Openness and transparency

In the past few weeks, we’ve met with a lot of people – restaurants, marketers, other startups, cool and knowledgeable people. We usually do a demo and talk about what we do. People always have lots of questions: what’s your technology? What’s your sales plan? How many customers do you have? Who are you working with? Of course, these are all questions I would ask too. However, I can’t help but wonder why many startups are in “stealth mode.” As soon as we had a working (albeit buggy) product, we solicited feedback from the market. Every iteration we’ve built since then has been based on feedback. But are we too ready to give away our secret sauce? Here are some of my reasons for being open:

1. Our technology is hard to copy. Since we have it and we’re easy to work with, I hope companies would choose to partner with us rather than become a competitor.
2. Transparency helps align collaboration. When partners know our goals, they understand where we are coming from. They often reciprocate and become more open as well.
3. People are willing to help. By being honest about our challenges, others can point us in the right direction, or even solve them for us.
4. Sets the right expectations. Jason Cohen has a great post about this: “You’re a little company, now act like one.” We’re upfront about being a small team. We can’t promise to have 24hr support, but we can promise we’ll do our very best and not sleep until everyone’s happy.