Let me guess. You have a solid idea, you built a working prototype in two months, and you somehow pulled together forty-five daily users. Not bad. But you still think keeping quiet is the smart move. You tell yourself you are protecting something fragile, something too special to talk about. The reality is the opposite. Your idea is not at risk because you talk about it. It is at risk because you don’t. There are at least ten people who have already tried something similar, and you cannot even name one of them.
A startup gets stronger the way a river does. Through confluence. Every conversation you have about your work adds a new current that pushes you forward. One good exchange can give you more direction than a month of isolated building. After speaking to enough founders, you notice the same pattern. Their first ideas were nothing impressive. What became impressive was what happened after they started talking.
Look at Stewart Butterfield. He set out to build a fantasy MMO called Glitch. The game failed, but the internal chat tool his team used to build the game became Slack. Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger built a bloated check in app called Burbn. Nobody cared about it. The only feature users reacted to was photo sharing. That insight became Instagram. Airbnb started with two founders renting out air mattresses in their apartment because they were broke. The conversations they had with those first few users shaped a global hospitality company. None of these founders got lucky. They learned. They listened. They talked.
Here is how Glitch (Slack’s original product) looked like before for context:
These insights do not fall from the sky. You create them by placing yourself in the right rooms, taking the long calls, asking for intros without hesitation and returning value when someone helps you. A founder grows by talking about what they are building. Even if the current idea is not the final one, the momentum you get by engaging with people ensures something worthwhile comes out of the journey. Silence does not compound. Conversations do.
But conversation has limits. There is one thing you should not talk about before its time. Potential deals, I have been there and yeah, this one is tough. A verbal commitment can make you feel like you have already arrived. You feel so good you tell your non existent granddaughter about it. Then the deal falls apart for reasons that never make sense in the moment. And suddenly you are no longer on top of the world, but everyone you told still thinks you are. Every time someone asks how that deal is going, it hurts a little more.
So talk about your product. Talk about your progress. Talk about the problems you are solving. That is how you find direction and clarity. Just keep the deals quiet until they are real.
It is not about secrecy. It is about discipline. And discipline is what separates people who build companies from people who build noise. If you are looking to actively share what you are building with fellow startup founders, join Proxima Mumbai at proximamumbai.com.