The myth of secrecy

One of the worst things you can do about your product is trying to be secretive about it. “What if people steal my idea?” They won’t. Do you not see how much work goes into launching a product? Most people won’t want to do this for someone else’s idea. Especially one that is not fully fleshed out.

Being secretive is a mistake almost all beginner builders make, and it’s one that builders eventually shed once they grow experienced enough. Whenever you find yourself being defensive, or contemplating an NDA before sharing what your product is about, understand that this is the instinct of someone who has not shipped before (aka you're being a total noob!).

Ideas basically have no market price

Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, pointed out that if startup ideas were really worth something there would be a market for them, and there isn’t one. His suggested experiment is to just try to sell one. You’ll find there are no buyers at any price. If you go to a room of investors with a brilliant idea and ask them to sign an NDA first, most of them will decline. The paperwork will cost them more than the idea is worth!

Think about what you actually have to do to turn your idea into a business. You have to build it, name it, buy the domain, write the copy, learn the platforms, post content for months to a non-existent audience, handle support emails, set up payments, and keep going when almost nothing is going right. Now picture a stranger who saw your tweet deciding to do all of that for your idea instead of one they already have. It pretty much never happens, and the idea you’re guarding so carefully is honestly the easiest step of the whole process.

The cost of secrecy

You end up building against your own assumptions rather than against reality, and you'll end up finding out which of those assumptions were wrong at the worst possible time, which is after you’ve already built everything. Far more founders lose their business to this than to anyone actually stealing anything.

It also makes the rest of this class impossible. You cannot grow a wait list for a product you're not willing to describe. You can't post content about something you’re keeping secret. You can't pitch a journalist a story you're not willing to tell. Everything in the lessons that follow assumes you're willing to talk out loud about what you’re building.

And an audience takes months to build. If you stay quiet until the product is finished, you'll launch to crickets, and then you have to start the whole months-long process of audience building from scratch, while also now trying to manage the rest of the business. Doing these two things one after the other instead of correctly at the same time will set you back months, if not years.

Be secretive with people that love you

In an earlier class I asked you to hold off on telling your friends and family about your idea, and mentioned the Gollwitzer and Sheeran study where people who announced their intentions went on to do less actual work. That might seem like a contradiction with what I’m telling you here, so let me be clear.

The thing that will hurt you is announcing your plans to people who love you. The reason is your friends will applaud your plan without you having done anything yet, and you'll get the feeling of having already done something productive, and the actual work then starts to get harder from there because of the dopamine trap I described. Whereas publishing to strangers is basically the opposite experience: nobody will respond to you, nobody will be impressed, and there's no dopamine trap to look out for. Quite the opposite if anything.

So before we move on to raising awareness of your business and product, please, stop with the secrecy. Everything in the lessons that follow depends on it.