The SECRETS to growing your company's social media

What's the secret sauce to growing your company's social media? We asked Jason Levin, Head of Growth at Product Hunt, about these questions: how his social presence helped land him the job, his strategy for engaging the Product Hunt community, and how it feels to build a brand mafia at your company, along with a specific example that you'll be able to follow along with. Jason, I want to ask you about the work that you're doing right now at Product Hunt. Product Hunt is this really big community. It's like, uh, it's a ranking board. It's a place that you launch products, places they get like ranked and shared and distributed, and it's got a great community behind it. Why did you decide to join Product Hunt? How did you get on their radar? What kind of work are you doing for them, uh, related to and along with like what you're, what you're already working on with Cyber Patterns and Meme Alerts and all the other stuff, cool stuff you got going on?

Yeah, so Product Hunt is the greatest game on the internet, I call it. Yeah, it's, you know, people are competing.

You're really good at like little taglines, by the way. Like, it's something else that I appreciate. Sorry to interrupt you, but like calling something the greatest game on the internet, that's, that's good. I like it.

This guy worked for Greg Eisenberg.

Greg is the one who introduced me to Ryan Hoover. Ryan was looking for some content people, uh, for, for his fund, Weekend Fund. Greg introduced me to Ryan. I had a call with Ryan. Ryan realized I'd be a better fit at Product Hunt than his VC fund. And so he introduced me to the team. I started freelancing with Product Hunt, and then I loved the team so much that I continued to like grow how much I love working with them. To answer the question, how do memes fit in? When I interviewed for Product Hunt, essentially like the person who was doing it before, not to throw any shade, but they hadn't replied to anybody in the Product Hunt community in like a year.

Oh dear.

They were just using it as a one-way channel.

Oh no.

Yeah, my immediate pitch was no, like, we are going to reply. We're going to have fun. We're going to make friends with our community. We're going to boost them up. We have 500,000 followers. Let's retweet some of our makers who are doing cool stuff. And they were all for that.

Sounds so simple when you say it that way. It's like, let's talk to our audience.

Whoops. Talk to our audience and support them. My mission was to help our, you know, Product Hunt makers make more money and also have fun and keep them going. So throughout this, I've seen people go from launching I remember actually, this is such a cool story. So this kid in India launched his first startup about like 6 months ago on Product Hunt. And I just— he was a really clever marketer, like also doing memes. I was like, oh, this, this guy's going to be huge one day. And he just made $5,000 last month off of his SaaS. You know, it's like 6 months later, I was like, this, this kid. And so like, I immediately commented, I was sending him messages from Product Hunt. We were talking like just very supportive, right? I think it's really just being like a real person from the brand account. That's really it. People want to talk to people. The Product Hunt logo is a cat. Like there needs to be some, you know, humanity behind that. Right.

Right.

And like when I send a message, I'm like, yo, it's I am Jason Levin to show the humanity behind it. You don't want to just like message them from, you know, whatever brand, like actually be a real human on the internet, even from a brand account. Memes are a big part of the mission there at Product Hunt, which is make people laugh as they're, as they're trying to build SaaS and make money and And it's also just like a huge part of the mission for engaging with the community and making people laugh, keeping them engaged at all times.

I think I could talk to you for 24 hours straight about how to behave as a brand account, like with this stuff, just the line of like, be a real person as a brand account. Like that right there is worth this episode in gold. I don't know if enough creators understand like what that actually like looks like and is, and you're doing it at Product Hunt right now.

A lot of it's inspired by what Beehive has done, seeing them really take off and how engaging they are with their users. They boost everybody up. And Beehive, similar to Product Hunt in the sense that people go on there to make money and grow and get more attention. That was a lot of my pitch was we're just going to do similar to Beehive, right? And shout out to their social team. They're absolutely killing it. It's like build up our creators, everybody on our team. We want them to have faces on the internet and our brand account should be like human, somebody that people look forward to seeing.

Yeah, it's one of the big benefits of having a lot large brand account. And I don't see people do it enough. And I do think that it's one of the real strengths that Beehive has is like, if I'm going to have tens of thousands of followers as a brand account, then like, how can I use that attention? How can I direct it to my users, to my customers, to the people that like I'm incentivized to help? And like even their company emails today, like, hey, here's this newsletter by this person. Like, you imagine like even if you're just somebody with 50 subscribers or 5 subscribers and someone like on the Beehive team like finds you and then promotes you in their weekly newsletter and their updates, like you're there for life. That goes for any brand. And anyone has the opportunity to do this 100%.

Like when I follow somebody from Product Hunt, they usually tweet a picture because they're so excited and like, oh my God, I made it. Like I'm now officially a Product Hunt maker. It's just the little things, right? People get so excited. That's also, you know, something I'm super passionate about is building that kind of creator mafia on the internet, like a brand mafia. Morning Brew, Beehive, Workweek, they've all done it very successfully. That's the next task is like it can't just be it can't just be the founder, but how do you build up this whole mafia of creators at your company? And it's what I'm thinking about a lot right now.

I call it the Barstoolification of creator businesses. There's a founder, there's like some main pieces, but they gotta be what, 50 deep on like personalities and people who are like acting like Barstool employees online. I'm not even like the biggest like Barstool guy. Like I listen to one of their shows. I can full well tell they have built a world of 50 people, probably more depending on like who's behind the scenes, that all act and behave in this stereotypical like Barstool way, right? So, but, but bringing that into like that knowledge creator space, I always think about that as a creator is like, how can we get 10 people in our orbit, whether it's people who work for us now or just creators who are very aligned, all push people towards like build a business you love with your content? How do we like find those people, grab those people, push those people, act like a some sort of collective? And you mentioned Beehive. One thing that I know they do, my friend Tommy Clark made a video about this, they shout out an employee at every Friday meeting of like, this employee jumped in on the most Twitter conversations.

Hmm.

I don't know if they have someone tracking it or if it's just like a vibes thing, but they amplify and support their team and like reward them. The fact that they like see their team doing this is just incredible to me.

Me and the fact that the founder does it. Tyler Dank, like, he responds to my DMs in 5 minutes, 10 minutes, right? Like, he's the founder of a company worth $100 million and he's, he's responding to DMs like all the time, helping me with support issues and stupid ideas that I have for the product. He's actually the reason why I switched over to Beehive because like, you know, I've been on there almost 3 years now. It's got to be founder-led, but everybody's got— everybody should be a creator and not just the marketing people. That's what a lot of people miss as well, is like if you run a SaaS, your engineers should be creators too, and your designers, because that's how you recruit even better engineers and designers is if they're writing blogs about dev tools, if they're writing, making tutorials about designs. Like think about Andrej Karpathy at OpenAI, right? He's got this giant YouTube channel and that brought so much alpha to OpenAI. Jam.dev, another company that I work with, our engineer like gives talks, he writes tweets, he writes blog posts about engineering, and that just brings in more engineers. We're hitting the point where basically everybody on a team should be creating content to some degree if you want to be maximizing your shareholder equity.

You'd never say that even like 3 years ago, 5 years ago, you'd never say that.

No, I would have thought it was just the marketing people. But now I really, after seeing it, I truly believe like everybody.