To provide some balance, does anyone here have any positive experiences with being in stealth mode? I have one. We launched Twttr in a stealth private beta for

To provide some balance, does anyone here have any positive experiences with being in stealth mode? I have one. We launched Twttr in a stealth private beta for at least a few months. I think the period coincided with the period it took to get an official SMS short code. During the stealth period we were serving SMS traffic out of an SMS modem attached to an office laptop. We got the normal benefit of polishing the product that you'd get from a private beta. Plus we got to develop the product without any public scrutiny. But we were very conservative about who we let know about the project, basically close friends and family who didn't work for a major internet company. I think the hardest part about changing your product strategy is going back on your promises (in our case we'd promised customers, investors, and employees that we were going to build a world-changing podcast product). I don't know if it would have been fatal, but it definitely would have been uncomfortable to be accused of abandoning our initial product before knowing we had a success (and contrary to some statements, there were a big chunk of internal users who knew we had something important from the first day we used it).