I have a small business that is now operating in two EU countries and in the US, we have grown with zero marketing budget 100% through word of mouth, our customers asked us if we could serve them there and we did, it's an overlooked niche and the last thing we want is to attract competition, I mentioned that as YC is everything we need right now but we don't want any publicity and we definitely don't want to expose our business to others, with that in mind, would we still be able to take part?
I've read what Paul Graham wrote about not worrying but why attract it if we don't have to? For YC the startups work on stealth mode until demo day, and that makes sense to me, we can expand to more markets keeping a low profile and push until we have a solid expansion model that works.