Going From Product to Investor - with Product Hunt Founder Ryan Hoover

All right, looks like people are starting to come in.

Cool, cool. Do we have chat enabled or are we gonna take that risk? I don't know.

Yeah, it should be, actually, while people are trickling in, I guess the fun game that we all like to play is, like, if people want to comment where you are logging in from, that would be awesome. Thank you all for joining.

And the person who lives the furthest wins away from. From me in Miami.

Oh, we should.

I know what you win.

We should do like a swag game someday of that.

Yeah. Well, we have people. Tel Aviv, Amsterdam, like that. That's pretty far from me. And you are you. Are you Bay Area right now, Elizabeth?

I am, yeah.

Nice.

So, yeah, I guess Tel Aviv might be winning so far.

Yeah. There we go. We got Washington and la. I do miss parts of la. I used to live in la, for those that don't know, for a couple years. It's nice.

Yeah. Actually, when you were in la, were you by the beach or. Not really.

No, I was in Hollywood Hills area.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, Venice. Venice. And the beach area is like a totally different city. I feel like in Hollywood, also, from a travel perspective, it feels like a very different city too. It's a long ways.

Yeah. The first time I went to LA and I had a bunch of meetings and some were downtown somewhere in the Venice area. And I had. I just had no idea how long it would take to go from one place to the next, so I never did that again.

Yeah, it's actually one of the. I know I'm totally going off on a tangent here, but this is one of the biggest challenges with LA tech scene is it's so scattered and it doesn't have the density and the serendipity of San Francisco, where you walk out, you know, a few blocks and there's a meetup or there's an event or there's someone else in tech. And I found that very difficult, you know, to build more of like, serendipity in tech being in la.

Oh, interesting. Okay.

Huh.

Well, welcome, everybody. I guess people are starting to trickle in. We had over 200 people register and it looks like, well, we're playing this little game of like, who's logging in from the furthest place away from Ryan. So that might be right now, Irfan from Bangladesh and. But we'll see, we'll see. This game could still be won by somebody else.

Honor system, no lies. Gotta be truthful.

All right, well, we will get into sort of the meat of this in the. In the next couple of minutes. But, you know, I think in the meantime, we're just sort of chit chatting and shooting the breeze, I guess. What, what's. What's top of mind for you in 2023, Ryan?

What is top of mind? I don't know. I'm loving not to talk about location and weather, but loving Miami right now. It's just beautiful in the winter, but I found that being in nice weather just gives me more energy and, I don't know, more positivity. But more on topic, what is on my mind? I don't know. It's interesting to see the market and how different it is from even 12 months ago, 18 months ago. And I was talking to someone earlier today about this, and in some ways it's like short term painful, long term good for, I think, a lot of markets, both investors and perhaps founders, because it is harder to raise for your average founder right now compared to 18 months ago. But you have a lot more talent to recruit from. Theoretically. You have more believers on the investing side and the team side. Maybe people are more committed if they join your company or invest in your company. So there's a lot of optimism I think, that I have, even though, you know, there's layoffs and, you know, a lot of people are struggling to raise, but that's kind of where my mind's at.

Okay, well, I'm sure we'll get into a lot of that in a second, so why don't we go ahead and get started? I think, you know, for everyone, this is an AMA format, as in you can literally ask Ryan any question you want, and I'll help moderate those. But I think as we warm up, I'll kick it off with some questions. And I think before we even dig into some questions, would love to just do some quick intros. So actually, Ryan, I think many people already know you, but would love to just sort of officially kick this off with your intro. Like, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Yeah. So where do I. Yeah, I'll give you the quick version. Grew up in Oregon to entrepreneurial parents. So I learned a lot from my parents, particularly my dad, around, like, entrepreneurship, and just really enjoyed the idea of like building basically solving problems or building a thing that people liked and used and hopefully paid for. And the most motivating thing, frankly for me was this realization that you could actually make money but not selling your time. Like you could create a thing and then you could make. And it wasn't even about making a lot of money. It was just like, oh, I don't get paid by the hour. Like, basically my income is based on my theoretic market value creation or whatever you want to describe it as. So anyway, I always kind of enjoyed entrepreneurship and fast forward. My first career in tech was in the video game industry and product management and well, technically it was first marketing and then I fell into product management. Had no idea what I was doing, as a lot of people do in their first full time career, and learned a lot. And then, you know, in 2013 started Product Hunt, primarily driven by my interest in technology. I always loved discovering products. I loved community building, I love building, you know, in general, and spent a lot of my career, you know, seven years as CEO of Product Hunt through an acquisition, some rounds, and then started weekend fund back in 2017 to invest in early stage tech.

Yeah, and I think we met even like years ago, way before you even started Product Hunt. And so we'll kind of dig into that in some of the questions, but I think let's just kind of kick us off. You know, I think many of you think many of the folks in this audience think of you as like, you know, Mr. Product Hunt or Mr. Product. Like, you know a lot about what makes for a great product. You've seen what does well on product hunt, etc. And I think that's something that's always sort of top of mind for many builders. Like, how do you kind of assess, like what makes for a good product? Is it, you know, especially at a startup when things are not, you know, fully baked necessarily, like, how, how do you think about, I don't know, creating a great product when you just have maybe one or two people?

Yeah, I mean, fundamentally a product is a solution to a problem at its core. And so I think it's useful as like sophisticated as like we like to think we are. Sometimes it's useful like ground yourself and be like, okay, what problem am I solving and for whom? And my dad always had this saying it was like, find the need and fill it. It was like this, this phrase that he had that I just always appreciated. It was like, oh, okay, that's, that's kind of the core of entrepreneurship and I think products in general. Um, so I think that's a good place to ground yourself. I mean, what makes for a good product is, is like, I mean it is solving a problem and a need, but it's also positioning it in the user's mind. So there, there's an aspect of like, product is one thing, but you kind of have to get a lot of the Other pieces right too, to be successful. So the old classic is like theoretically you could build the best product in the world, but if no one knows about it, there's no distribution. If it doesn't resonate with people, they won't try it and it just won't go anywhere. And so in some ways like building a good product kind of, I think requires more of a holistic perspective of like who you're building for, how does it position in their mind, what are they doing right now to solve their problems and how do you like insert yourself into that, maybe decision criteria or workflow. And so it's kind of like you need a bit of marketing perspective, writing perspective, and then certainly need, you know, depending what you're building, the ability to actually build it. So in some ways building just a good product isn't sufficient in many ways. But yeah, at the end of the day, like at its simplest, like foundational level, it's about solving like a real need for a very specific customer or.

User in the beginning and to ground that into something very concrete. Actually, can you talk a bit about how product hunt evolved? Like what did day one look like in trying to solve the problem that you were trying to solve? And then obviously we all know what it looks like today, but how did you kind of evolve to get to where we are today?

The kind of funny thing is there's certain products in this world that don't. They've evolved quite a bit and they mature quite a bit, but they actually aren't too different from how they started. So I'll talk about product in a second, but let's use Twitter as an example that everybody knows. Twitter obviously started off as text based like 140 character messaging and you broadcast to many followers. And since then they've introduced a lot of things like retweets and media polls and a lot of these other features and they're all valuable and useful and everything. But at its core Twitter is still kind of the same, still the same product. If you removed all those features and it was just text based broadcasting with a follower model, you get most of the same value that you get today, which is kind of crazy. So almost like sometimes products don't require a lot of things. It's like having more features, more things don't necessarily make it better in all cases. Now that's not necessarily true for everything. Like let's take Airtable, which is like the exact opposite. Like that's a beast of a product that took many years to build and get to a scale where it's like sufficient I suppose for a lot of customers and users. So I don't believe in absolute sometimes when I talk about these things. But on the product inside we in the very beginning was a newsletter so it wasn't even a community or a site but it was just a newsletter of products that me and friends found and you know I it was motivated to explore what people were creating. I wanted a single list of cool new things that were were there every day and that was like that that was the mvp. And from there we built the site which again kind of similar to the Twitter comparison like Product Hunt. The site is actually very similar to what it was in its like MVP state. It was a list of postings that were organized by date like a daily leaderboard of sorts with upvotes and comments and of course we added a lot of things since then like dedicated product pages and at user mentioned.