Stealth mode used to signal that a company was onto something worth protecting. Now, too often, it gives founders a comfortable place to build around assumptions no one has verified or challenged.
The economics of building companies has changed with the advent of AI. Ideas and content are abundant, software development is accelerating, and execution alone is becoming less of a differentiator.
What hasn’t gotten easier is earning trust.
People still buy from founders they believe in. They join communities where they feel heard. They advocate for companies that show them their input matters. You can’t generate that with a prompt.
I wrote recently in Fast Company about why that makes building in public a competitive advantage. But deciding to build in public is the easy part. Figuring out what that actually looks like for your company is harder.
Start With What You Need to Learn
You don’t need to put every company decision in a LinkedIn poll. Start with the decisions that will get expensive to change later.
Before you spend six months building a product, test whether customers care enough about the problem. Before you settle on positioning, see how customers describe the problem when you’re not feeding them the language. Before you build a campaign around a message, put the idea into the market and see what people question, misunderstand, or ignore.
The earlier you find out you’re wrong, the cheaper it is to change course.
Give People Something They Can Change
There’s a difference between showing your work and letting people influence it.
We’ve experienced that firsthand with The StartUp Marketer. Members haven’t just reacted to what we’ve built. They’ve challenged priorities, changed how we think about features, introduced us to partners and surfaced needs we hadn’t seen ourselves.
That only works when the feedback arrives before the decision is final.
And no, everything shouldn’t be open for discussion. Protect genuine IP, confidential information and anything constrained by regulation. But “we’re not ready to talk about it” shouldn’t be the default.
A useful test: If sharing this now could change our decision for the better, what’s the reason for waiting?
Make the Market Part of the Process
Building in public doesn’t require a massive community program. It requires a deliberate way to put important assumptions in front of the people who can challenge them while you can still act on what you hear.
That’s the work we help founders do at SalientMG: identify what’s worth testing, get it in front of the right people and use the response to make better decisions about the product, positioning and go-to-market.
You don’t need the market in every meeting, but you probably want to hear from it before the expensive decisions are made.