The Ledger
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Hoover rejected early investor pressure to build a Product Hunt VC fund
“A few different investors and people suggested, Hey, you should start a product hunt fund. You should build a fund on top of product hunt, invest in, use the data in the community and everything to source and find really early stage opportunities. And I was pr…”
Hoover: Product Redesigns Are Often a Trap That Won't Move Metrics
“When you do raise a lot of money and you feel like you have infinite runway you should treat it like you don't. And truthfully, there's some things that, that I prioritized on the team because I wanted it Myself, like some redesign work that we did, which rede…”
Hoover: At most 50% of products on Product Hunt are consumer
“People think that most of product hunt is actually consumer as well. It's probably, I don't know, 50% at most is consumer. There's a lot of B to B stuff on there.”
Hoover: Tech discovery communities cannot be easily replicated across other verticals
“I was a little bit naive, I think, in thinking that we could quickly replicate communities in these different verticals and the nature of even just game discovery is quite different than product and tech discovery.”
Hoover: Approaching ideas as side projects is far better than overthinking business models
“And when you put your frame of mind of like a side project, first you start to settle. Most people start to settle in, well, what would I want to build or what would I, what could I use? And it's just a lot better way to start. I think personally.”
Cannon: Authentic engagement on Hacker News and Product Hunt remains undervalued
“Just getting good at engaging with your community on HN and Product Hunt is really undervalued.”
Hoover: Product Hunt upvotes do not determine startup success
“The number of upvotes you get on product hunt honestly doesn't mean whether they're gonna be successful or not.”
Hoover: Podcast discovery dynamics do not fit software discovery platforms
“Discovering the way you consume podcasts is wildly different than you discover an app or a product. It's also very frequent. Like there's a new podcast every week or more than that. So like the dynamics didn't really work. With just shoving it into the product…”
Hoover: Active usage is undeniable proof for non-technical founders
“If you can demonstrate data like that, it's hard to argue. It's hard to say that, oh, actually, no, this isn't useful. If you're demonstrating that people are using your product, then that's ultimate proof.”
Dessaigne: Algolia founders manually coded Product Hunt's first search integration
“I remember when we implemented Algolia in Product Hunt, you know, Ryan, the founder, that was before Product Hunt became huge, and he didn't have, like, any resource to implement search himself, and so we remembered the Stripe story. We did it. Like, he gave u…”
Hoover: Andreessen Horowitz preemptively led Product Hunt's Series A during YC
“We raised a million before, like, going into YC before demo day, when we were targeting, like, 400 K, but we got great people around us, and then fast forward through demo day Marc Andreessen reached out kind of in the middle, and he'd been following it, and w…”
Hoover: Product Hunt Grew 50% Month-over-Month Leading Into YC Application
“We, if I'm not mistaken, I think we were like 50% month over month. And that's not counting like with hundred users in month one, but it was like over the course of a few months with some users.”
Hoover: Massive influx of new software products will be built by 2024
“In fact, in the next five years, we're going to see a ridiculous number of products being built, partly because it's more accessible, it's easier, you don't actually need any money to build anything.”
Hoover: Over half of Product Hunt's community is outside the US
“More than half the product and community is actually outside the U S”
Hoover: Product Hunt would not exist without his pre-built audience
“If I didn't have, you know, this first few hundred people willing to sign up that I had built that audience for over several years, I don't think Product Hunt would exist today.”
Hoover: Product Hunt started as a 20-minute email list setup
“So built this email list, sent it out, got a few hundred subscribers initially, and it took me 20 minutes to set up.”
Hoover: Casey Neistat used Product Hunt's Ship for Beme Panels
“Like Casey Neistat and his new app, they used it to start capturing interest for beam panels or new app that's coming out.”
Hoover: Manual Twitter outreach converted 80% of makers to join Product Hunt
“And so when we realized that I would every morning go on Twitter and like search for their Twitter username and say Hey Jill, your product is, is over here. People are talking about it. Do you want to join and answer questions? And like, 80% of the time they'd…”
Hoover: Product Hunt grew user visits 50% MoM in early months
“It was obviously still very small because it was pretty early days, but we were seeing about 50% month-over-month growth in total, like, top-line user visits. And that was consistent for the first, I don't know, two, three, four months.”
Hoover: Product Hunt quietly killed its podcast category
“We actually kind of quietly killed podcasts.”
Hoover: Ship is Product Hunt's first paid product since job listings
“So historically we've never really charged for anything. Outside of long, long time ago, once upon a time we did post for charge people for job postings, but then we stopped that to focus entirely on building the community and the audience. Now we're shifting …”
Hoover: Paris produces disproportionately design-centric tech products
“I think for whatever reason, Paris is very design centric in general. So you'll see a lot of design related or like beautiful looking products coming from Paris or France in general.”
Hoover: Product Hunt began as an unincorporated email list side project
“It started off as a side project and it was right between startups. I was leaving in another one and kind of tinkering and interviewing at other startups. Started product time. It started off as an email list. Got some traction there. That then turned into a w…”