Joe Stump on the Pros and Cons of a Stealth Mode Product Strategy

In Chapter 15 of 17 in his 2011 Capture Your Flag interview with host Erik Michielsen, Internet entrepreneur and SimpleGeo CTO Joe Stump gives his opinion on stealth mode product strategy. He compares and contrasts it to going private beta and also to releasing a minimum viable product (MVP) and improving via iteration. Stump notes why short development cycle products such as Instagram needed to be kept quiet before release. He also shares how some companies, for example Paypal, might pull a product back into private beta or stealth if a major pivot was in order. Stump is the co-founder and CTO at SimpleGeo (www.simplegeo.com), a San Francisco-based mobile location infrastructure services company. Previously Stump was Lead Architect at Digg. He programs in PHP, Python, Django and enjoys scaling websites. He earned a BBA in Computer Information Systems from Eastern Michigan University.