[dclusin]

I've heard secrecy thrown about quite a bit but I've always been a bit mystified as to why. The reason I'm confused is because it seems as though any of your well healed competitors would be able to study your product/marketing/etc and determine what you are spending time and effort on to acquire customers.

For instance one of the tactics mentioned in the blog is SEO/Adwords. From a competitors standpoint it seems like it would be pretty easy to reverse engineer where the company is devoting most of their money and effort into and thus their user acquisition strategy.

This of course assumes the competitors are technically sophisticated. Is this assumption really that much of an exception? Meaning, for those in business, are your competitors really that stupid?

[acgourley]

It's hard to comprehensively study what all competitors are doing. It's probably more than most startups can afford to allocate time for, anyway. You're right it's not impossible, but what advantage do you have making it any easier? Some blog writing about your great user-buying tactics? That's still not a great song to sing, when you could be saying, "our product is so great users just come to us"