#50 - Rajiv Ayyangar: CEO of Product Hunt on 3 Tips to Launch on Product Hunt

I met Paul Graham outside in the atrium and we talked and then he personally invested in Tandem. And it was just this crazy awesome moment and he had some thoughts for us and I did a literal handshake deal with Paul Graham. It's a really cool energy.

How much did Paul Graham invest?

He invested $50K. Wow. And I think he wanted to invest more and we didn't have room.

Sup nerds, today I'm talking with the CEO of Product Hunt, aka my boss, Rajeev Iyengar. You're gonna hear tips from the man, the myth, the legend himself, Rajeev, about how to go to number 1 on Product Hunt. Rajeev has done it. He went viral, hit number 1, and then raised $7.5 million from Andreessen Horowitz and the father of Y Combinator, Paul Graham. You're gonna hear that story. You're gonna hear Rajeev's tips. You're gonna hear the behind the scenes of Y Combinator. You're gonna hear a lot of good stuff. Plus all the amazing things you're going to be able to look forward to in Product Hunt in the coming years. So get ready for this. Get ready for some juicy launch tips from the CEO of Product Hunt himself, Rajeev Iyengar. I have my boss on the podcast, which is pretty cool, gotta say, and pretty amazing thing to happen. What is YC actually like? Do you guys like just hang out and read Paul Graham essays all day or?

First of all, yeah, it's interesting. It's okay. So there are two things that happen each week. There are group office hours, so it's 6 startups in a small group with 3 dedicated partners. So it's way smaller than you might think, and it's a lot more intimate. And I remember every group office hour started with, what are you building? So you, you give your tagline, you give your one-liner. And you say it to everybody and then they give you really honest feedback on whether they understood it or not. That was almost every week until people started learning how to describe their product really well. So there are these office hours, you go through what the challenges are with each company. You get to see what, how people are navigating problems. So that happens, if I recall correctly, every week. And then there's also a group dinner or a section dinner, which is like larger, like maybe 50 startups or so. And usually there's a guest speaker and they get pretty pretty amazing speakers. So it's like Brian Chesky or like the Segment founders, and there's usually like a talk and then just open conversation afterwards. You can go up and talk to the speaker and that's— so these are like anchor points for the 3 months, but in between you are just going 120 miles an hour. You are, you're doing office hours if you need, like, regularly to get like very specific help on your startup. You are talking to everybody in your batch to get feedback, cuz everybody's trying to get feedback. You're going out and talking to customers, like whatever speed looks like for your type of product, you're just going as fast as you can. And the thing that everybody realizes is because Demo Day's coming up, which is this, this backstop of, of fundraising, it's like a moment that's created for you. Those 3 months are the highest leverage time, like maybe in your startup's life. So people are just trying to make magic happen as quickly as possible. It's really, it's really intense and like really exciting.

How do you make magic happen as quickly as possible? Just a lot of coffee or no sleep, or how does that happen?

People, yeah, people always ask me like, what did I take away from YC? And I think it's the one concept is velocity, but it's not necessarily a simple concept. Like it looks different for every type of company and every different phase. So if you're pre-product, velocity could look like talking, like doing deep interviews with a bunch of potential users to try and explore, hey, what are their pain points around remote work in our case or collaboration? And you're pushing and pulling and trying to figure out, are you solving the right problem? If you have a consumer company or a social app, probably speed looks like building something as quickly as humanly possible, launching it as quickly as humanly possible, seeing if it works or doesn't work, seeing what works or doesn't work, and then iterating on it and launching it again. If you have an enterprise company, if you're selling to businesses, probably stop even writing code. And just go out and try and sell this product before you build it and then build it. So speed looks different for every company in every stage, and you get this like really rich dataset on what it looks like.

Wow. And are you paired with people in similar, like, are B2B paired with B2B?

Generally, yeah, the groups are similar. So we were in a group of dev tools, like developer tools. And while we weren't strictly a dev tool, we were selling to a lot of you know, developer teams. And so they had similar types of problems.

And where are these office hours taking place?

I think they're in person now. They were in person for us and then they went remote during the pandemic and now Gary's brought it back in person. Wow.

And then talking about Demo Day, a lot of buzz around Demo Day. What is that actually and Where does it happen? What are you standing out there? There's just 30 people you're demoing for? Like, how, what's it like? Walk us through.

I haven't been to the latest Demo Day. I think it came back in person. And so it's starting to be more similar to what it was when we did it in 2019. When we did Demo Day, it was a huge stage and there were hundreds of investors. Like hundreds of investors were there. It was a crazy energy and it's a 2-minute pitch and we drilled that. I like, I could probably still say the pitch. It's, I've, I've got a YouTube video of it. I remember the one of the key lines was every company is a remote company, which seemed like a tall claim in 2019 and then just became true.

Yeah.

But it is crazy energy. And then after you pitch, there's the auditorium outside. Everybody's just talking with each other, right? There's just, it's just milling, like investors are meeting founders and like deals are getting done. Like I met Paul Graham outside in the atrium and we talked and then he personally invested in Tandem and it was just this crazy awesome moment and he had some thoughts for us and I did a, I did a literal handshake deal with Paul Graham. It's a really cool energy.

How much did Paul Graham invest?

He invested $50K.

Wow.

And I think he wanted to invest more and we didn't have room. So that's another thing with, that's another thing with Demo Day fundraising. It's, it's hard to get urgency and leverage as a founder when you're fundraising, right? If you don't have some sort of backstop, where investors know a whole bunch of investors are going to come in, it's just really hard to create urgency. You talk to an investor and they can say, maybe we don't have conviction yet, but keep us posted, maybe we'll get back to you. And it makes sense from their side. But as a founder, oh, you're not going to close the round, get back to building unless you have some sort of urgency. Demo Day provides that backstop, right? So there's one moment when all of the investors are looking at you and And because of that, a lot of rounds get closed or mostly closed before Demo Day. Yeah, so it's functionally a really interesting way to just amplify fundraising for founders and compress it so it's not taking up a ton of time and they can get back to building.

How much did you raise?

We raised $7.5 million, mostly led by Andreessen, which is a pretty unusual seed. And I think was, it was a really high seed for the time, but a confluence of just a bunch of stars aligned. And we also had a crazy traction on the Product Hunt launch.

Something I've thought about, how do you choose how much you want to raise? And can you raise too much or too little?

That's a good question. So fundraising is like a Maslowian hierarchy, like depending on how strong your company is in that round, you may have, you may not have the option to raise beyond a certain amount. So it's like very rare and lucky when you get the op— the opportunity to raise more than you absolutely need to get the business to the next milestone. How do you choose how much to raise? Um, it, everybody's got a different philosophy. I think one thing that's constant is you don't want to dilute the company too much. Right? You don't want to give too much of the company away because money is replenishable. You can make revenue and replenish your bank account. Equity is not really replenishable. There are things you can do, but it dilutes everybody else. So there's some equations there, and there's some, like, benchmarks where you just want to make sure the path ahead, given what you expect to do in terms of raising, is as clear as possible.

Yeah, it's just tricky. What benchmarks should founders have in mind of how much equity they should keep for themselves versus diluting for investors?

It's, let's see. So the target's always moving. So my benchmarks may be a little bit out of date. I think for, for companies right now, I'm seeing like raise a couple million on maybe a 10 to 20 million post valuation. So you're diluting for your seed or pre-seed, maybe 15, 10, somewhere between 10 and 20%. So of course, like 10% is better for the founder. 20% is getting like pretty high to dilute for a seed. So you want it to be a bigger round, right? Basically, if you dilute more, you want to have more cash so you can get further and then raise at a higher valuation the next round. So there's some flexibility there.

Interesting. Okay. And could you walk us through the YC SAFE? What is that? Why does everybody talk about it?

A SAFE is a Simple Agreement for Future Equity. And it's a really simple legal document that lets you invest money and it converts to equity in the next price round, but it, but it keeps things simple. You don't have to set the price necessarily. Um, and the reason, so the reason you do a SAFE versus a priced round is like complexity and cost. For a priced round where you're setting an actual valuation for the company, one, it's gonna cost like $100K in legal fees, which generally you have to pay. Not trivial. Two, there's a lot of negotiation that goes into that. Like, none of these deals are totally standard, and that's partly why the legal fees. And three, you need a lead, somebody who's going to take 50% or more, who will set the price. And so the dynamics of that are really hard. You need to— you basically can't take in any money until you find a lead. If you don't find a lead, you're screwed. Like, that, that round falls apart. It's a really scary thing to do. It's what we ended up doing because we were raising a larger amount. It also typically comes with giving up some control of the board because that lead investor is going to want a board seat. Now, SAFE keeps everything really simple. With a SAFE, you just take money and there's an agreement for future equity. You can close them as they come. For example, let's say you, you want to raise $2 million at $15 million post valuation. You can close $2 million. And then if there's more interest, you can say, okay, we'll raise another million, but that valuation is going to be at like $20 or $25 because we don't want to dilute as much. And then you can close more people. And each time you close, they just sign it. Money's in the bank. It's like very little legal fees or no legal fees. Um, the SAFE has a really interesting—

I'm sorry.

Oh yeah. The SAFE has a really interesting feature where there's a clause that says if the SAFE is edited, it's invalid. All SAFEs are going to be standard.

Wow. And you just do another SAFE every time or just one SAFE?

The SAFE is just the standard document for each investor. Each investor will sign a SAFE note and then those SAFEs will convert to equity down the line when you raise a priced round.

Okay. Wow. And that's just free to do. You just download it from YC.

Yeah, the YC Safe is on the website and it's the standard, it's the standard way that like seed and pre-seed investments get made.

Founders, if you're listening to this, make sure you're using the Safe. Wow, that's wild to think about. And did you— yeah.

Oh, sorry. I got to describe like why the Safe is so great. Before the Safe, like the first, the first company we started, we did on convertible notes. This was, it's basically a loan in exchange for equity in the future. So somebody like took loan, a loan structure and adapted it to startup equity. So it mostly works like a SAFE, but there's some really annoying things like interest, which gets really annoying to calculate. And then it's a loan. So it's just legally not as friendly for startups and doesn't make as much sense for startup fundraising, because it's like an older vehicle.

So for the SAFE, sorry to dive in on this, would I set— the SAFE is unpriced, right?

The SAFE, there is a valuation cap, which operates a little bit like a— an implied price.

And I could send a different valuation cap to Investor 1, who's got a bigger fancy name, send a lower valuation, maybe. So whatever. Or, and then send a different valuation to a different investor, potentially.

You could. Generally, yeah, generally you want to keep— generally you don't— you want things to be relatively equitable. Sometimes people will do an earlier round. Usually earlier rounds are priced lower than later rounds because the earlier you're investing. Yeah.

Okay. All right. Interesting. Okay. That makes sense. And were you, did you just have to file an S corp beforehand or did you need to do all that stuff?

C corp usually.

C corp. Okay.

Yeah. Delaware C corp is pretty standard.

Okay. All right. Interesting. All right. So jumping into Product Hunt stuff. I have always wanted to know the answers to that stuff and it always confuses me. But let's jump into Product Hunt. So what products do you want to see on Product Hunt in 2024 and beyond?

I want to see products that are solving interesting problems, whether it's like how we connect with each other socially, whether it's how we work, every— anything about how we work and how we think, whether it's like business problems, like company problems, or just help us express ourselves. Like just, yeah, I think like, yeah, maybe that's the simplest thing I could say, solving interesting problems. I love it.

I love it. Solve interesting problems and you'll never go out of style and do interesting stuff. Do cool shit and you just meet cool people.

Yeah. And interesting problem. There's so many interesting problems in every sector. So like whatever you're interested in, there's probably something there that's like really compelling to the community. And I think part of launching on Product Hunt is like just validating that this is a pain point, we're going to do this thing, Request for Startups, where we map out what we see as like the biggest pain points in various sectors and what some people in our community see as the biggest pain points. So that might be a place to start. So look for that coming up.

Yeah, look for that for sure. We were at the AI demo a couple nights ago in SF and it was really interesting. We watched a guy named Vidy. I'm not sure his last name, Vidy, and he showed us a product called Trace. And I thought it was the coolest thing. Basically a customizable SwiftUI build your own app. And it's, his goal was to let self-expression, let software be self-expression. And I love that. Software is very scary to a lot of non-coders to make. So the idea of you wanna express yourself with weird software and add some weird stuff going on. All right, this is a lot more self-expressible than paint-by-numbers Squarespace, right? I, I don't know. I, I thought that was a really interesting problem. That's why I said I was so bullish on him. Um, who knows if that product will succeed or if he'll pivot and do something, but I'm, I'm definitely bullish on him. I'm curious, what are your thoughts on AI right now? We were at dinner as well. Mike, our CTO, said the more I see these AI products, the less I'm impressed.

I think I was saying the opposite, like the more I see AI products, the more optimistic I am. Yeah, I think there's a lot of hype. The hype-to-substance ratio is high. Like, for those of us who were in crypto in the last wave or the wave before, similar thing. Hype-to-substance, very high, right? So it can feel similar, but I really like to try and ignore the hype and focus on the substance, and the substance is really interesting. Like, The thing that's very true about AI now is that the developer infrastructure is far ahead of like end applications. There's a lot of things about the UX and just how to make this practical and plugged into our, our life that aren't really figured out. And every week there are new models and new frameworks being built up. So developers are getting more and more powerful. And I think that this year we're going to see the end applications catch up. I think we're going to start to see that on Product Hunt. We saw a little taste of it at the AI night. I think that one of the things that may be confusing to a lot of people is just how it's like what a good AI-powered product is very subjective or people have different opinions on it. For example, you were really into Trace, which lets you generate mobile apps. Um, and I think you weren't as into BestEver, which lets you generate ads in different formats. I, I've talked to, uh, a couple like technical founders who were there and said by far BestEver was their favorite product and they weren't as technically impressed. They weren't as impressed with Trace. I think part of it is like ads, go-to-market, marketing, that's your world. Like your skills are higher, but for technical, like technical founders who aren't in that world, they could just see how Trace, how, sorry, BestEver would be really valuable to them now. And they could appreciate like the product format there. And they thought like quality of ads seems pretty good right now and it'll get even better. And then vice versa, like on, if you know how to build mobile apps, Maybe you can't yet see the value of Trace because your bar is a lot higher. It's going to catch up. And I think that difference in judgment over what's a good product and the fact that it's so variable is just a sign of applications powered by AI being early.

Yes. I love that comparison. I'm so impressed by AI artwork. Because I'm okay at Photoshop, but I can't make— I can't sketch, I can't draw, I can't do anything from scratch. I'm not impressed by ChatGPT because I write all day and I'm a good writer, but I, I can't draw. And so I'm just so impressed by DALL-E and Midjourney and stuff and all the video stuff. Like, that to me is really impressive. But then BestEverAI, I make ads. I get paid to make ads sometimes, so it's, I'm not really impressed. So that's a really very good framework. And I wonder if there's, if I was a founder, I was like, what are people really bad at? And then focus on that as a problem to solve. That's not a bad way to think about it.

Yeah, it's not a bad way. And, and also like another thing, this goes back to what we've talked about in the past, which is how. Startups are trajectories, not points in time. So each of the demos, you're— what they're promising to do or what they're pitching is not just this product, but the way it will improve. Like the ads will get better, this will get better, and this is the direction we're going. And one way to understand that is to see the product. Another way to understand that is to know who they're building for. Are they building for marketing teams or are they building for like early founders or early founding teams where you've got a bunch of generalists and they need like tools to cover the marketing function?

Yeah. Yeah. I love the idea of choosing an app for the trajectory, cuz I think I'm one of those people that does that. Like I chose, I've been on Beehive for almost 3 years and way before they were hot. And I chose them because of the team and I chose them because I really liked the way that the product was looking and they have not let me down and I'm so appreciative. I, I put the team on my back because I've, I like rep them everywhere because I love it and they haven't let me down. And I think that's really important for founders to keep in mind is you got people counting on you. You gotta, you gotta do this. I love it. So I've had other products. Yeah. I've had other products like where you try, you think you see the trajectory, but then the founders, they don't follow through. And it's so sad. It's as, let me buy your product. Let me edit it. Let me fix it. I want this. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's so cool to see products evolve from very early on. One, one that really stands out to me just because I was just using the tool and this is not an ad. Is Hex. So Hex is like a collaborative notebook for like data scientists. I used to be a data scientist and when Hex like first came out with their v0, I'd talked with Barry. So I, I was like an early user. It was rough, but it got the job done and it was like really interesting. And then fast forward, that was with my last startup. Fast forward now, we like recently started using it at Product Hunt. And I'm just like in, I'm just really gratified by where they've come. They've come so far. It's when I used it in the early days, you could see this laser beam pointed out into the sky. And then now you go in, it's not just for data scientists. You could just write lightweight SQL. You can be completely not data literate and still get a ton of value out of it. Like the design's great. It's really powerful. Like. Damn. Yeah, they delivered on that. You do these cycles of talking to users, building, seeing what's broken, seeing what sucks about your product, do it again. It's like each rep is not magic, but you compound that. If you make the product 1% better, like every week, every month, like it compounds and then it starts to feel like magic over time.

That's what's been so cool about Beehive. They've been launching every single week, a new feature. Every single week and you just see their people go nuts. Like when they launch their feature on a Wednesday or whatever, the Beehive community is tweeting underneath. You don't see that really anywhere else for people going nuts over a feature, maybe like Notion, but it is crazy. The movement and the excitement about just new features every week. I love it. And speaking of new features, we've got new features at Product Hunt. We're working on really awesome stuff. We got shoutouts, we're also fixing the spam issue hard. It's already improving, like you said. And I know you've been feeling a little more relaxed not having to deal with spam every day, which is a nice feeling and something the community has talked a lot about already. I've seen them talk about. Curious, what are you thinking about on product features, on shoutouts, and where we go from there?

I think shoutouts are really interesting because they show what's behind the products that people are making. And yeah, I think like people can expect some really interesting views on what's behind the products that are being built. We're going to launch like a special place for shoutouts. So you can see the top apps people are using, different ways of following the product graph, like which products are built on other products. I think that's going to be really exciting. And yeah, also really just stoked for a lot of events. Throw it back to you, like, what should people look for events?

Very exciting. So coming up early in May, we're going to be throwing meetups literally all around the world, dozens to maybe even 100 cities. And these are going to be popping off and we will be at some of them. Our team will be at some of them, but it will be community-led. Because the Product Hunt community is massive and very powerful and very ambitious and loves the Product Hunt community and they're going to do it and it's going to be awesome. And so that is what I would look forward to, is coming through to some events, meeting other builders and coming up with ideas together. And then as well as we're going to be throwing small events too in SF and New York. We're going to be throwing, really trying to do curated style events of high-quality builders, and I'm really excited for that. So I'm really excited for just building up the community of talking to people online. People are just— I don't know how to describe it. I said this the other day, but like, the more AI girlfriend— the more AI girlfriend apps I see launching, the more bullish I am on IRL community. People need community. They need it. And if you're a founder, it's like, lonely, if you're a creator, it can be very lonely too. And you want to be around people who get you. And that's what I love about Product Hunt and what I got immediately talking to the team and meeting you guys is like, just people who get making stuff on the internet. And that is a lot of what their life is around is just making cool stuff. And it's a value, it's a value, it's a habit, it's part of them. So Yeah, that was a little bit of a rant, but it's okay. Get ready to come to some cool events and it won't just be in early May. We're going to be throwing events every month in a lot of cities, so it's going to be a lot of fun.

Hell yeah.

Yeah. And then on, as well as like on the social aspect, social media aspect, we are building up a fun media machine where this thing is going to be amazing. You're going to be hearing from both of us quite a lot. And something that we're focusing on is launch education. I ran a survey recently, actually, on Twitter. I think over 700 people voted. I asked, what is harder, making or launching? Most people voted launching. And that was great feedback. It was like, all right, we need to be showing how to launch and showing how to market. How do you actually like get people trying your product? How do you get first on Product Hunt? We're going to be interviewing makers. We're going to be showing We're gonna be like, I'm gonna be going behind the scenes with like marketers, like I do every week on here and in my newsletter. Like we're gonna be going through all this stuff, talking about community tactics. How do you build on Twitter? How do you build in public? Like we're gonna be going through all that on YouTube videos, on Instagram, TikTok, wherever, on Twitter, and giving people just so much free value and education where they're gonna, they're, the launch quality on Product Hunt is gonna get better because of this. and I'm convinced of that. Really excited for that. It's just the high density of startups, quality, high quality startups is like the leaderboard is just gonna get better. Like really excited in the next 6 to 12, 18 months, the leaderboard is just gonna get better and better. I'm calling it right now. Calling my shot.

Yeah. Hell yeah. The, the leaderboard is like this, it's like this arena where the top startups launching that day and the top indie makers duke it out to see what's the most competitive. Telling. And I think one of the things we're gonna do, it's already really competitive, but the one of the things we're gonna do is a series of events, some tools you'll see in the launch flow that are just gonna help everybody raise their game. Cause then everybody wins. I think like the thing that was magic for me in my last startup about Product Hunt is it forced us to raise our game. Like none of us were marketers, none of us knew how to position. And it forced us to raise our game and like condense what we were building into a really crisp positioning statement that then allowed us to grow. And I think that's, that's what Product Hunt does for so many startups.

So you went viral, hit number 1 on Product Hunt, then raised a $7.5 million round for your company. What tips do you have on launching on Product Hunt?

You need a really crisp tagline. You need something that's very clear, and compelling. The main way I see people messing this up is they make it really grand. And startups are a lot about fear. We're afraid that our startup idea sounds too small, so we make it really big, and then we end up with a platform that leverages AI to do blah, right? Nobody knows what a platform is. I have no idea. And here's the thing, you cannot go viral if I don't understand what your product is. I can't tell a friend. They can't tell a friend. So this is something that I think a lot of people forget. It's not just about compelling, it's gotta be really clear. So make a really clear and compelling tagline, test the shit out of it. Go to coffee shops. This is what we used to do. You go to a coffee shop, you wait for people to order coffee. When they order the coffee, they're gonna move over to wait for it. They take out their phone as they're taking out their phone. You go, hey, what do you think about this? You can Gasp for feedback on UI. Maybe this works better in San Francisco than other places, but we did a ton of coffee shop testing. So test your tagline. That's number one. Two, in the video, show the UI, show what you're building. Like a Loom where you're talking over the video works really great. We've got a new feature coming out where you can do an arcade demo or a screen space demo where you have this like interactive, you UI, so you can show people what the app feels like. But yeah, show the UI in your video. And number 3, this is the new feature we launched, add your shoutouts. So shoutouts are 3, are up to 3 products that were indispensable in building it and like why you love them. One, it just spreads the love. Two, it shows a little bit about the craft and care that went into your product. And three, it just spreads the good vibes in the community.

Yeah, and it adds the viral potential. Adding shoutouts into your product actually can help you go viral and get you more distribution because the big products that you shout out might go retweet you. Mr., uh, Vercel, let's say I shout out Vercel and Guillaume, right? Guillermo, the CEO of Vercel, he has 250,000 followers. If you give a nice shoutout, he hits you with a comment, a retweet. Hey, that's a great connection down the line. and hey, might be some awesome distribution too. So there's a little bit of gamification there with the shoutouts too, is the shoutouts can help you get more distribution. So make sure you're shouting out products.

Secret pro tip here.

Secret pro tip. Exactly. And if you want to shout out specific people, I've heard that's a little bit of savage too. That's cool.

Yeah.

Uh, I'm really excited for The Product Hunt, the graph that we're building, the knowledge, the knowledge graph. And do you remember Roam? Do you remember that app? Roam?

Yeah, totally. The note-taking app.

Yeah. And remember how it was like, like dots everywhere? You could almost see the graph if you click on the knowledge graph.

Yeah.

We're going to have that basically. I don't know if we're going to have that on the website. That's up to you guys and Mike and engineers, but that is what is going to be going on in the brain of the of the product kitty in the background is this giant graph of who built what, how is everything connected. And it's going to be magical. It's going to be really good information.

Product Hunt is a lot about bringing people who are outside tech into tech. And like, the thing I love about the graph is it starts to help you as a new builder figure out what you should be using. If you're really well connected in tech. Often you text your friends, like you text your friends at different, at a company that you respect and ask, what are you using for this? What should I use for this? And that's great if you have a network. If you don't have a network, there isn't like a place where you can go to find out what the coolest companies are using. And that's what we're building with Shoutouts.

It's going to be fantastic. I know for me personally, I had no connections to tech prior to Twitter. And so I wish that I had something like this that was like this little secret database of what people were using, the best tools. And what's cool is it's so verifiable because which tools are being used to build stuff. It's pretty fantastic. Yeah, I'm very excited. Also, I want to say this while we're on here. We just got a NVIDIA sponsorship. Did you hear about this? You heard about this?

No.

Yeah, Stephanie just messaged us yesterday or this morning. We got a— we locked in NVIDIA. That's insane.

Sick.

That's pretty cool. Mr., Mr. Jason Levin in his leather jacket. We might, might be locking in that sponsorship right now, which is pretty fantastic, I think, for future of Product Hunt advertising, newsletters, all that stuff is, yeah, NVIDIA is top of the top. So I'm pretty happy for us. Pretty cool.

Product Hunt's the place where all the startups launch, right? It's that default place where you launch. So. It's, yeah, it's pretty cool to see people like so many awesome companies, like wanting to partner on events. Shout out to, to gen.dev and Mercury for partnering in that event the other night. It's just a good energy.

100%. And I think what's cool also about Product Hunt, which we've talked a lot about, it's everybody from the indie hackers to VC backed with millions in the bank. And we're all here. We're all hanging out. We're all just building stuff. Like yesterday or the other day, we had a giant builder, the OpenUI guy, I think you were talking about, who's like very successful already.

OpenUI.

Yeah.

He's one of the founders of Weights and Biases, which is like one of the most important AI infra companies right now. They're a very well-established company. And one of the founders built this project for himself. You can describe the UI and it builds it. And it's just a side project. He didn't put a lot of marketing into it. He launched on Product Hunt. I think he got number 2. It was just, really resonated. And also on the leaderboard, and I think the top 10, like still pretty competitive, was Frame.io, like video management workflows and like creative management in general. And they launched a huge update. No pixel was the same as their previous app. And this was their first big launch since getting acquired by Adobe for like over a billion dollars. And the founder launched it. He was there in the comments. And so just one-man builders or one-person builders to huge companies, everybody's launching and that's what keeps it exciting. And we get a lot of comments on like, hey, we should, we should have a separate arena for like indie hackers or startups or like later stage companies. And I just gotta talk about this a little bit because I think the fact that everybody's in one arena is the strength. And here's the thing that nobody understands. Everybody you talk to thinks the game is stacked against them. Indie hackers think, oh, it's hard for us versus venture-funded startups think like startups think, oh, it's hard for us versus the more established later stage companies. And the later stage companies are like, I don't know if I wanna launch because It takes a lot to make an innovative update and these small startups are moving so fast, launching something so exciting. Look, everybody's got it hard, but it's not, it's not just you. Like the, I think the, like the fact that it's hard for everybody is what makes it worth launching on and what it's, what makes the leaderboard valuable. Like one thing that everybody should do is look at the bottom of the leaderboard because even the bottom of the leaderboard on any given day gets a lot of interesting comments and engagement, and they're often really interesting apps, maybe not as like broad appeal, but they're really interesting, useful apps in different categories. So the whole leaderboard's awesome. And yeah, I think it's just gonna get better over the next year.

100%. It's gonna keep getting better. We're gonna make sure of that. And a high density of just very cool, crazy ideas and startups. Personally, I always root for the indie hacker, my scrappy self. I'm rooting for the underdog. And I love it when I see an underdog at like number 2. I saw that the other day, this guy, Abhishek, I think his name is, he— wait for it. I was showing you the other day, like a waitlist, random little app, but he was doing this like meme marketing and silly, took him a dollar to make, $2 on the video editor or whatever, and got number 2. And this was his first launch. It was so cool to see. It was like, that's awesome. And he scrappy. So if you're an indie hacker, yeah, don't worry. I know you're competing against the big guys, big VCs, but you, You just gotta work hard. That's it. You just gotta be scrappy and build up your community and, and be scrappier and hustle harder. That's, that's really it. I think this was, this was everything. This was a lot of fun.

This is awesome. Yeah. Great chatting with you.

All right, cool.