Ask HN: How transparent should your startup be?

18 points

11 years ago

I recently watched a Jason Cohen talk called Naked Business - How Honesty Makes Money[1]. I'm the founder of the Bike Index, and I think we had bought into all the quasi-marketspeak that makes the Bike Index sound like a big company, when being transparent about our size and limitations seems like a better strategy.

I opened a github issue[2] and revised our about page. I asked everyone I could about whether this was a good thing and the general response was yes.

So Hacker News - is this honesty a good thing? Should we be even more transparent, for instance by publicizing our burn rate? If we start to look for investment, is being up-front about being excited to run the Bike Index regardless of whether it makes money a good thing?

[1]: http://vimeo.com/96685927 [2]: https://github.com/bikeindex/bike_index/issues/80

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