it's probably already been done or the risk for competition once you do launch is high enough you should probably take another look at the idea in the first place. Honestly, with Unscatter I'm not too worried about people stealing the idea, because they don't have the big picture of where I'm going. Even if they did and wanted to steal it, I don't think they'd execute as well as I will when I get to it. On the other hand the feedback I've gotten from people getting fresh looks at the project as I've worked on it has been invaluable. I've already done a couple pivots since the original idea. The original idea in fact was a hosted search solution that offered social aggregation. Social aggregation is still in the big picture, but the hosted search solution is gone. A very intuitive news portal and search has been developed instead along with more real time results coming soon. I don't think in the future I'll bother with stealth mode. As soon as I have something functional I'll throw it up and get feedback from the internet. I'll know I've made something worth while once those people start coming back rather than looking at it and leaving. Heck right now unscatter.com might as well still be in stealth mode if judged by the fact is has few enough regular visitors that I can count them on 2 hands.