Personal brand vs. Stealth building: how did you approach your early MVP?

I saw a great discussion recently about building a personal brand before the product is even ready vs building the product first and revealing yourself later.

For those of you targeting specific, legacy enterprise problems, which route did you take? It's tempting to build in stealth to protect the core idea and architecture. On the other hand, building a brand (in the sense of building trust) seems critical for those first few partners willing to hand over their messy internal data for you to structure.

If you had to start your current project over, how would you go about it? What have been some of the most unignorable observations centering on this aspect?