Alice stealth startup at the moment has just announced a $4.3 million financing round,led jointly by private equity angel funds Kegonsa Capital Partners and DaneVest Tech Fund.
The founders of Alice,Brian Wiegand and Mark McGuire have earlier managed to sell out their three startups(the last one,Jellyfish(social search engine ) to Microsoft) in the past decade and are looking all set with Alice.com
As the startup is in stealth mode right now,you will hardly find any information about the service they are going to offer.They have planned for a closed beta release in January and a full public release in March 2009.
According to whatever they have written on the site,Alice seems like an online retail service for consumer stuff,focussed on linking household stuff manufacturers like toilet papers & trash bags to end consumers directly.
You can follow their updates and things happening behind the scenes at Flywheelblog.But as i mentioned in the title of the post,there’s something that entrepreneurs and startup folks can learn from Alice.com’s founders.
If you observe the way they’ve written about ‘Alice’,they are giving enough clues to the readers to guess what they are about to offer.But still,they are pitching it as ‘Top secret’ and running it under ‘stealth mode’.Such a strategy can create a lot of curiosity among the crowd and ‘updates through blog’ can serve as a good method to maintain the ‘curiosity’ and let it burst out on the day of public release.
It can prove to be an effective way of creating a lot of FREE buzz.So,other folks planning to open up to public can try out something of this sort to buzz up their product launch.