Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover recommends Jesse Schell's book 'The Art of Game Design' as an underrated resource for software founders.
Opinion
Hoover doubts a single person can run Twitter and Square simultaneously
“I don't know how he can do it. I don't know. I just don't know how anyone can run two companies, especially two massive prominent companies as a single person.”
Prediction Partly held up
Hoover: Product Hunt will expand to all passion categories within 5 years
“In five years, you'll see Product Hunt turn into a community and a site for all kinds of people and all kinds of things. And it will be a place where you can find all kinds of things from You know, whatever you're most passionate about, and you can find like-m…”
Insight
Hoover: Building online communities requires extensive manual outreach initially
“To make a community work, to build something like this, you need to really focus on the people in the beginning and do a lot of frankly manual, like labor, manual things to get it going.”
Insight
Hoover: Online communities must continually grow or they will die
“When you build a community, you have to not only seed it with the right kind of culture that you want, but then you have to make sure it grows, and you have to keep growing, otherwise it just dies. A lot of communities start, but they don't grow, and then they…”
Insight
Hoover: Changing community platforms without warning upsets users
“Communities are kind of like a home, and when you move the furniture around, whether it's better or not, people are like, whoa, you moved the furniture, why didn't you ask me?”
Insight
Hoover: Product teams should act on user patterns, not individual feedback
“Like, we're going to look for patterns, and we're going to make changes, but there will inevitably be people that say, oh, like, this button shouldn't be here, and we're not going to move it just because they say this button shouldn't be here. Like, not all th…”