coming out of stealth mode: a launch plan with a past

the short answer

coming out of stealth mode is a launch with one extra asset available to you: everything that happened while nobody was watching. most founders waste it. they announce the product, write a thread about the journey from memory, and the months that made the company are summarised in a paragraph.

a better plan has three parts. decide what you are announcing and to whom. prepare the places people will land. and bring the stealth period with you as a record, in order and dated, rather than a recap written with the ending already known.

this page covers all three, with a section on what to put on linkedin while you are still in stealth and a checklist for the day itself.

what coming out of stealth mode actually means

stealth is a choice to build without saying what you are building. the reasons are usually good: an idea easy to copy, a job not yet left, a pivot not yet told to customers, a raise that needs quiet.

coming out of stealth is when that ends, usually tied to an event: a launch, a funding round, a first public customer. the announcement says the company exists and gives people a reason to care.

the usual advice is fine as far as it goes: have a story, line up press, update your profiles. what it misses is that the stealth months are the strongest story you have, and they are almost always told badly, because they are told afterwards.

a launch plan for leaving stealth

work backwards from the day. these are the decisions that matter, in roughly the order to make them.

• the one sentence. what it is, who it is for, what they do instead today. if you cannot say it in a sentence, the announcement will be a paragraph nobody finishes.
• the reason it is news now. launching, raising, first customers, opening the waitlist. an announcement with no event behind it reads as a rebrand.
• who needs to hear it first. existing customers, investors, your current employer if you are leaving, the team. nobody important should learn about it from a feed.
• where people land. a website, and one place that holds the whole story. more on that below.
• the post itself. one post per network, in your own words. one, not a campaign of forty.
• what happens on day two. a launch with nothing after it is a spike. the second post decides whether people follow.

what to put on linkedin while in stealth

"stealth startup founder linkedin" is a real search, because the profile is awkward. you want to be findable by the right people without saying the thing you are not ready to say. some practical choices:

• an honest headline. "founder, stealth startup" or "building something new for independent retailers" is fine. the second is better: it tells the right person to get in touch without naming the product.
• an experience entry you can live with. many founders list "stealth startup" as the company. some leave the old role as the current one until they have left it. do not claim a job you have quit or hide one you still have.
• turn off the update notification. when you edit your experience, linkedin offers to tell your network. switch that off in stealth, and switch it on for the real announcement.
• post about the problem, not the product. what you are learning about the people you are building for, the thing everyone in the space gets wrong, a question you are trying to answer. it builds an audience that will care on launch day without giving anything away.

stealth is also the best time to build a posting habit, because nothing rides on it. if you document privately (see below), the words written from each private episode can seed a post about the problem, in what you actually said. read it before it goes anywhere: nothing should leak.

come out of stealth mode with the origin story already filmed

here is the idea the generic guides do not cover. the footage of the stealth period is the one thing about your launch that cannot be made later. you can write the website on launch week. you can hire a designer, film a slick product video, buy ads. you cannot go back and film the tuesday you were sure the pricing was wrong.

so document in private from the start. a short entry whenever suits you, filmed, numbered, kept. nobody sees it. then on the day you come out of stealth, you do not have to reconstruct the story. you have it, in order, in your own voice, dated, told by someone who did not know how it would end.

that is what underway's stealth mode is. everything works exactly as normal: the same interview about the day you had, the same numbered episodes, the same cut. the only difference is that nothing leaves the app. every series starts in stealth, and nothing in the vault is ever published on its own.

it starts with episode zero: what you are building, who it is for, what they do instead today, where it honestly stands, the hardest part, and what you are setting out to do. filmed in stealth, it becomes the start-here episode on launch day, and it is the answer to "so what is this?" that you will otherwise type out forty times.

the vault becomes season 0

when you go public in underway, everything filmed before becomes season 0. the public series starts at season 1, and you are asked, in the same box, what season 1 is called and what it is for. a new viewer is never confused about which episode is the current one: season 0 is before anyone was watching, season 1 is now.

going public is deliberately two steps. first you claim your address, underway.life/series/your-name, which you can do any time before launch to set your page up and look at it before anyone else can. then you go public, which lists the series in the directory and records the launch. releasing the vault is its own press after that. nothing is released by going public alone.

release the vault in order, to places built for a back catalogue

the obvious move is to post the stealth episodes to your feeds. do not. a feed is one timeline, newest first. forty old episodes dropped into it next to today's make a mess of it, and the platforms rank on recency, so a backfill mostly goes unseen anyway. a single compilation throws away the detail that the people who care most actually want.

so the vault goes whole, oldest first, to the places that hold an archive natively:

• your page. release the vault puts every finished episode on your public page, oldest first, each carrying the date it was filmed, with episode zero pinned at the top under start here. it takes seconds an episode, and the card lists any that did not go out, with the reason.
• the podcast feed. every series with an address has a feed. a back catalogue is the native shape of a feed: release the vault and every podcast app that subscribes pulls all of it, in order.
• a youtube playlist. posting an episode to youtube from underway adds it to your series' playlist. post the season 0 episodes oldest first and the whole run plays in order from one link.

any single episode can be held back for good from its own page, whatever the rest of the vault does. some stealth days should stay private, and that is your call per episode.

one launch post in the feed, not forty

the feeds get one post: the announcement, pointing at where the whole story lives. "six months of this, in private, filmed as it happened. here it all is."

underway can cut that post's video for you. cut the launch trailer, in the go public panel, reads what every vault episode was about, picks ten to fourteen moments that carry the story, and keeps one line from each: hard cuts, no cards between, each moment stamped with its episode and date in the corner. it is about a minute long, and it is made only from what you said. nothing is invented and nothing is reordered.

when you go public, the confirmation box also offers one unticked box: feature my launch on underway.life. tick it and the series appears on the launches page and at the top of the directory, with how many episodes were waiting and how long you documented in private. stealth founders are not left out of the directory. they arrive in it with their archive already behind them.

after launch: throwbacks that carry their date

after the launch the vault is still useful. when something now echoes the stealth months, post that old episode on its own as a throwback: the first design, the pricing argument from month two. one at a time, chosen because it bears on today.

the rule is that it carries its filming date and says what it is. months-old footage posted undated next to today's is quietly dishonest. in underway every released episode shows the date it was filmed on its own page. never number throwbacks as a second series: season 0 already has its numbers.

checklist for coming out of stealth mode

• write the one sentence: what it is, who for, what they do instead.
• name the event that makes it news now.
• tell customers, investors, team and any current employer before the feeds.
• update linkedin: headline, experience, and turn the network notification back on for this one.
• make sure the website says the one sentence above the fold.
• claim your page address early and fill it in: about the series, your name, your photo.
• decide which stealth episodes to hold back, one by one.
• name season 1 and say what it is for.
• go public, then release the vault, oldest first.
• submit the podcast feed to apple podcasts and spotify once, from their dashboards.
• post the season 0 episodes to youtube oldest first, so the playlist plays in order.
• cut the launch trailer and make it the one launch post, linking to your page.
• film the next episode. season 1, episode 1 is the day after launch, or the same day.

on price: three episodes are free, with no card. stealth launch is £490 once: everything runs in private, the whole vault is released on launch day with a trailer cut from it, and it includes ninety days of series after that, which is the plan with the podcast feed and one tap to every connected network. raw footage is downloadable on every plan.

where to go next

the stealth diary, from the first private episode to the release. document in private, publish the archive on launch day.

posting the whole run to youtube, in order, without editing. how to build in public on youtube.

launching to nobody is the common case. what to do about it. build in public with no audience.