Ryan Hoover on Startup Growth Hacks, Products, Silicon Valley Success | Product Hunt | TRS 130

Ryan Hoover is one of the most respected people in the tech space in Silicon Valley, and therefore pretty much in the world. He founded product hunt in 2013 out of his pure passion for tech products. The tech product revolution has only recently entered India. It's people like Ryan Hoover that the Indian entrepreneurship space needs to study in order to elevate our own game. In today's episode, we spoke about everything from his own entrepreneurial journey to his love for video games, to how video games actually inspire the the world of tech products. So if you're an aspiring entrepreneur, this is the episode you need to watch. Almost as a postgraduate degree. No matter what business you're running, the pandemic has proven to us that every single business has to eventually become a tech business. Ryan, who was the man to be studied. Ryan, who was the man to be learned from? And of course, even if you're not from India, this is the man who's respected widely in the tech community globally. Do follow him on Twitter, but first, consume this episode of the Ranveer Show. Remember to follow us on Spotify. Every episode is available on Spotify 48 hours before it's available anywhere else in the world. The Ranvee show is now Spotify exclusive. And on the Spotify exclusive today, we've got one of the most beautiful minds that we've ever had on the show. Ryan Hoover, breaking it down for all of us. Ryan Hoover from sunny Los Angeles. Welcome to the Ranvee show, brother.

Hey, thanks for having me. It's not too sunny today, though. We got some clouds, but, you know, normally it is. How are you?

So I'm good. I'm good. I'm super excited to speak about startups to you. I'm super excited to speak about products to you. I'm super excited to speak about the future to you. I put this up on my Twitter and Indian Twitter. Indian startup Twitter kind of went crazy hearing your name. So the work you've done in tech, the work you've done in the world of startups, you have, like, fans all over the world, man. And there's a lot of people who want to ask you questions. Later on in the show, we're going to take questions from Twitter. All right, I want to begin this conversation by asking you about your story. Why don't you explain very briefly, you know, what you've done with your life, what you've done at Product Hunt to someone who's just getting introduced to your work.

Yes. Yes. So I was born in Oregon to entrepreneurial parents. My father has Been an entrepreneur since he was in his 20s and I learned a lot from him as a kid and gave me a lot of really some inspiration and opportunities to do some small things like run the gumball machines at the video game store that he owned, which is really cool. As like 1112 year old, we'd go every Sunday, go to the machine and we'd collect these quarters and we'd buy more candy and put them in the machine. And the concept of doing something where you got paid not for your time but for your actual output was always really compelling to me as a kid. And I work many hourly jobs, but I just never liked that because it just wasn't that motivating. Like you could do really well or really poorly and you get paid the same amount. Just it's not a really efficient or motivating like economic system. And so I've always been really into entrepreneurship. I bought and sold things on ebay as well in like high school and college, just as a side hustle. I modded Xboxes as well back in the day, which was really fun and kind of exploring more technology there. And so I grew up kind of, kind of more with an entrepreneurial childhood and then went to the University of Oregon, got a business major with a computer information tech minor, which was fine. I have a lot of opinions on college education, but I won't go on my own rants on that topic right now. I ended up though, through that getting an internship in a video game company, which is a dream. As a kid who grew up playing video games, working at a game company was super cool. And that led me to marketing and then product management, which product management wasn't really a thing that people knew about, especially a decade ago. It wasn't a role that I even knew about before I became one. Effectively.

What is a product manager? Like how do you explain that to a four year old?

Yeah, to a four year old. So product manager's responsibility is to essentially work with both internal and external stakeholders. So customers, let's say, or like your engineering team, your design team, to ultimately figure out what you're going to build. Like they're the ones that are taking all these data inputs and then providing recommendations that hopefully align with like the overall company strategy. And so a lot of that it varies across different businesses and companies in terms of like the role or scope of a product manager, but it might result in them doing wireframes and working with design or engineering teams and like, here's the product that we might be building and then also working with teams to scope, you know, projects. So it's really easy for, like, smart people to come up with all these feature ideas. But at the end of the day, the product manager, really good one, will hopefully hone down into, like, what are the core necessities for a product and how do you deliver that to customers, then learn and iterate from there. And so I love product because it's, it's, you know, I love a lot of roles in business and they're all very important, but product fundamentally is the thing that you're delivering to customers. Like the product is the thing. And being involved in that and working with the entire team to figure out what that is is super energizing to me. So I sort of fell into the role and like, loved it. I really enjoyed it. And worked at one game company and then moved to San Francisco in 2010 to work in another company that was in the mobile gaming industry. And at that time, mobile gaming was just taking off. Like we had Facebook gaming was a big thing, but Facebook changed a lot of their APIs and the way that their platform managed gaming. And it really led a lot of developers to realize smartly that mobile gaming is the future for casual gaming especially. And so for three and a half years I worked there. I joined, I think, employee number 10, and we grew to about 100 before I left building tools for game developers. And that was super fun. It was a really wild ride. Saw 10x company growth from a headcount perspective and learned a ton. Andy Yang was the CEO of the company and my boss for a good portion of that time, and he taught me a lot along the way. So that was all, I guess, pre product hunt. And then majority of my professional career has been product hunt and kind of building that out. And so, yeah, happy to dive into that too, if you'd like.

Yeah, of course. What have you done at Product Hunt? Like, if you could just like take us through that journey a little bit.

Yeah. So Product Hunt was initially a side project and it was late 2013. It was actually I was transitioning out of Playhaven, was the company I was at. You know, ultimately I got to a point where I felt like I wasn't learning as much as I was in the early days. I wasn't as motivated to be quite honest. I felt like I knew I needed to do something different. I'm of the mindset, especially early in a career, like, if you're not learning, like you need to figure something out, you need to do something different. And so ultimately transitioned out of that company worked part time for a little while as I was transitioning, but ultimately started product as a side project, as a newsletter to begin with. And this was inspired by my interest in just products. I'm a weirdo and I would just play with products and explore products, not to use them or anything, just because I was curious. I felt like it was a great way to learn too. As a product manager whose responsibility is to build products and work with teams, I think it's important to be on top of what people are creating and learn from that. The initial platform was an email list of me and a couple dozen friends sharing cool products that we found every day. And it quickly got some attention and traction because I guess I didn't think of this as a startup. It was just a project, a cool idea that I thought would be fun. But what I realized is there was this sort of hole in the market where there wasn't this simple list of here's what's cool and new to check out. And there wasn't a place on the Internet to talk about new products and for the tech community, and I mean tech community from a global perspective to come together and kind of geek out about these things. And so the email list led to a very simple website. Nathan Bashaw and I collaborated on it over Thanksgiving break. So about a five day period. We worked on the scopes, kind of going back to the product management background, like what is the mvp? How do we build a site that's really simple, that isn't going to take a lot of time to bring to market? And we modeled after Reddit largely. We knew that we wanted it to have comments and discussion, we wanted it to have some sort of curation mechanism so like upvotes and we want to keep it relatively simple. And so we modeled the UI and UX after sort of a Reddit mechanic. And we also felt very much that you don't need to reinvent the wheel too when you're building new products. You could imagine many different approaches to product hunt, you could imagine many more innovative kind of UIs, but we felt like that wasn't where we needed to innovate really. It was about the content, the community, and that's what was important. And, and so we launched that and for about five or six months it was still a side project, it wasn't incorporated, but it got a bunch of traction. And we eventually had some conversations with Gary Tan and some other YC partners and ultimately went through Y Combinator and raised around with some great folks and then raised A series A with Andreessen and Horowitz in early 2014. So that was all within the first nine months or so of Productmix existence. Wow.

Crazy. And how did that journey end? Are you still on the Product Hunt journey?

Yeah. Yes and no. So that was a while ago. It's been over seven years since Product Hunt started and up until recently I've been the CEO of Product Hunt. We were acquired by Angelist in end of 2016 and then we maintained our own code based brand, our own, our own kind of mission within Angelus. So Angelus is quite, quite an interesting company because it's kind of a holdings company with many companies. It has AngelList venture, AngelList talent, product hunt, CoinList is a spin out of AngelList. Republic is also a spin out. Then you have AngelList India as well, which is its own beast. And so Product Hunt was one kind of pillar within the platform. And the mission of Angellist is really supporting entrepreneurs and founders and startups. How do we support them and help them? Because we fundamentally believe startups and entrepreneurship are super net positive. They make the world better. Not that every company necessarily makes the world better. There are certainly things that might be net negative, but on the average startups, they employ people, they push humanity forward. Not to be cheesy, but we believe that to be true. And so how do we support entrepreneurship and startups through AngelList? It's through recruiting, it's through funding, through Product Hunts distribution community. And so there's a nice natural fit there. And Naval was a seed investor as well in Product Hunt, so we already had a connection. And so after that acquisition, I still led the team as CEO, started the fund as well, kind of in between that time period and been investing in early stage companies. And up until recently in October I stepped down and Josh Buckley took over as CEO. And so I'm super proud of what we built. I'm still on the team calls every Monday and still advising and helping. But we have some new things coming out too that I'm super stoked about later this year I think people will be surprised and maybe a little bit excited about what we're building.

Very cool, man. Going to be super authentic here. I'm going to be super straight up with you. I had a bit of concern with doing this podcast because I didn't know how deep to go. I didn't know whether to make it a startup nerd podcast and ask you all those kind of questions or ask you surface level questions. So what I figured is that I'm going To alternate in between. I'm going to ask you a basic question here. So I want to take you back to the time where you used to work with Xboxes and gumball machines. That's how a lot of entrepreneurial journeys start. You basically figure that, okay, here's this thing I've built and maybe I can sell this and make a profit. That's basically what business is at its core. A lot of Indian college entrepreneurs think of products like, okay, let me start a T shirt company. Let me start E commerce for college based T shirts. Let me start some kind of services. Let me start an internship portal. Not too many people think of consumer based tech products. Not too many people think of building the next Instagram. I'm talking about India specifically. Not too many people think of building some kind of app that you can put in someone else's hand which will eventually help that person with their life. It will eventually help make your consumers life easier. Not too many people think like that. So what was that switch for you? Where did you realize that? Okay, when I bring tech into all my business ideas, that's where the game will change. Was there any point like that in your life? Maybe in your teenage. So could you just take us through that a little bit to give some of the college listeners some perspective?

Yeah, I mean if, if I'm honest with myself, I don't think I had a super clear game plan. Like even when Product Hunt started, it wasn't necessarily intended to be a company nor did I realize the potential of what it would be or become. But going back to earlier in my life, I've always been interested in technology. Video games were my gateway into tech related things. To be honest. You know, I was a kid building websites for fun. There's actually this friend of mine I don't think I've told told this story. A friend in high school that built this simple website of like jokes and comics and things like that. And I think he made like $100,000 as like a 14 year old. And I remember hearing that and my dad was like, he heard the story too and he was like, Ryan, you should try that too. And so I tried that. I made $77 0, so I didn't make 100,000. But anyway, that was inspirational to me and it taught me how to build websites and like some basic things like that. And then going back to video games again, you know, modding Xboxes and building computers so I could like play PC games online and things like that. That was another source of like inspiration or motivation. To like, play with technology. And so, I don't know, I sort of organically fell into it. My father, he's an entrepreneur, but he's not a tech entrepreneur. In fact, he doesn't come from the world of like, VC and that he comes from like the normal world, which is you build a business that makes money and then you reinvest that money to grow and scale. And they've done really, really well. But it's a different world in building tech products. I think where I got excited about tech, I think largely is certainly gaming was part of it. Another part of it was growing up in the Internet age. I guess there's something really fascinating about building something that anyone on the Internet could use and then building something that's there and accessible without me being involved. Like a website, for example, where anyone around the world at any moment could be using this thing. And there's something so motivating about building something that people use. That's probably one of the most motivating things actually, beyond even just like the money that you might make. But, you know, seeing a product that people use, you know, product hunt was one side product. I built some other, like tiny side projects and never took off. But the process of building and everything was really fun. And as I get older and maybe more like, how do I say this is, I think, more of it from like an impact or a business perspective. Like, technology is such a huge lever and opportunity for people to scale themselves and scale in ways that aren't possible through traditional, like entrepreneurship or businesses. And so I don't know. Andreessen, of course, says software is in the world, and that's certainly true. And more and more companies are adopting technology in different ways. And now today, technology, tech businesses or tech startups is. At some point it won't. It'll just be businesses. Like everyone will be a tech company in some form or another.

It's just how the world is progressing. I think the key word to be noted for young entrepreneurs is scalability. That's what you get when you bring tech into any traditional business. You brought up video games a lot. Takes me back to my childhood when I was playing a lot of video games and my parents had an issue with that. And I remember my parents and relatives saying that, you know, how is this ever going to benefit you? And I kind of believe that growing up. But once I grew up and I started working on product myself, forget product. Even before that, when I was just a youtuber, I started applying fonts that I saw in games as kids onto YouTube thumbnails because even that is a form of consumer experience that you're giving your viewer on YouTube. And I realized, hold on, maybe all those video games have entered my subconscious mind and given me some sort of training, you know, so, so like my question to you is about the world of video games. I feel that beyond the obvious video game benefits of better reflexes or you know, a potential career in the world of gaming, it does a lot for you. If you're going to become a designer at some point in your life, if you're going to become a product manager at some point in your life, if you're going to become an entrepreneur, if you're going to become a YouTuber, if you're going to become a creative professional, there's a lot of inspiration you can take from the world of video games. So I'm sure you still game, even if it's a little bit. I'd love to ask you some anecdotes from the world of gaming for your own mind from your childhood and from the games we see nowadays. What are things you're applying in your own entrepreneurial world?

Yeah, well, so I grew up, most of my childhood was actually we lived in the country, we didn't have broadband Internet which was a huge bummer. I wanted to play games online and I did try on my 56k dial up I used to play Starcraft and TM and my, my ping was ridiculous and like I was definitely not competitive but I did do that and I actually went to my grandparents house all the time and would just like say hey grandma, can I come over and play video games? Because they had broadband. But you know, there's, there's one side of video games which competitive gaming. Let's take StarCraft as a really good example. Competitive gaming is, is just like, you know, traditional sports too. I grew up playing soccer as well competitively. And you learn a lot. I don't think I realized this until later in my adulthood how valuable I think the collaboration and competitive nature of sports in general is in building just I think positive characteristics. Whether it's how do you collaborate and work with others, how do you push through difficulties like training and competing. That's true in sports, is true in esports and with something like starcraft. It's such a intellectual game in some ways. It's about strategy and it's about game theory and it's about all these things. And as a kid you don't really think about that. It's just like, oh, this is fun. But I think in hindsight you kind of realize, oh wow. Actually those things that I used to do, they're quite relevant I think to the real world in different ways. And so the other part of gaming that I think is the most fascinating, maybe I'm super biased, but I have a bias towards people who have built games, who have worked in the gaming industry in that I think they're some of the smartest people. Because gaming, creating games. Now disclaimer. I actually didn't create games, we built tools for game developers, two companies I worked at. But the people that built games, they need to apply two different really important things. One is they need to really understand human psychology and behavior because gaming is all about creating fun entertainment, which is a very difficult thing to do, extremely hard. And the process of understanding the psychology, everything from high level things to like the details like how onboarding flows work. Like, you know, Mario actually like Super Mario World. There's some blog posts about this. But the design of Mario Super Mario World is brilliant in many games like that because they onboard the user and teach them new skills in a very like, almost like invisibly like the user doesn't really realize what's happening, but they're being taught and they're learning and they're progressing. And there's a lot of like really smart people that have, that operate in gaming that I think, you know, when applied to other industries is really powerful. The other point of gaming that's really powerful, this is more recent relatively speaking in the gaming world I would say in the past maybe 10, 10 years. It's not super recent. But the use of data and how data is used to optimize and essentially build games is also a real superpower. If you have experience really understanding and interpreting data in a gaming kind of context, I think that's really powerful also for other industries and businesses. And so I love gaming for that reason. I think people that build games are some of the best entrepreneurs or best product people in the world. And the last point I'll make too is gaming is oftentimes using new technologies and on the forefront of tech, whether it's, you know, maybe today it's something like VR and ar, it's AI or there's a lot of other really interesting emergent technology trends or shifts that are being applied and used in gaming before any other industry. And so I just love gaming for that reason. Also I actually don't play as many games anymore. I did pick up Warzone and I've been playing that with some friends which by the way. Amazing, amazing game and brilliantly designed. Like it's, it's just so impressive what they've done. But, but yeah, it's, I have a lot of, lot of love for the gaming industry. Even though people like to hate on it. It's like, oh, it's not, it's not useful or productive. It's like, that's fine, like you can have entertainment and like, by the way, you actually are learning some things. It's not just a waste of time entirely.

Yeah, I think it becomes a waste of time when it becomes an addiction. But that's actually the next question I have for you from the world of product. I mean the basis of designing really good products, especially really good tech products, is sort of creating an addiction within your user's mind. The more your user enjoys your product, the more your user gets dopamine hits from using that product, the better the product is or the likelier it is to be successful. So again, coming back to basics. When you're trying to create a business, you create something that solves a real world problem, look at your own life, perceive your own problems and create something that will help you, a product that will help you. But the second step to that, the second level is that that product needs to be addictive. That's what we call stickability in the startup world. It needs to be stickable, creates stickability within a product. I think that's something that the world of gaming does really well, that games become addictive because the people who've created it have created addiction within that system. So from that perspective, I'd love to ask you the approach that product developers like yourself have towards creating products. How do you make it addictive? Is there these tips and tricks which actually make products stickable or, you know, whatever. Can you, can you manipulate your consumers into thinking about your product when they're not using the product?

Yeah, I try not to use the word addiction because there's. Well, so I worked with Nir Eyal on his book Hooked, which is all about how to form, how to build habit forming products. And in the book there, there's a lot of discussion around addiction and morality of building products because you can. It is a superpower in many ways. Technology allows you to scale and do things. And now we have these phones and eventually we're going to have glasses and things that allow technology to invade or enhance our life depending on how you look at it, the way we see it. And when I say we. Nira and I have talked a lot about this. I think there's some things that are addictive is a negative thing. You don't want people to be addicted to things. And one way to frame it is there are certain products. Let's take Strava as an example. So Strava is an app to help you track your cycling. It's essentially an app to help you maintain healthful habits and be fit. And the design of Strava, the product designers behind that, their intention is essentially for you as a consumer to enjoy this and use this and engage with this product in this product they believe will enhance your life. It'll make you healthier, It'll be actually a net positive for you. And so that's sort of just one example of like, the more engagement, you could argue, is always going to be better. Of course, there is a point where anything, it can be taken to the nth degree and be a net negative, even if it's a helpful habit. But the design of creating an engaging product is super important, and it's not a negative. It doesn't mean it's addictive necessarily. One way to frame it too is if you are a creator. This is actually a good litmus test. If you're creating something and of course you want it to be engaging, and it's important for it to be engaging for a number of reasons. Maybe for your business model, maybe just because it's a sign of a product that people actually like. Engagement is a reflection of that One way, one litmus test is to say, like, do you use it? Do you believe this is helpful? And do you use it yourself? And when you compare it to a drug dealer, let's take a drug dealer who deals crap on the streets. There are a lot of the drug dealers who don't use it because they know it's terrible and they know it's going to harm them and probably kill them in the end, but they still give it out, they still sell drugs. And that's a good example where it sort of passes that litmus test, where it's like, well, you're creating addiction. You're creating ultimately net negative. Like, why aren't you participating or using this product yourself? You clearly know it's not healthy. It's not a good thing for your end customers. And so I think that's a good way to frame it and look at it. I think there's a lot of talk about tech addiction. And the whole documentary, I'm forgetting the name of it, that was on Netflix, got a lot of attention as well.

Social dilemma.

Yes, yes. The social Dilemma. Yeah, that was. How do I want to be careful how I say this, but it portrayed technology.

Just say it out loud, just say it aloud. We love.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, don't worry about offending people on this podcast.

Yeah, good. Well, it is. They bring up some valid points, I'll give them that. But it is propaganda towards one, one perspective. And the social dilemma essentially is assuming people don't have agency, assuming people don't have self control, assuming that people can't make their own decisions. It's also disregarding all the value that Facebook is just one example is creating in the world. And we've gotten to this point in technology and the ecosystem where people are super skeptical and there's reasons to be skeptical, but they're very negative about engaging products, products that people use on a regular basis. And I just think we should equip. And this is Nir's perspective. He wrote a whole second book called Indistractible, which is all about equipping consumers with a better understanding of how these products work and how to break unhelpful habits or addictions. And I think what we need to do, instead of criticizing, you know, these products that people do use and love because it's valuable for them, we should be instead equipping people with, you know, a better understanding and maybe the tools to stop addictions if they do occur. And so ultimately I'm more of a. What you'll learn from me is I'm more of an optimism, optimistic person, especially around technology. We have too many haters, too many critics, too many armchair CEOs saying how bad technology is. And that's not to say there aren't bad things that occur from technology. It's that's, you know, since the beginning of time, like cars were invented. Cars are technology and people die every day, lots of people die. But it's also enabled so many other things. And so that's how I kind of look at things. I think it's important for entrepreneurs and product designers to be thoughtful and really think of it like, if I was using this product, what would it do in my life? And is it a net positive? But ultimately, like, we should be supportive, I believe of companies and highly engaging products is not a bad thing.

I think product design is possibly one of the most important subjects you can learn as a human being. If you have entrepreneurial ambitions and the way to work that muscle is compassion. At the end of the day, understand how other human beings minds work, understand other human beings problems, understand how they'd interact with the stuff you're building. So keeping that in mind, I'd love for you to break down the product design of any popular social media platform. What's your favorite social media platform? Twitter. Twitter.

Twitter is up there. Yeah, I love Twitter. I use it every day. Yes, we can use that.

Could you break it down from a product design perspective? That okay, as users of Twitter, we're using it every day, we love Twitter. It's helping our minds, it's helping our perspectives widen. But what has the product team at Twitter thought of while designing Twitter?

Yeah, so, so first it kind of starts with what are you building and why do people want it? And so with Twitter, Twitter's evolution, and I won't obviously pretend to speak on their behalf entirely, but as I understand was very organic, I think in how things formed. I don't think anyone really truly understood what it would turn into today. What Twitter provides is a few things. One, it's essentially, it's the best place to see what's happening right now. It is where you find breaking news. It's where you get information directly from people around the world, whether it's people in the press or individuals or. It's really created, it's almost like its own API of information on the Internet. And that's really fascinating. The second thing is it really creates a place for community for you to learn and connect with other people. And I would say those are the two primary values in my mind of what Twitter provides. Now if you break it down, I think one model to look at Twitter and really almost any social product or consumer product is to use the hooked model which near came up with, and I love it because you can actually map pretty much any product to this four step process. And let's use Twitter as just one example. So one example, early days of Twitter it was on sms. So you sign up and you use sms to send tweets, 140 characters and you get SMS's back. And so there's this four step process. It's trigger action, variable reward and investment. And so the trigger might be getting a tweet from somebody that you follow. So a message comes in the sms, the notification is that initial trigger and that's what brings the attention to the service. Now the trigger is super important because in the early days of building or using a product, you don't, you haven't built a habit, you haven't actually built this like muscle memory to like go back to the product. So you need an external trigger at some point to like remind you to Say like, hey, here's a thing that's interesting or useful for you. And so when you get that trigger, you get the notification, the action is, you know, opening up that SMS and like viewing it. So it's really simple. The lower the friction to take the action, the better. So on your phone, it's simply a tap. But if it was, if you had to go to your mailbox to see your tweets, like, that's a lot of friction. Like, you gotta be there, you have to like walk over there, you have to open up the letters. That's obviously a ridiculous example, but that shows, like, the difference in friction is just dramatically lower. And now the variable reward. Now thinking this in real time, so maybe this might not be the best example, but the variable reward is the. That's the reward, that's the thing that you get. So when you're opening up that tweet, let's say you don't read the full tweet, the initial message. When you tap that action, you open up that tweet or that message, you now see the message, that's the reward. It's variable, meaning you don't know what you're going to get if it's always predictable. Just like, you know, this goes back to the gambling side. Like, slot machines are variable by definition. They kind of have to be. But like, if it was always the same, you know, every time you pull that crank, it's the same results that wouldn't be nearly as interesting or engaging. And now the last thing, the investment piece is the thing that people don't think about as much. So you have the user, like, sees the message, they tap the action, they view the tweet. The investment is when the user contributes something back to the service which ultimately brings them back. So an example of that could be, let's say the tweet is a message from my friend asking me a question. Now my investment is messaging that friend back, responding to their answer. What I've done now is contributed to the system. And that person now is going to get a trigger and they're going to get the action reward themselves. And they might also respond to me again, which will pull me back into the flow. And so the entire hook model is designed to break down like this simple flow in this loop that all these different products, email, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, all these products can be mapped to these different flows. And what they do is they ultimately drive engagement. And over time, those external triggers actually don't have to exist anymore. Technically, like today, I actually don't have any notifications except for Twitter DMs on my phone enabled. So I never get notifications saying like somebody tweeted something. But I check Twitter dozens of times a day because I've now been habituated to think in my head, oh, Twitter is where I'm going to go to see what's happening right now. Or Twitter, I might have some more notifications from some friends. I should probably check that out right now. Or I'm in between meetings. Let me see what's happening right now on Twitter. And so over time you see these external notifications become less important. And in fact I think your product has, at some point it almost should never have to rely on external triggers, ideally and instead rely entirely on internal triggers, things that comes up in the user's mind in certain occasions, that pulls them back into the service without any kind of external prompt or push.

That's the engineer inside you breaking down this process. I feel like it's actually again compassion that you've tapped into, but you've broken it down into this four step process.

Yeah, well, Nir takes all the credit because he's the one that kind of like dissected this through like years and years of studying, both studying products, but also studying like the psychology research papers. But what's interesting about this model is so that that might be the core loop, but then there are a lot of other loops that you'll find too. Like Twitter DMS has its own loop as well. It's totally separate Twitter DMs, you know, you get a DM, you get a message, action, response, like there are multiple loops usually within these platforms. Productant has multiple loops as well. The core homepage has its own loop. But then we also introduced collections where people could collect and essentially bookmark products under their own account, which has its own loop, which creates both that entire trigger, action, reward, investment kind of flow as well. I love this part of product design and thinking through product because it's super fun to think through. Almost like in systems, like how does the system work together and then how do you optimize each step? And it usually starts with what is the goal that the user has in mind? Like what are they trying to achieve? And two, what are they already trying to do? Like what behavior are they almost trying to hack around or use in a way that you might not expect before?

Beautiful. Ryan, talk to me about the Indian startup scene from a worldview. How's the world thinking of India? Because what you've pretty much done on this episode is also a bit of a coaching class when it comes to product. I'm sure there's a bunch of Indian entrepreneurs listening to this podcast till this point. What's the worldview about India? What should we be doing? I know that there's a lot of knowledge and wisdom that's a part of this country's culture. My hunch is that over the next 10 to 20 years we're going to take all that knowledge and wisdom and turn it into some form of tech. I also feel like when there's that much knowledge and wisdom in culture, if you engage with that knowledge and wisdom, you do become compassionate. Which again for me is the core of product design, understanding how other humans minds work. So whether it's about AI, whether it's about ar, I feel like we are going to see some big Indian tech startups over the next 10 to 20 years. But I'd love to know what the world thinks.

Yeah, actually I was looking this up recently. This year, 2021 there have been and someone should double check me on this because I haven't like, you know, triple checked these metrics, but there have been 12 new unicorns formed in India this year compared to last year. All of 2020 it was 9, 2019 it was 8. So by the end of this year, maybe it'll be 20, maybe it'll be more than double it was last year is just one example. And the Indian tech scene. So I'm investing as well. We've invested in six or seven companies in India, including one we literally just committed to invest in. And we're seeing a lot of entrepreneurship, a lot of really interesting ideas come out of the ecosystem. And furthermore on the consumer side we're also seeing this digitization happening where Internet access, broadband access, high speed access is now more and more available across the country. Covid, of course has changed the world, but certainly India as well as people, consumers and businesses have had to adopt to distributed working and online e commerce and things like that. And so we are very bullish on India and we'll continue to be investing in that category. And we're also seeing a lot of other investors as well invest in the ecosystem. One of the concerns and risks that early stage investors have always had with investing outside of, let's say Silicon Valley and some of the US tech hubs is that, well, who's going to follow on who's going to invest in the Series A and the Series B? And I think that was a very valid concern five to 10 years ago, relatively speaking to nowadays. I have zero concern. If a company's doing well, it will find funding and it will grow and be successful. And angellist, I mentioned earlier, they expanded to India. I think it was 2018 when they did that. And I was just chatting with utsav, who leads a team there, and they're through the Angellist platform. They're doing at least one investment a day, I believe, roughly speaking, in the Indian ecosystem, which is wild. There are thousands of investors on the AngelList India platform and they launch equity list as well. So they're investing heavily there. YC is also invested heavily in India. In the last batch, there are about 300 companies and I think almost 50 of them were from India. So almost 20% of those companies in that batch were from India. And that's not new for this last batch. That's actually been pretty consistent with prior batches over the past, I don't know, 3ish years. So, long story short, more people are investing in the ecosystem. As more companies get bigger and more successful, what happens is you have these companies scale, they learn a bunch of things about building companies and they meet really talented people, they spin off, they start their own company, and there's this beautiful flywheel effect that happens. And so that's what happened with Silicon Valley 15, 20 years ago. We had this density of talent and these companies scale and grow. And that led to more and more companies, both starting but also getting funded. And that's had a huge impact on the world. And so I think we're going to see a lot more Indian unicorns and a lot more innovation coming out of the ecosystem.

I want you to be rude here. What do you think India can learn from America? And what do you think America can learn from India? And you can be rude both ways. Be ruthless.

Let me start with the latter one. Well, I mean, I have a lot to learn still about India. I mean, I grew up in Oregon, lived in Silicon Valley, now live in la, and I had more to learn about India culturally. And so I always feel. Vedica works with me at Weekend Fund. She's born in India and so she comes from that culture. She's now in London, but she's in many ways like my cultural partner when it comes to understanding the space and the ecosystem. And I think that's important, I think for us entrepreneurs and investors to understand better is just what is the Indian ecosystem like culturally, but also from a regulatory perspective, it's very different. And so that's one thing that's been on my mind a lot lately. The other, in terms of what India can learn from the US And I say this with the utmost respect, but historically, Indian companies have not been the best in design. They've been great in other areas. But I think the design aesthetics and design execution is what's probably been lacking compared to other ecosystems. And you see a lot of really amazing Indian companies and the design is just isn't quite there compared to like, maybe. Well, France actually is a good example where their design esthetics and their design skills there are fantastic. I've also spoken to a lot of, a lot of entrepreneurs in France and their product design, like just aesthetic design execution is always like world class. And so I think that's, that's one of the biggest things missing, I think, in India, because, you know, ultimately a lot of Indian companies are actually building for a global audience. And, you know, maybe Indian consumers might have a different expectation when it comes to design execution, but the world.

You're right. Yeah, no, no, you're right. Like, if, if you're an Indian startup in a particular space and design is, you know, one of your strengths, it's a way to break out. So you're spot on.

Yeah. And I don't know, I haven't done enough research to understand why that is. Like, why are. And this isn't a knock against India specifically because each ecosystem has its own characteristics. Like, you know, Silicon Valley might be like, maybe too engineering focused, too much of that kind of like, perspective. And then when you look at like France, you know, they're really strong in design, but not in other areas. And you look at other, other ecosystems, like Israel, maybe they're really good in like, AI and some of the hard tech, but not so much in design execution as well. And so it is interesting to see. It's almost like each ecosystem tends to have different characteristics or strengths or weaknesses.

So here's my $0.02 on the same subject. Most of our population hadn't got access to the Internet until recently. A big part of our population didn't even have access to television. Okay, so the rest of the world is watching television together. We're watching old shows like Fear Factor and Malcolm in the Middle. And like all these shows which only urban Indian audiences were watching. So urban Indian audiences kind of progressed in terms of design along with the rest of the world. So when Instagram came out, it appealed as much to us. We started using Instagram almost at the same time as when the rest of the world did. But the rest of India hadn't got access to television, to the Internet. They were still watching films from the 90s, films from the 80s, so their design aesthetics are still stuck there. Now, if you're an Indian product and you're designing primarily for India, first you've got to design it according to the average of the mindset of the population. So even if there were designers who were talented within those teams, probably the founder said, no, this is not the vision we have, because our customer comes from the interiors of the country and then design it according to their design aesthetic, which doesn't match the rest of the world. But since the whole Internet boom has happened here in 2016, I think India is becoming more globalized in terms of design. Products like PUBG took off a lot in interior India. We're using the same social media platforms that the rest of the world is using. So I think the country is catching up, but it will take another five years. And within these five years, companies that actually focus on design aesthetics, that'll kind of be a strength, that'll be a way for these companies to break out from the pack. So that's my 2 cents on it.

Yeah. No, that's interesting. I love learning from you on that. That makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. Urban India is another country. It's completely different. Urban India is like the rest of the world. The clothes we like, the food we like. It's like the rest of the world. The interiors of India are another country. And India is kind of pretty much a collection of multiple countries together, and everyone's got their own design aesthetic. That's the other. The other kind of point within that topic. Okay, we got to move on to the Twitterverse questions, because there's a lot of questions sent in for you.

Let's do it.

Let's do it right now. Okay, Ryan Hoover, we got to talk about questions. I'm going to take questions from my team first. The first question is from Ipshita. Have you experienced. Experienced a significant shift in how you perceive life since the pandemic began? And I'd also love the entrepreneur in you speaking up and answering this particular question, because wherever there's a shift in lifestyle, there are opportunities for entrepreneurship.

Yeah, for me. For me, not as much. The reason for that is the product and team has been fully distributed everywhere, from we have teammates in India to Canada to London, Paris, and. And also Vedica, who works with me at Weekend Fund. She's also in London. So remote distributed working has been normal for me. So in many ways, maybe I have been far less affected, I suppose, but it's getting us to question actually do we want to live in multiple locations? We're now here in la, we like it here. But we might actually shift and move into a different city and kind of split time and kind of be more global in that sense.

So work from home is your big highlight that got solidified after the pandemic? Pretty much.

I was already working from home actually, so it was just. What changed is my partner Susie. She now works from home and I love that because I have to wait for her to come home to eat dinner together. And also now she and I can travel and work remotely together as well.

Got it. Satyam Pandey from my team asks, what are some future technologies that you should keep your eye on? Again, from an entrepreneurial or startup perspective, what's Silicon Valley thinking about? That's my follow up question to that.

Yeah, I mean everyone, everyone has a different, I would say preference or bias towards like what they're excited about. I mean we're, we're excited about not to, I hate to say in the crypto word, but very excited about crypto and what's happening there. More so now than I would say in the last boom. I think we're seeing a lot more maturity in the sense of, you know, infrastructure and even the number of people investing and spending time in it. And frankly we're doing some investments in the space. We're trying to get smarter about the space. But over time what we'll see is web 2.0 and 3.0 kind of merge and ultimately web 3.0 will take over a lot of what I think we've seen historically in the next decade. So what that actually looks like is kind of tbd, but the space and opportunity is just massive. A few other interesting categories like audio and voice is super interesting to us. It has been for a while, partly because you have smart speakers in at least in the U.S. i think half of U.S. homes have a smart speaker like an Alexa device or a Google home. We have these airpods in our ears that seem really small. But going back to the friction piece that I mentioned earlier, even small reductions of friction can dramatically increase engagement. And I'm sure Apple will also open up more APIs and functionality too to build. On top of that, distributed and remote working also is something that we've been excited about since the beginning of weekend fund in 2017. I just think that is the future. You know, Ayush, who introduced us from Pesto, they're a part of that future, bridging the gap between us and Indian talent. So those are a Few categories that we're really excited about, that we're following.

Do you think that there's a lot of untapped Indian talent, like from your experiences? And you don't need to be nice here, you can just be honest. Are we on par with the rest of the world or is the world way ahead of us in terms of coding, in terms of artificial intelligence knowledge, in terms of creating futuristic product? Or is there talent that exists within India that just hasn't got opportunity yet accordingly?

Honestly, the truth is, I don't know. It's hard to take averages. There's no doubt many of the best engineers are in India. I think the big difference in Gap is companies finding those people. Right now there's a problem with the way that we hire people in the US and really globally is that a lot of people use resumes like what school did you go to and what company did you work at? And that is a proxy for talent, but it's not sufficient. And to use an example, at Prototon Ratto, he's head of engineering, been working with me and the team for I think six years now. He's in Sofia, Bulgaria. I don't even know if he went to school. I don't know where he worked at before, meaning I don't care. But he's one of the best engineers I've ever worked with. And we just need to find new ways to be able to surface and curate and match talent to companies. I think that's the bigger issue. They're there. It's just how do we people together?

So what do you suggest should be, you know, a replacement for resumes? Like what, what, like some kind of test, some kind of platform?

Well, the, the best way to get to know how good someone is is to work with them. But obviously that's. You can't work with everybody. That applies for a job. So my initial thinking is how do you work backwards from that? How do you get more data on how people actually work? I think seeing what people have built, like actually seeing in the case of engineering, actually look at the code of projects they built before, that can be extremely telling. And I think there's also an opportunity around references still that hasn't been tapped. I think references are super powerful. But there's a lot of reasons why it's very difficult to get honest references, either for social, cultural reasons or just. It's just not. It's not the most scalable thing. So I'm not sure what the answer is exactly, but those are the two areas I would look at Gotcha.

Lots of questions about the investment side of things. You've invested in startups yourself. So again, this is Ipshita from my team. Her question is what do you look for in startups that you'd like to invest in? Do you look into the team in detail? Do you look into the market that they're in? You look into the product, what's in your mind or what have you learned over time?

Yeah, yeah. I mean there's the old, you know, team, market, product are three like major variables. And some, some investors have different biases. Maybe they're more market focused, some are more team focused. We don't. Ours is more of a contextual answer. I think ultimately what we're looking for are teams that are capitalizing on a consumer behavior shift or technology shift. So consumer behavior shift could be essentially what does the world want now that they didn't want before? How is their life changing? So an example could be remote distributed working is actually a very obvious cultural and consumer behavior shift. We now work from home and that doesn't change work, it changes education, it changes travel, it changes a lot of things. So we like to understand like what does this founder, this team understand and what insight do they have into this shift? And then the technology side, it's essentially what technologies are available now that weren't available yesterday and what, what can you build now with that technology? Whether it's audio and voice like I mentioned before, or you know, crypto is unlocking a lot of opportunities. And so our thinking is really like what is that shift and what insight do they have? And then from there we try to understand, okay, well why is this the team to build it? Like what unique insight or experience or product do they have in the market that's capitalizing on these things. So yeah, I wish I had like a formula. A job would be a lot easier if there was like a formula I could like put everybody through. But you know, we're investing super early, sometimes pre product and so, you know, it takes a lot of I think conviction in the team and the market to make those kind of decisions.

Got it. Aryan Sharma, he's asked you a question. I already asked you, but I have a follow up question to what he's asking. His question is what's some product trends that he's excited about in the next five years. I'm guessing you're going to say crypto. You also said you've invested in crypto and or you want to invest in crypto based startups going forward. But what is a crypto based startup. And correct me if I'm wrong, but is it something like, okay, so you have the whole traditional financial world with all its workings, and then it's going to be mimicked in the blockchain world, in the crypto world, and there's going to be opportunity to create businesses which kind of mimic a real world analog finances business. But in the world of crypto and blockchain, is it these businesses that you speak of?

Yeah, there's a lot. So the word crypto is so broad, it could touch so many different things. To your point, the areas that we're excited about in this space and frankly we're still learning because it's changing every month, but the areas that we're particularly excited about right now are social or community tokens is really fascinating to us. A buddy of mine, Trevor, started fwb, which is a tokenized discord community to start with, meaning you have to buy FWB tokens to get access into this discord. And similar to bitcoin and many other currencies, there's a finite number of FWB coins. And so as more people buy, the price appreciates.

It's like currencies within games. Like in the same way that you'd purchase currencies within a FIFA or an NBA game, you do this to be a part of that app or whatever, that service, and then there's a whole loop within that. Its own cryptocurrency loop.

Yes. Yeah. And in fact, going back to the video game conversation in this part, gaming has illustrated a lot of these virtual economies. Some of the most sophisticated game design thinkers and effectively economists are building these economies inside of digital games and digital worlds. And we're starting to see this now being applied to the real world. I put that in quotes. But what that unlocks like social or community tokens is very fascinating because it's frankly, I don't know exactly what people are going to launch, but a lot of people have experimented things. This guy named Alex created his own coin and his motivation was actually to have people invest in him and give him enough money to move to San Francisco and build the company. Ultimately it was just a crazy experiment. He got some money, he got people to buy in. He also allowed them to vote on certain things, like what he would eat. So like it was very experimental. And so I love, I love weird stuff like that that are on the fringes and so social community tokens and kind of what that enables. It also touches on the creator economy. And how do you Create different types of almost like ways for creators to monetize and make money, but also allow their community or their users to benefit in that. That progression or that success, I think is really fascinating. So that's probably the most exciting or interesting area of crypto. But there are a number of others too, to explore.

You know, when they talk about creator economy based startups. I'm a creator, I'm a very active creator right now. I've been a creator for like five, six years now. I feel this consolidation that's happened in the creative space, at least in India, people who've been there have like solidified themselves, they have a position for themselves. And these creator economy based products are primarily meant for people who are on the up. But the issue is that in India we don't have that many creators who are on the up that will kind of help these startups actually become profitable. So I feel when we're speaking about creator economy products, we're still like five years behind in India, but the world is ready for them actually. What do you have to say about that? What are you sensing about the creator economy in usa?

Yeah, that is an interesting point. Yeah. I think it's similar to what we were saying before. When you have more and more unicorns in terms of successful companies in India that scale and have hundreds of employees or teammates, what that leads to is really this flywheel effect. And I imagine something similar will happen in the creator economy as well as more and more massive successful creators come out of India that will also inspire more people to do it in their region. Because I think representation is. Representation is important. I wish that nobody, I wish we didn't have to. I wish representation wasn't a necessity. But it is a necessity sometimes to inspire a little kid to see somebody that's like, that person looks like me. And I can relate to that. Maybe I can do that too. And so I think that's a part of it. Ultimately it kind of comes down to this compounding effect where in five years India from a tech perspective might be dramatically larger and more successful because of all these effects over time that compound.

Got it. Because we're catching up with the rest of the world. So when an economy is on the rise, there's opportunity there. Yes, that's how I look at it. How does the world of product and how does generally tech companies in Silicon Valley look at the world of content? How do they look at content creators? Because I feel like there's a skill that we call code coding and then there's another Skill, skill of content, creating gripping videos, being able to sell yourself on social media. So do you think these two worlds are going to converge at some point? Are they already converging? Ayush actually had told me this way back about a couple of years ago. He said that the easiest way to create stickability and product is put great content into it. People come back for the content. I couldn't wrap my head around the statement back then. Over time, since I've began, since I've begun working on my own products, I've understood the power of that statement. I said, oh shit, I didn't even know that this skill I had worked on is actually useful even outside of social media. Yeah, but I'd love for you to expand on that thought.

Well, yeah, I mean, another way that I look at it is what's the hardest thing in building a product in a company? And for many it isn't the act of like, can you build it? Like it's actually easier and easier to build things. Now this of course isn't true necessarily for like you know, cutting edge ML perhaps, but like the average startup, tech startup is, is the risk isn't can they build it, it's actually can they get users and can they get attention? And that's partly because it's becoming increasingly competitive, you know, globally, but certainly in India as well. And this is where creators or those with audiences are extremely powerful and impactful. And frankly, I think their influence will, will continue to be on the rise as more and more competition comes in. Finding ways to get distribution and attention is going to be more and more important. I wrote a blog post, I forget like three or four years ago just about like audience versus startups. Meaning like there are certain people that have started with building an audience. They don't have a product yet, maybe not even a company, but they actually invest a lot of time in building content or building something that creates an audience for themselves and also creates influence that they control. Like Casey Neistat is kind of just one of many examples where he spent years and years flogging and built an amazing massive following. And eventually he started building Beam. And while Beam didn't ultimately take off, it was a really creative social network kind of UGC play. He had guaranteed distribution from day one. He de risked the hardest part of building a company, especially in consumer social, which is distribution. And so I think that having some audience is super important. And the second part of that that I'll also mention though is there's also, there's another lever to that so there's audience, which is one thing, which is a one to many kind of thing. It's like you create content n number of people can interact and consume it. But what's really powerful is if you can build community, which is a many to many kind of relationship. And like productant for example, I blogged a lot and I didn't have a massive audience, but I built a big enough audience that when productant launched, I had users from day one and I had at least enough to kickstart the community. But over time, I don't post on product a ton, I don't have to. The community is posting, the community is doing all the content creation and I can go on vacation and it's still happening. And so that is something that I think is worth thinking about. Not that everyone needs to build a community, but those with audiences. If you can transfer that audience into a community, it's actually dramatically more powerful and more scalable than just a pure kind of audience play.

So what I hear from you is mainly distribution and marketing. But do you feel, I mean, after interacting with content creators that you've met, do you feel that any other skills that the world of content gives you that can be applied in the startup world, for example? I feel like it does kind of work, that design muscle for a lot of people. It also works the compassion muscle, like understanding consumer psychology, because you have immediate feedback for something you're releasing. Like you've worked for days, you work for weeks on a project, a video, an article, you put it out and you know immediately how this is going to be received. So over time you kind of understand psychology on a much deeper level. But that's just what I feel. What do you think about this?

Yeah, I think it depends on. There are different forms, of course, like podcasting and vlogging, and that is one form. There's many other forms, like content creation, I think. Well, one thing I love about content creation specifically writing actually is, you know, writing is a vehicle to learn and writing, to write something, you have to understand it. And so in some ways the act of creating that content hopefully helps you better understand your audience or your product or whatever. Like you're writing about, you should better understand that space or that topic. And it also creates more relatability to your point, but also authority in a sense. So when you create some content and people find it of value and they learn from it, they now trust you more and that trust can be transferred into like, let's say, conversions for your product over time. So yeah, I Think. I think a good, good. I think it's really important to think about audience as a part of most companies. Not that you can't just purely build a product and avoid any of that audience building kind of processes. But I don't know, I'm a big fan of those that are building audiences like yourself because I think it's really powerful and allows you to also segue and transfer that to different products over time. Let's say you come up with a product idea tomorrow and you know, ultimately it doesn't work out. But then like next year you try a totally different product for the same kind of demographic that you built an audience for, that that still carries with you. It's like, it's, it's, it's like this evergreen like value that you have that helps with all projects that you start in the future.

Thank you for the mentorship session, man. I appreciate it. Learned a lot on this podcast, as did all the listeners, all the young entrepreneurs, the college students, the dreamers listening to this till this point. Ryan, one last simple question from you, breaking away from the entrepreneurial side of things. If you were dying in the next one hour, what would you like to tell the world right now?

If I was dying in the next hour? Wow. So morbid. What would I tell? Oh, man.

Hmm.

Well, I wish I had like a really catchy, catchy, like one liner to give you, but in less catchy, like succinct ways. I think I'm just super pro entrepreneurship. I'm pro building, procreating. Procreating, not like babies, but like procreating products and technology. Because the reason for that is like product. And part of my motivation with it is not necessarily to always, you know, spotlight the well funded big companies in the world. The majority of projects on Product Hunt are side projects or really small startups that no one has heard about before. And I think it's really important for us to going back to what I said about optimism, we should be optimistic. We should encourage people to build things even if it's awful and shitty, frankly, like that first. Whose first product or first essay or first anything wasn't shitty like it always is. But we should encourage people and give them the motivation to keep pursuing that, I think ambition because that's just making the world better ultimately. So that's a lot of what I think about and that's why I'm investing. That's part of the reason why I'm so excited about Product Hunt still more than seven years later. And so, yeah, go build. I guess is maybe what I would recommend everyone do.

Beautiful. Ryan Hoover, thank you for being on the Ranveer show, brother. I'll be linking all your social media handles down below. Big thank you from the bottom of my heart and from the bottom of the hearts of all the listeners of this podcast. Appreciate you being on the show.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me.

So that was the episode with Ryan Hoover. If you enjoyed it, make sure you share it with all your entrepreneurial buddies. Everyone who wants to learn a little bit more about the tech space from a global perspective on a very personal level. This was a tuition class for me because I have experienced the world of entrepreneurship in the services business through Monk Entertainment. Creating Level, which is a tech product and a very loaded tech product at, that requires a certain amount of mentorship, a certain amount of guidance, a lot of the questions that I asked Ryan, who are very specific to the product that we are trying to build at Level. Before this podcast was released for you guys, we even ran it through the entire Level team, just to ensure that all our bases are covered, that we're covering the basics. And that's kind of the power that I want to bring out in every single episode of this podcast. Every single episode should change you a bit, should elevate you, should help you out in your actual professional and personal life. We didn't talk much about relationships or spirituality on this one, but this one was a professional gold mine of information, honestly, at least for me, at least for my fellow entrepreneurs, at least for people who are interested in the tech space. So if you enjoyed it, make sure you tell us, drop a comment. Also, follow us on Spotify. We're a Spotify exclusive. Every episode's available 48 hours before it's available anywhere else in the world. If you want more episodes like this, please let us know. Follow us on social media and tell us who else you'd like to see on the Ranbir Show.