The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 17 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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?”
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…”
Hoover: Product Hunt grew 50% month-over-month leading into YC
“Leading into, to the YC interview, we were growing 50% month over month”
Ryan Hoover: A CEO's job is to hire themselves out of a job
“As a CEO role, your kind of ultimate job is to hire yourself out of a job in many ways”
Hoover: Tech founders overlook game design psychology
“There's a wealth of information there that most kind of tech entrepreneurs, like anyone building a website or app, they don't really think as much about some of these things that game designers think about all the time.”
Hoover: Original Product Hunt app was built in 5 days
“The first version was really a Ruby on Rails app that Nathan, my buddy, he built it over like a five-day Thanksgiving holiday”
Hoover: User testing is essential but emotionally painful for creators
“User testing is the most, one of the most insightful things, but also painful things to watch. Because you see them using this thing that you spent all this time building, and you're like, this is beautiful.”
Hoover: Product Hunt email digest has hundreds of thousands of subscribers
“There's the email digest, which hundreds of thousands of people subscribe to.”
Hoover: Twitter is critical for Product Hunt and one of his most important products
“It's probably one of the most important products in my life. Actually without Twitter, I don't even know where I'd be, which is kind of a weird statement to make, but it's such a serendipity machine and has allowed me to meet a lot of people, and of course it'…”
Hoover: Tagging authors and adding takes when sharing links builds authentic connections
“One small, small difference that most people don't do is they usually share articles, but they rarely tag the author. And so just one small thing, I would share like maybe 10 articles a day, and I would always tag the author just to give them a hat tip and be …”
Hoover: Investors approached Product Hunt first during early fundraising
“Investors started approaching me before I never actually approached investors in the beginning.”
Hoover: Betaworks' Matt was a daily Product Hunt user before investing
“Matt, for example, he was a super early user, Matt at beta works. And when we started, when I started talking to him, like he already understood the value of it and he was a user and consumed it daily himself.”
Hoover: Hosting 6-10 person brunches is an effective, underutilized networking tactic
“Small brunches with, you know, six to 10 people. A lot of them, people in, in entrepreneurship or startups or whatnot. And those have been fantastic because it's a great way to build a really small but, like, very intimate relationship in some ways with people…”