Learn How Ryan Hoover Transformed the Startup Ecosystem with Product Hunt's Explosive Growth

Welcome to another episode of Growth Hacker tv. I'm Eric Torenberg. Today we have Ryan Hoover. Ryan is the founder of Product Hunt and today we're going to talk about product marketing, delighting users, personal growth, career growth, and how you've built such a incredible community around Product Hunt in just a few months. Now, I met Ryan about a year ish ago.

Yeah.

Through partially your writings. Through also you're familiar with my other startup, Rapped fm.

I haven't tried.

Yeah, we haven't gotten you to rap yet. We haven't gotten you to wrap yet.

That's not gonna happen, especially not on camera.

Yeah, yeah, I was not on this interview exactly. So yeah, I've been following his writings and a few months ago I was lucky enough to be able to join Ryan at Product Hunt. So have a unique insights into, into what you've built. So I'm pretty excited. So for those who don't know, give us a quick overview. What is Product Hunt?

Yeah. So Product Hunt is a community. It's a website right now where people submit links to new products. Could be mobile apps, websites, hardware projects, and many other things. And inside that community, people upvote the best stuff each day, the things they find interesting and new, and people discuss them. And the founders often come in and start answering questions and kind of telling their story. So each day you have a curated feed of new and interesting things and that's what we do each day. So a lot of discussion around products and a lot of startup people, founders, investors and so on.

Now it's really started to take off and we'll get to that in a bit. But first, let's talk about the beginning of Product Hunt. It started as an email list, correct?

Yeah, yeah, it was just a simple email list. That was the easiest way to get something out there. I'm not an engineer, so one, I couldn't build a Ruby on Rails app from front to back myself. And frankly, I shouldn't waste my time trying to build something that complex to prove out an idea to see if people wanted it.

So in the beginning, is that what it was? It was just a test?

Yeah, it was. You know, I actually, my morning routine is I go to Phil's, which is a couple blocks away. And at the time I was doing a lot of writing and I was actually in a transition from playhaven, so I was working part time and I had a lot more free time on my hand. And so I go to Phil's and one morning I just thought, okay, how cool would it be to kind of have a curated feed of products, new interesting products that are recommended for my friends. So created an email list using something called linkedink and kind of a weird name. I know people kind of like what linkedink which is just a very simple tool for creating collaborative email lists. So I created this list, invited a few dozen people, these were people in startups like investors and friends of mine and other founders and told them hey, if you find cool interesting products, submit them here and we'll get an email every day of those products.

And working backwards, did you think this could be a company or this was an if the experiment went well, what would happen? How did this develop?

So I've done a lot of different experiments in the past and when I say experiments they're just ideas I'm always interested in just new things and new concepts and you know, I've played around with okay, what if there was like a laundry, like an Uber for laundry type thing a few years back and now there's Washio and some others and I've just done landing page tests and kind of the basic stuff and none of it I took off one and none of those ideas that I experimented with really had a passion around. And so initially Product Hunt was just another one of those things and it was something that was fun and easy to do. It wasn't like I invested much time into the beginning of it. And from that, from the email that I got over the next following two or three weeks, that's what inspired me to take it a little bit further.

I think it's important to note that you'd already built a network and almost even an audience before you had started the email. How did you do that?

Yeah, largely that was based on my writing. And I say writing feels like such a professional term and really I'm not a professional writer at all. I actually hated writing when I was in high school and college. Maybe it was because I was forced to write, I don't know. And so over the past two years or so I've written a bit just about startups growth, marketing, other things like that, personal growth. And over time I've been able to build not a huge audience, but at least a small enough audience in this community to give me at least some credibility and at least an audience that I could turn to when I did want to run these experiments and try out things. So I've written a bit on my blog. I also helped Nir write his book Hooked up how to Build Habit Forming Products and that's done really well as well for him and myself. And through that, it's just given me a platform essentially. And that's really important. I think for anyone that wants to build a startup, the hardest thing for most startups is not really building the product. It's one, figuring out what people want. So building something people want ultimately. But then two, breaking through the noise and getting people to actually pay attention. And if you can at least start de risking second part before you figure out what your startup is, and you know, I think that's wise to start now, other than, you know, start from scratch. When you do have a startup and you do have an idea, what are.

Some ways in which people can think about building an audience? So one is writing about, you know, products or something similar to what you did. What are some other ways people can build an audience?

Yeah, and so not everyone should blog. Not everyone wants to blog. And that's just one way of frankly getting attention and providing value in some way. So there are many people, many bloggers and founders that do write that I really respect and appreciate. And I've followed them on Twitter and I followed their writing over time. And they have a lot of credibility because of their blogging. But people can also do that. They can also build an audience in many other ways. It could be through podcasting, could be even event organization. So like conferences and those type of things, or even smaller things. I know, Eric, you've been doing more brunches lately and we've done product hunt brunches as well over the, I don't know, six months. And those are just really good ways of building community around yourself and ultimately providing value to some community of people. So those are just a few different ways of kind of getting out there.

So what I hear. So you spent. Okay, backing up completely. You spent a couple years at a mobile gaming startup as a product manager?

Yeah, it was back in 2010 is when I joined and it was 10 people at the time as a PM and then we grew to like 110 people before earlier this year.

And do you think of that as where you developed your product, chops, your product? Understanding?

Yeah, on the job is the best way to learn usually and especially in a product management role, it's really hard to learn that skill set more so than engineering and design, because there's no clear path to product management. And so it varies between job to job. So for me, I was a product manager at the previous startup before I joined Playhaven, and that was, I think, back on myself. I had no idea what I was doing. It was a Complete mess. But it was like it was a good thing because they threw me in the fire. And I learned and the same thing at playhaven. I think back at when I joined and I was doing so many wrong things and I'm still, I have so much to learn and Playhaven was a really great way to learn. Okay, how do you operate as a 10 person company to 100 person company and how do you lead as a non manager? Because PMs usually don't have direct management experience. They manage through implicitly in many ways.

What were some of the things you learned from expanding from 10 people to.

Plus 101 is that the people that this is. I forgot who said this is a pretty common quote. The people that got you there in the beginning aren't necessarily people that should be there later on. And for speaking about myself, you know, I, I believe I provided value later on certainly, but I operate better in a smaller company. So I learned not only do you need to change the way you work as a person, but also as a team as you grow, but then you also for me personally, I realized that I don't want to work at a larger company. I feel like my skill set and my interest is much better suited to a smaller team. So team is really hard. It's really hard to make those transitions from say 30 people to 60 people to then 100. There's a whole lot more challenges that go with that and you have to have more process. And those are just growing pains that, you know, with Product Hunt we're a long ways from thankfully. But I recognize that when we do get to that point that, you know, there's, there's a better way of going about it than we probably did at play even frankly. But they're doing a great job now.

Absolutely. So you leave playhaven and you don't really have a master plan. You're just thinking, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to start writing, I'm going to be developing my network. Is it you're kind of developing your skills. How did you see your career developing as you leave Playhaven?

Yeah, so, you know, I was, I was going to leave. I gave him notice, this is around June or July of last year and said, I'm not sure where I'm going but you know, I think it's a good time for me to leave and go on and do something different. And at that time I decided then, okay, maybe I'll just work part time. So that way I can transition. A lot of the things that I have to do. And also things that I know because I'd been there for so long. I had a lot of tribal knowledge that I needed to spread to the newer team teammates. And during that time I also helped out tradecraft on the side, which is a school for UX sales and growth. So I was doing other things along the way and you know, frankly, I did interview at a couple places. There weren't very many startups that appealed to me and you know, at the end of the glad that those didn't work out. They just weren't the perfect fit for me. And along the way I was just continuing to write more often and exploring just ideas so I didn't have a clear path, honestly. And Product Hunt wasn't like I didn't leave Playhaven at the time or say I was leaving for Product Hunt. Rather, it's something, frankly, I just stumbled on.

And were you conscious of, hey, I'm building experiences, skills, developing a network. I know this is going to be valuable soon. I'll just, you know, keep going and keep experimenting until I find my opportunity.

I, when I think about it now, I say yes, but I don't. I'm not certain at the time that I was actually that thoughtful, frankly. I was writing in part just because I enjoyed it. And then there's, frankly, there is the egotistical side where you get the retweets and you get your article in the next web and panning and it's kind of nice to have people will give you some pats on the back for that. And so that was a lot of my motivation really is just, okay, I like doing this, I'm getting some recognition. I don't think I thought as thoroughly at the time that, okay, this would be my launching pad to my startup or whatever I'm going to do, frankly. So, yeah, I mean, in hindsight I think it all makes sense and the dots kind of connect now, but maybe not at the time.

Right. It's interesting. When you started Product Hunt, did you think, hey, I'm solving this, there's a problem I see and I'm solving, or I'm just pursuing this passion, or do you think you need to have both or what did you think?

Yeah, that's a really good question. Similar. I have a similar answer in that I didn't see the clear path for Product Hunt becoming a startup in the beginning. I definitely saw there was an opportunity here, but I wasn't bullish enough at the time or maybe egotistical enough to say that, oh, this is A startup. And this is a huge opportunity. So at the time, again, it was just experiment. I was figuring out, okay, this is something I like. I like media, I like content, I like products, I like talking about products with founders. So producthunt was a manifestation of a lot of my interest, frankly, in the beginning. And then as it started to take off and as I thought more about the market and also where ProductFund is going is when I realized, okay, maybe there is actually an opportunity here to turn it into an actual startup, an actual business.

Now, you started Product Hunt in November.

December, late November last year.

And right now product has over 200,000 monthly monthly uniques. From the beginning, at what point did Product Hunt become, you know, not just an experiment, but, oh my God, we're seeing something here. What does that look like?

Yeah. So the way I kind of describe it is, okay, step one, experiment, check. Later on, it turned into side projects. So when Nathan Bashaw, my good friend, when he worked on it, the first version he built over Thanksgiving break and we worked on it for the first three or four months or so together, that's when it started turning into a side project. When it was, okay, this is an actual product, an actual website, not just an email list. And it required continual maintenance and continual work. At the time it was like, okay, this is great, I'm enjoying this side project. I didn't want to commit to turning into a startup at the time because I didn't need to. I was still at playhaven, I was making a little bit of money there part time, so why not just continue to grow this and see where it goes? Then I started thinking about, okay, what does this look like if as a bootstrapped business, like a self funded business? And I was pretty confident, I still am, that, okay, what if I turn this into a $20,000 a month business for myself? Like, that'd be fantastic. You know, having complete ownership of it and making good money and basically having freedom. And I still think that Product Hunt could turn into that relatively easily compared to the other path which now we've chosen is, you know, raising some money and going big and creating something more meaningful than bootstrap business. Now, I don't see that demeaning in any way to like people that are self funding. Self funding is actually the right path for many people and most businesses are self funded and should be. But. But for Product Hunt, it just makes a lot more sense and it's wiser for us to raise money and to get the right people on board and to have A huge impact, I believe, in the market.

And what was the traction you were seeing that caused that transition to, hey, this is a real business. Was it a lot of users? Was it that they weren't churning? Was it that they were important users.

In the very beginning? It was going back to the very beginning email list. It was a couple hundred email subscribers who signed up. So that wasn't really what kicked me off and got me excited, but that was good validation. What really excited me at that time was people would go out of their way to email me and they would in person tell me, hey, that product in email is cool and I enjoy it, I read it every day. And so those like qualitative, that qualitative feedback is really what encouraged me to take it one step further, to build the community with Nathan. And so from there it just continually organic, for the most part started growing and the product just has some built in network effects and the model just works. And then over time we started noticing more and more opportunities to expand on that and expand beyond this kind of niche startup community.

Okay, we got to talk about those network effects and why it just works. This is growth Hacker tv. They want the good stuff. When you were building this product, how did you think, I'm going to make this sticky easy to share. What are you thinking? What are the keys when you build this product?

Yeah, so there are a few different things. One of them is, so let's go back to the email. The email is where it started and the email today is still a big, big part of the product. And right now we have almost 50,000. And every day we blast it out and we see our site traffic skyrocket and every product that's featured on there gets thousands of more visitors. And so the email component is important not just for driving traffic and attention, but it's a facilitator for habit formation. So what is when you visit a site and you think it's cool, you do need a reminder to come back. Oftentimes, no matter how cool you think it is and how much you like it, oftentimes you need some sort of external trigger, some way to bring that person back.

And for us, email is a great way to do that because it's in our inbox.

People read their email all the time.

And it also provides value. A lot of people enjoy the email because it's a quick digest of the previous day and has other content. So I guess to provide something a little bit more actionable, the email or if your product is like a mobile app, like Push notifications are a great way to re engage. The mobile app icon on the phone is also an external trigger.

There's also going back to the email side with the product. There's also social re engagement. So when people mention your name on Product Hunt, when they tag you, you get an email to come back. So a lot of different ways that we kind of pull users back into the product. The other key difference that with Product Hunt versus let's say Hacker News or Reddit or Digg and many of these other kind of community curated feeds is the day parting. And the difference is that each day the board resets essentially. So the list of products on the page, it starts anew. And it's kind of a way to reinforce that daily routine of coming back and finding a digest of the coolest stuff for this day and the previous day and the next. And it also kind of helps curate that. There's kind of an overwhelming feeling when I go to a site like Hacker News. For myself and I know for many other people, it's like this continually changing board of links and it's almost like it feels overwhelming when you visit. So if it feels overwhelming and you have a feeling of not going to the site, you're not going to go to the site. So the day parting is one aspect of that. What else?

Let me ask you about the day parting. First, you're trying to build a habit, a daily habit around product line. You send an email every day, at the same time, around the same time. It's a very simple email. You also integrate with Twitter. We also integrate with Twitter over Facebook. Why did you make that pick early?

Yeah, so there are a couple reasons why we chose Twitter. One, it was easier at the time. We were trying to build something very simple and quick. So we didn't want to build our own authentication system. So why not just use Twitter? But more importantly, Twitter now gave us consistent social graph so that today and in the future, we know who you follow, we know who follows you, and we can start building out this network that over time we could start using to change the product and make it better. Rather than starting from scratch where you know nothing about this person, essentially you just know their email address and maybe their name. So that's one important thing. The other thing is that since everyone that registers is on Twitter, we now can communicate with them on Twitter. So we, you know, oftentimes pull in founders and we also communicate with our users through Twitter, at least, well, you and I both do. And that's just another channel for us. To engage our Twitter following on the Productund account now is like 20,000 people a little bit over that. And that's continuing to grow because, again, we're really focusing on Twitter and building that audience. So just like email and the site, Twitter is another engagement channel for us.

And Twitter allows us to have everyone's full name and their handle, which is typically recognizable. So we can see, oh, my God.

Ashton Kutcher, Brad Feld, and we can verify that. Like, if it was just email and password, how would we know that, you know, that is actually Ashton Kutcher? We wouldn't really know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And one thing to also emphasize is that we are on Twitter all day, you know.

Yeah.

We are favoriting everything people say about product hunt. We are responding to every, you know, everything people say about product hunt. I mean, you've been using Twitter as a growth channel for, you know, even before Product hunt for yourself for a long time. Right. What are important things people should know about how to grow an audience on Twitter?

Yeah. Twitter is the most, arguably the most important product in my life outside of maybe like email. You know, it's amazing how much influence it's had on my life and just the world. And Twitter is just the easiest way to stay in touch with people and engage with a huge audience of people. And when I was writing, of course, that's just one channel to distribute my writing. It's one channel to also get feedback from people. You can also see, of course, who's sharing your stuff. So when I was writing heavily and I didn't have as many, like, maybe I'd get a couple dozen people sharing my essay or something like that, I would respond to every single person and thank them. And it's small things like thanks, Kyle or thanks, Bill or thanks, Jenny, it's using their first name, things like that. It might sound, I don't know, cheesy, but people appreciate that. And they also appreciate that you took the time to type their name. Like, frankly, typing their name versus just thanks about their name is important. So I spent a lot of time doing that. And just small little things like that over time on Twitter can add value. You know, I also used to. I've been more busy now, so I haven't been able to. But I used to read a lot of blogs and share that through buffer on Twitter. And that's a good way just to create a feed, hopefully, of content that people like and enjoy and find useful. And when I did that and when I do that, I always tag the author's name Just to make sure that they know that I'm sharing, that I'm reading. And when you do that over time with people you respect and trust, they start remembering you. And that's how you build up a relationship with them, whether it's just a casual Twitter relationship or you meet them for coffee someday or maybe you join their team or they hire you or something.

And that's one of the biggest ways you've built relationships with people over time who've now become super early users of product, you know, famous investors and celebrities who are now early users investors through Twitter and through just kind of being persistently appreciative. How would you describe.

Yeah, it seems each individual interaction doesn't seem like much, but in aggregate over time it means a lot. And as long as you're not kissing ass, I guess there's a balance there. I guess there's kissing ass and being annoying and being kind of obvious that you're just trying to get attention versus providing value or just having fun. Also, don't treat things transactional, I guess, is one piece of advice I'll give people is just have fun and act like a human. And that's what I try and do on Twitter and email and everything.

Some people, what I find most interesting, some people from the sidelines are like, hey, you know Ryan, Ryan Hoover, how did he go from 0 to 100 so quickly? You know, who was he? And now, you know, he was writing, but now he's, you know, on top of the world. And you know, the response is, it was, you know, it wasn't just a few months. You've been, you've been working for years, you know, to build an audience, to build a platform, you know, to build your skills. What do you say to someone who asks, how can I develop a network of influential, incredibly smart people?

Yeah, figure out what your. How can you provide value? I guess. And going back to your previous question, maybe it's blogging, maybe it's podcasting, maybe it's event coordination. How can you provide value to some sort of community or some like minded people? And, you know, I guess that's the most important thing ultimately then going back to like just being like a normal, nice person. I mean, in startup culture, people talk first off, and there's also a culture of giving back and paying it forward. And if you just stick with that over time, it'll come back to you. I've had a lot of really awesome people help me along the way. And product hunt would not be where it is without the help of so many different people. And also I'm just really encouraged and hopefully I can help them in return. And I will, and I am. But, you know, I guess that's kind of general advice. But yeah.

And the ways you thought about building value as it relates to your strengths and interest were. You said, I spent years, you know, as a product manager, I know a lot about products. I can have interesting insights. Or how did you. How did you think about it?

How do you think about which part exactly?

Adding. How you can add value.

Oh, yeah. I don't know. I mean, I guess when I was writing first off, when I started writing it, it was like anybody else. You get no attention. And it's kind of like demoralizing. When you post something, no one reads it but one. I just like doing it. And I started getting a little bit better at it. And I'm definitely not great at amazing writer, but I can write good enough. And then over time, you start getting feedback and you get a bigger audience and know, like, okay, people are actually reading this stuff and they like this stuff. And when you get just a couple people email you and say, hey, I changed my product based on something that you inspired or wrote about, it's really encouraging. I don't know, I think a lot of it is being curious and kind of experimental in what you do. And maybe if writing just didn't go anywhere and I kept at it for a year, maybe I'd experiment with something different, like more podcasting or something. I don't know. Everyone has different types of talents and ways to provide value. And if you're not in startups, like, startups are one thing, you know, but there are many different industries that you might be operating into where you can provide value in a unique way.

It's interesting you bring up podcasting because that's another mechanism we've used to build our credibility, to build relationships. Is that something you saw initially as a strategy, as a kind of user acquisition strategy? What do you think about podcasting and how can other people use podcasts or do podcasts?

So this kind of goes back to writing again. I started the podcast primarily because I wanted to do it and I thought it was fun. And I've been listening to podcasts for years, like this week in startups, this week in tech, every single day. I still listen to those podcasts and watch this podcast. So it was partly a great excuse, now that we have product hunt, to say, okay, let's just talk about products. This will be fun. It's like, now we have this platform to do it off of and then also, like, more strategically, though podcasting is. We have access to so many awesome people. You and I were interviewing and chatting with Scoble recently, and I've met Alexis and did a podcast with him and Kevin Rose and so many other cool people who I've looked up to over the years. So it was a good way to bring those people and kind of put them on a kind of bring the human side out. Like a podcast, when you talk to people is a lot different than reading their writing. And that's a great way to build community, because I think you and I feel like more like humans and people get to know our personality a lot more through a podcast than through Twitter and email. And those are still great ways, but hearing someone's voice is a lot different.

Right. Go for it.

The last thing I was going to mention is it's just another channel for engagement. So when they subscribe to us on itunes, that's another, like, opportunity for us to remind them about Product Hunt, just like Twitter and email and so on.

And you talk about. One thing we talk about a lot is delighting users. Now you think about, you know, I'm a big fan of Quora. Yeah, I don't, you know, but I don't know the founders of Quora. When I think about the use of Quora, I'm using. I think about Quora. A lot of users, Product Hunt. Think, Ryan. Think. Think, Eric. You know, they're building relationships with us, and that's making them more loyal. And one of the big philosophies you started is build in public, talk about how we delight users and what building a public means.

Yeah. So in the very beginning, we started sharing mockups and wireframes with the early users. So these were the first couple dozen people Nathan and I were bouncing ideas around. We were emailing these people individually and getting their feedback, so asking them specific questions about what they thought about the product and what they thought about these wireframes. And that was a good way to involve them and make them a part of the process and then also get feedback on how we should change the product before we built it. So early on we've been doing this, and then as we've grown, we've also shared mockups with the community at large. So what was it? The first one we did was at the homepage redesign. I think it was either the homepage or the comment redesign. Anyway, it was a big site redesign, and we put it on InVision, which is a tool to annotate comments on a mockup and blast it out to the the community through email. And that morning we got, I don't know, 100 or 200 replies and comments on this mock up. And it was great. It was really exciting to have people sharing their ideas and also being excited enough to take their time to do that. And the feedback that we got was good. And we actually changed some things before we built it. So it's been this continual thing where we just add as much transparency as we can and that helps tremendously in making people feel like part of the product. And. But as a community, it's more important than anything for people to feel like they have a say and they have like a voice in the community.

Right. And, you know, you might have a fear that you're like burdening your community, that they don't want to see these things, but they do. You know, the ones who love the product, they're fascinated and it gives them more of a sense of ownership.

Totally. I mean, Buffer has been a really good example of this in different ways, but they've been extremely transparent. Like probably the most transparent company I've ever, ever seen and sharing their metrics and sharing their investor updates and replying to every single person on Twitter. Like, if I tweet at them, I'm going to tweet them right now and see if they reply before this podcast is over. Hey, how's it going? Ok, so I'll keep this open and see if they reply. There's probably a good chance they're going to say something. And it's what? It's six o'clock Saturday.

That's awesome.

So they're always trying to delight people and they do that through personality and being human, ultimately and being extremely transparent. And Joel's done a really good job of kind of facilitating that over time.

Right. And it's been for us, that's one thing we've tried to do too. And it's been a bit difficult since we've grown so fast, but answering as many people as we can, just when they send us an email, try to personalize that and. And convert every user that's maybe confused or unsure into a friend, into a fan.

Yeah, yeah. And it's tough. It's tough as we grow because the support emails increase and there's only so much time. And so it's definitely a concern of mine is like, how can we maintain that, that level of high touch and not spend our entire time answering emails or answering tweets? Because we still have to do other Things, so it's tough.

One thing we've also tried to do, so there are like a few different channels, right. Where people get to know us. There's Twitter, there's the podcast, there's the email. We also try to do live events. Yeah, you wanna talk briefly about that?

Yeah, yeah, we've done happy hours, which are really easy to do, honestly, if you have. I mean, you don't need to schedule a reservation at a bar, you just email out to a group, set up an event page, say we're meeting here. And when you have enough people in a community that are like minded, they want to meet other people in the community, they want to meet you. So happy hours are super simple, super easy. I've always had a good time with. We had one in New York like a month ago, I think, and we had like 500 people RSVP. I don't know how many people showed up, but there's a line out the door. It was great. And then we've done brunches, which are also really fun. I think I enjoy those even more because they're usually 25 or so people, so it's more intimate, it's usually a good crowd and everyone always enjoys it. And then I think we haven't really announced this publicly or we kind of talked about it, but we've chatted about doing a hackathon and other things like that. So I don't know, it's fun when you take these interactions, these people that you've been chatting with online, and then meet them in person and chat with them. It's a great way to build a more authentic relationship with them. Furthermore, they start building relationships with other people in that community. And the best thing is if you can make those connections through your site or your community, it's fantastic to see.

Yeah. And we've seen those people who we've met in real life, you know, become some of our biggest supporters and fans and contributors.

Totally. And like, I think in the past two weeks we've had two or three people email us and say, hey, I want to do a meetup in Canada, in Israel. Israel. Yeah. There's, there's Bram wants to do it. I forgot where. Somewhere in Europe. And he, he DM'd me. He's like, hey, can you send me some of those kitty stickers? I want to hand them out at the happy hour. And so we'll have to do that.

Awesome. Back to back to product time, the product marketing. So we've got that daily habit. Another thing we have all the incentives are aligned. So when a product is posted, the founder is incentivized to get as many votes on the product as possible. So they're sharing with their friends, they're sharing with their users. And each founder, what are some of the other metrics designed to get people to share and keep coming back? Can you hear me?

Yeah. So, yeah, can you hear me? Okay.

Yep.

All right. You know, we don't have many very explicit sharing calls to action. We have a tweet button. That's it. We don't really force people to share. We don't have walls where you can't access content before you share and that kind of thing. And that's just because the product is inherently social. Like people. One, they want to share cool new things that they like, especially early adopters. They want to share and introduce cool products to their friends and it makes them look cool because it's like, hey, here's what I found before anyone else. And so there's that aspect of it. Then to your point about founding and makers being in the conversation, of course they want to talk about product, they want to get as many people in the conversation, they want to share their product and they want to get it to the top of the leaderboard. So naturally that's something that's going to happen. As long as we have a big enough user base where we are meaningful enough, then founders will really care about that. And they should, because we're driving in some cases over 10,000 uniques to these products in a one or two day period. So yeah, it's just the design of the product is for, for not optimized. It's a bad word. But it's just to be social.

And another key principle that one is that we don't accept any company Twitters, everything's got to be a real person. So people could feel like they're, they're having conversation with a real person. Two, we've limited the, the ability in the beginning, the amount of people who can post and who can comment so that incentivize, you know, people want to. And it's been an exclusive club in the beginning. Talk about that, how you thought about the beginning and how you're changing it as the community grows.

Yeah. So part of it, there are a couple of reasons why it's limited and why not everyone can comment or post. And one of them is just, frankly we can't open it up to the world. Like frankly we can't or the site just wouldn't work. You know, it's we, we do allow anyone to submit and only a certain number of people actually have like whitelist ability to submit to the page. And we get over 100 submissions that never make the homepage each day. And if you look at that feed, a lot of them are not on topic, they're duplicates or they're just frankly just not really high quality submissions. And so by opening it up to the world, we would one have a lot of lower quality product submissions. We'd have a lot of self promoters because everyone in the world is going to of course, submit their own product. And then lastly, it's just too many products. It's already too much. When you have 60 in a single day, imagine having 200 or 400 products on that homepage. Now there are ways to scale that and things will be changing longer term to include more people. But for now, the way it's designed, we just can't open it up to the world for many different reasons. The other thing is we can't control trolls and spam and everything. If it was the world. It's just you and me on the community side now, Nicole. So it's not like we have a whole lot of people to do moderation and that kind of thing right now. The other thing, you know, is just too. Or lastly it's. There's an important piece in exclusivity or at least limiting to a certain number of people because we can now start kind of facilitating that culture, if that makes sense. That culture of where we want to go, if it's open to the world. And you have a bunch of. Let's take an extreme example. Nothing against Justin Bieber, but let's say Justin Bieber's fan base all of a sudden gets on Product Hunt and they can start commenting and posting. That's a different audience. And Product Hunt is not for that audience. So, you know, we don't want to. We want to kind of build this culture slowly so that it can be meaningful long term over time.

Yeah, I know Justin Bieber is watching this. No offense to Justin Bieber.

Sorry, Justin.

Absolutely. I heard Bronson Taylor is a huge Justin Bieber fan, actually. Yeah. No, I'm just kidding.

I follow him on Twitter.

Yeah, so we have the. We have the product, but Product Hunt is growing Since January, what, 75% a month? 80% a month. Active users.

Unique since 1-1-70. 70% month over month. Unique user growth.

How is that growth being sustained? What are the biggest channels? What are we doing? What's the secret, Ryan?

Yeah, you know, it's going back to the product itself. So one, people care about this content. I think we've definitely proven that, at least as there's a certain number of people that love finding out new products. And there are many different signals before Product Hunt began that led me to believe that's true. And two, going back to the social aspect, people want to share this content. So a lot of it is frankly driven just through word of mouth. So again, we're focusing on Twitter. Everyone that registers is on Twitter. They're sharing this stuff on Twitter. And you and I are both like, I can open up tweetdeck right now and I can look at my column right now of Product Hunt tweets. And there's just tons every single day. So word of mouth is largely how we're driven. That's driven user acquisition and retention. But also press has been good. Press is a good acquisition source for us and this is not true for probably most startups. I mean, it's good to get intention for hiring or for fundraising in press, but oftentimes you get that Shark Fin and those people never come back. For us, press is great because people that read TechCrunch or Pando or Gigaom, VentureBeat and so on, those are the same people that want to find out about new products. So we've been really pushing on the press and we're also adding value for a lot of reporters and journalists because they're using Product Hunt to find cool products to write about. And so we built fantastic relationships with a lot of people at these press outlets. And that gives us an opportunity to one, get cited on their articles, but then also have them write about us, frankly, from the YC announcement to our iOS app that's coming out, to number of the things that we'll be doing in the future.

And another thing we've been doing is all the top 10 products every day, or top 10 founders of the products every day. We ask them to write about if they're interested, we ask them to write about their experience and we'll share it. Yeah, which gives them more buzz, gives us more buzz and puts us in the same conversation as Hacker News, TechCrunch, some of these other.

That's a really good point. Yeah, it's a two way street. They are spending a lot of time, in some cases writing of a bunch.