What should a stealth mode startup website include?

A stealth startup website should include the problem in one plain sentence, why it is solvable now, the founders with names, photos and past work, any announced investors, open roles, and a named person to contact. It should leave out screenshots, features, pricing and how the product works. The goal is to prove the company is real while keeping the product private.

Should a stealth startup have a website at all?

Yes. Candidates, investors and early customers will search your name, and finding nothing makes the company look unreal. A one-page site with the team and the problem costs little and answers their first questions. Stealth is about keeping the product private, not hiding that the company exists.

How do I hire engineers while my startup is in stealth?

Give candidates enough to trust you before the first call: a team section with real names and backgrounds, a careers page with full role descriptions, and a clear statement of the problem. Keep the product for a later call, under an NDA if needed. Strong candidates accept product secrecy, but they drop out when they cannot confirm who the founders are.

Can I list my investors on a stealth startup website?

Yes, once the round or the investors have been announced. Investor and angel names do the same work for an early company that client logos do for a later one. If the round is not public yet, leave the names off until it is.

How do I keep a stealth startup website out of Google?

Usually you should not keep the whole site out, because candidates and investors will search for you. For a single private page, use a noindex rule rather than robots.txt, since Google says a page blocked by robots.txt can still appear in results if other pages link to it. Anything truly secret should not be on the public site at all.

When should a startup come out of stealth?

Come out when being unknown costs more than being copied would. Common triggers are hiring beyond your own network, design partners who would talk about the product, the start of a raise, or a competitor announcing something similar. If your stealth site already shows the team and the problem, coming out means adding a product section rather than rebuilding.

Stealth Startup Website: What to Put on It

A stealth mode startup website should show who you are and what problem you are solving, in detail, and hold back only the product. Put the founders' names and past work on it, the problem in plain words, the roles you are hiring for, and a real person to email. Leave out screenshots, features and how the thing works.

This matters because the people who open a stealth site are rarely competitors. They are engineers deciding whether to take a call, investors checking a warm intro, and early customers deciding whether to give you an hour. Each of them decides what kind of company this is in about four seconds. A page with nothing on it answers that question for them, and the answer is usually no.

The page that says Building something new

Picture a seed-stage AI company, used here as an example. The site is one screen. A black background, a white wordmark in the top left corner, and one centred line: Building something new. Below it sits a grey email link that opens a blank message to hello@. There is no footer, no About page, and the browser tab just says Home.

The founder is hiring two senior engineers from this page. The job posts on LinkedIn link to it. Both candidates who reached a first call asked, in the first few minutes, whether the company was real. One had searched the company name and found only that single sentence in the result. The other asked who else worked there, because the site did not say.

Watch what the founder does next. He starts sending the pitch deck as a PDF before every first call. He adds a paragraph to each outreach message explaining who the team is. He spends the first ten minutes of every interview proving the company exists before he can talk about the work. None of that is product secrecy. It is the company being hidden by accident.

Who actually opens a stealth site

Before you decide what to hide, list who is looking. For most stealth companies it is four groups, and only one of them is a threat.

Candidates. They are leaving a safe job. They want to know who the founders are, whether the money is real, and what problem they would spend two years on.
Investors. Usually after a warm intro. They open the site to check that the team is who the intro said, and that the problem is big enough to matter.
Design partners and first customers. They are being asked for time and data. They need to see that you understand their problem better than they do.
Competitors. The only group that stealth is really for. They want the mechanism, the product, the wedge. They do not learn much from your team page.

Three of the four need proof that the company exists and knows its problem. Only one needs the product kept away from them. A stealth site built for the competitor fails the other three.

Stealth hides the product, not the company

Most advice on stealth sites says keep it minimal: a logo, a tagline, a waitlist box. That advice treats stealth as one switch, on or off. It is wrong. Stealth is about one thing, which is how the product works and what it looks like. Everything else about the company can be public, and should be.

Your team is not a secret. Your investors, once announced, are not a secret. The problem you are solving is not a secret either, because your customers already live with it every day. What a competitor cannot copy from your site is the answer, and you can keep that off the page completely while still showing everything else in detail.

Mi-VAD is a useful model here, even though it is not in stealth. It is building a heart pump about the size of a coin. Its site talks to two rooms at once: investors deciding whether this is real, and clinicians deciding whether it is safe. It names the people behind it, surgeons and engineers from Mayo Clinic and Cornell, and it makes the case for small before it gets into specifications. A company with a product most visitors will never touch still earns trust from the team and the problem.

This is the founder's blind spot. He knows the team is strong because he hired them. He knows the problem is real because he has lived in it for a year. Nobody arriving at the site cold knows either thing, and a page that says Building something new tells them nothing they can check.

What to put on a stealth startup website

Here is the full list. It fits on one page, and most of it you can write this week.

The problem in one plain sentence. Name who has it and what it costs them. For example: hospital billing teams rework the same denied claims by hand every week. A stranger should be able to repeat it after one read.
Why now. Two or three sentences on what changed that makes this solvable today. This is where an AI company can explain its timing without describing its model.
The founders, with faces and names. A photo, a full name, a link to each LinkedIn, and one line of past work that relates to the problem. This is the section candidates read twice.
Backers, if they are announced. Investor names and angels do the same job as client logos do for a later company. If the round is not public yet, leave them off.
Open roles. Each role on its own page with a real description of the work and who it reports to. A careers page turns the site from a placeholder into a company.
A named person to contact. Replace hello@ with a founder's name and a line on what to write about. People answer people.
What you hold back, said out loud. One line such as: we are in stealth on the product until next year. Saying it makes the empty space look chosen rather than unfinished.

And here is what stays off: screenshots, demo videos, feature lists, pricing, architecture diagrams, and the name of the model or method that makes it work. If you are unsure about a line, ask whether a competitor could build something from it. If not, it can go on the page.

Hiring from a stealth page

Hiring is where a blank stealth site costs the most, and the cost is runway. Every week a senior role stays open is a week of product that does not get built. The gap between a seed round and a Series A is around 616 days at the median across all sectors, and roughly 70 percent of seed companies never raise a Series A at all. A hiring delay eats into a window that was already short.

A good engineer checks a company before the first call, the same way you check them. They search the name, open the site, read the founders' backgrounds, and look for anyone they know. If all of that turns up one sentence and an email address, the strongest candidates quietly drop out, and the ones who stay ask whether you are real. Your interview loop then starts at trust instead of at the work.

The fix is small. A team section, a careers page with real role descriptions, and a short paragraph on the problem will answer most of what candidates ask in those first minutes. You can still keep the product for the second call, under an NDA if you need one. Candidates accept that easily. What they will not accept is a company they cannot find.

Keeping the right pages out of search

Some founders blank the whole site because they are worried about what Google will show. You can be precise about this instead. Keep the homepage, team and careers pages indexed, because candidates and investors will search your name. If one page must stay out of search, such as a page you share with design partners by direct link, give it a noindex rule.

Do not rely on robots.txt for that. Google's own documentation says a page blocked by robots.txt can still appear in search results if other pages link to it, and that noindex only works when the crawler is allowed to see it. Better still, keep anything truly secret off the public site entirely.

When to come out of stealth

Stealth has a cost every week it runs, so set the exit date when you go in. A simple rule: come out when being unknown costs you more than being copied would. In practice that is the first of these to happen.

You need to hire beyond the people who already know the founders.
Design partners are using the product and would talk about it if asked.
You are starting a raise and investors will compare your site with your deck.
A competitor announces something close enough that secrecy no longer protects you.

Coming out is mostly adding one section. The team and problem pages you built during stealth stay as they are, and the product section goes on top. If you planned the stealth site this way, launch week is a content change, not a rebuild. Our guide to a launch-ready website for an AI startup covers what that first public version needs, and how to make an AI startup look like a YC company covers the signals that make a young team read as serious.

If you would rather hand the whole thing to someone, this ranking of design agencies for pre-launch AI products compares studios that work with companies before the product is public.

Studio Maydit is a web and product design studio for AI founders in the US, UK and Europe, and a stealth site is the kind of website problem where stature has to come from the team and the problem rather than the product. We build in Framer, Webflow and custom code, and recent clients include Wave, PixelFlow and Mi-VAD. Fixed-scope projects run three to four weeks, so a stealth site can go live while you are still hiring, and the structure can stay in place when the product section is added at launch. If candidates are asking whether your company is real, book a 30-minute call and we will go through what your stealth page can show.