Interview with Ryan Hoover, Founder of Product Hunt

Today we're joined by Ryan Hoover, founder of Product Hunt and investor at the weekend fund for our first episode. It's only fitting. Hey, Ryan.

What's up, everybody?

How do you like to frame Product Hunt in its current form?

So Product Hunt is a place to discover what's new and cool in tech and also launch your new product, startup or company to the world.

Okay, awesome. And launching on Product Hunt has become a true milestone for founders. The platform's votes and reviews can be crucial feedback for teams, and then the reach potential can. Can be killer for initial acquisition. It's epic, but let's get into a few questions about the journey.

Let's do it.

So ideas are great, but execution is, of course, 90% of the battle. I remember, like, growing up watching Shark Tank. I'd be like, oh, my God, I had that idea last year. But, girl, that ain't shit. What was that initial idea that sparked for you? And then how did you prove its viability?

So the original idea for product was quite simple. I, as a. At the time, this is back in 2013, actually, I was a product manager. My job was essentially to play with products, explore products. I love technology. I've always been interested in technology and what's new. And I would browse the App Store, I'd browse Angellist, I would look at new company landing pages. I would just try to understand what are people building and how do these products work. And what I realized is it took a lot of hunting, a lot of hunting around the web to find all these cool apps or products out there. And what I really wanted was just a single list of, here's what launched today. Here's what's new and cool and interesting and worth checking out. So the original idea was an email list because I was like, well, you need a retention hook and an email, which is quite an easy thing to start with. And that was. Was really the seed of product. That's what started everything.

Even as a content creator, I often feel the pressure to innovate within my work. It's kind of like a distinct feeling that comes over me. I'm like, all right, I'm ready to move on. At what point did you realize that it was time to pivot from being solely an email list and what were some of your immediate iterations?

So email is a great start, but obviously email is a broadcast mechanism. It's not a way to build community. There's no way for community members or users to interact with each other. There was no way for people to really have much of a say in the curation side of things. There was no way to have comments, discussion with the maker, discussion with other people who are excited about technology. So it's very obvious that we needed to build some sort of web app or some sort of interface for people to contribute. And what we really did is model it. After Reddit, you know, we looked at, okay, what are the mechanisms for curation and community discussion and how do we, you know, not reinvent the wheel? How do we just borrow from what seems to be working and apply it in our own way? And so a lot of the design was very simple. It was just a simple Heroku app. Nathan Bashaw and I worked on it early on and it was, I think over like a five day Thanksgiving break that the first version of the web app came together. And it was a great start. It grew quickly from there and it was very clear that people wanted to participate. There was a hole in the tech ecosystem for this type of content, this type of community interaction.

All right, this is something I'm really fascinated by, so I'm going to go on a bit of a tangent. But hand in hand with iterations is feedback and just human nature changes can initially make people feel very uncomfortable. There have been countless instances of digital first companies getting, you know, negative noise around a product update. The company then pushes through for varying durations of time and ultimately the users actually end up loving the update in the long run. There's also the flip side of the coin. If you push through user feedback, that could be really bad as well. So how do you assess if user feedback should be executed on in the short term or if it's worth testing the long game?

Okay, so the beauty and the awesome part about building a community based product is you get a lot of feedback. People have an opinion, especially if it's for technology kind of early adopters. And we get a lot of it. We've gotten tons of feedback, tons of ideas from the community and, and some of our best and most adopted features have really been either direct feedback or actions. What are people trying to do? So early on there were a bunch of, I would say, nascent kind of behaviors or emergent behaviors that we built for the most obvious and arguably one of the most important dynamics was the maker badges or maker associations. And what I mean by that is when people posted the product on Product Hunt, in the beginning it was users posting these products. What happened is it started driving traffic to the landing pages to the websites of these makers and of these founders. They noticed that they came to Product Hunt and said, hey, I made this product. One, as a means to say, like, hey, I'm the maker, I'm proud of what I made, and two, to solicit feedback and take questions. And so we realized this and it's a very obvious feature really in hindsight, but we added a maker badge to associate and identify those makers. Now that doesn't seem like that big of a deal, but what's really cool is it starts to build a graph, starts to build a graph of the makers and the people that are interested in this product, the upvoters and the community itself. And it's really been a core part of product from the beginning. It's kind of shifted more towards a launchpad, more towards a place to support, you know, makers from 16 year old in India that, you know, learn to code on his own, you know, watching YouTube videos, to big companies like Zoom and others, you know, launching the new products to the world. And so a lot of the feedback that we've gotten has been largely driven by those actions, by those nascent or emergent behaviors. And when it comes to the verbal feedback that we get from people, we get a lot of it. Obviously we don't build everything that people ask for. And the trick for us is largely thinking through one, does this align with where we're going? And two, what are the trade offs? How does this impact the system? And when I say system, when you're building community software or social software, it's a really complex, largely nuanced game that you're playing. Meaning one small change can have a massive impact in how the system works itself. So going back to the maker badges component, what that unlocked was some really cool things. It allowed us to notify the followers of those makers when they launched a product. It allowed us to create more of an identity on Product Hunt for those that are making and launching products. So your profile now shows what you made and so it actually unlocks a lot of really cool incentives and rewards for people to participate in the Product hunt ecosystem. That didn't exist before that feature was implemented. And so those are the things that we have to think through now. There are features you can build that can actually have a detrimental impact in the experience. One mistake we made at one point was actually implementing a messaging system, a one on one messaging kind of DM system, which seems like a useful feature. It was driven by emergent behavior, where people were in the comments, messaging, you know, publicly saying, can you message me on Twitter? Can you send me an email? Here's my address. And so there was a desire to connect. However, what happened is it started to be abused and people started spamming each other and it actually created a net negative impact in the ecosystem. And so we killed it, we killed that feature. So we're not right, you know, a lot of the time and even the feedback and requests that we get from users is sometimes, well, it just needs to be fully thought through, especially in these types of community or social systems.

My last question, Community has become sort of a buzzword over the past year some way somehow. Maybe you Disagree, but product 10 has been well rooted in community for well over a decade. Capturing an initial community today is actually kind of easier than ever with the current state of digital. But now, what is your advice for keeping an acquired community engaged?

So building a community is super hard. It's. It's one which takes a tipping point. You have to get to a certain tipping point where the maker or the founder yourself isn't the one. Always starting conversations, isn't sort of bootstrapping the engagement. In the beginning, getting there is tough and then sustaining that, especially for many years, is super, super hard. A lot of what we think about is, I would say, two different categories of things. One is the utility side. So what are people getting on this? What job to be done is being solved? Or what's the purpose of coming to this community? Communities are really not just like, kumbaya, let's hang out, let's meet people. There has to be some sort of utility for it to be sustainable long term. And on productivity, there's really two primary use cases. One, if you're a maker or a founder, you might go there to launch your product, to get to your first users, to get feedback. And if you are a consumer, if you're an early adopter, if you're someone who's in technology really within any role, you can use Product Hunt to stay up to date on what's new, to explore new products, to find something that benefits your life. Maybe it's a new app on your home screen that now changes how you communicate with your family. Maybe it's a new workplace tool that now changes how you operate in your company. There's many different utility benefits in being a part of Product Hunt. And that's a lot of, I think, what you have to consider in any community, what's the utility that you're providing? And then the other category is really, it's a combination of momentum and how do you keep things fresh, how do you always implement and introduce something new? And you know after many, many years, things might start to feel a little stale. If you're in a community, if it doesn't change, if it doesn't evolve, people might churn. It may not feel as exciting as it once was. And so thinking through what new changes can we introduce? And it really goes back to the other question, what are people asking for? What behaviors are emerging? How do you build a better experience for those people? And some of it's products, some of it's also marketing community building in that we've done hundreds and hundreds of events, for example, across the world in product hunt, so people can come together and meet one another. And those one off events are also, I think, really helpful for building community beyond just the product improvements and changes as well.