Product Hunt Gets $6.1M Series A Funding from A16Z and Alexis Ohanian

http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/08/product-hunt-gets-6-1-million-series-a-funding-from-a16z-and-alexis-ohanian/

by lalwanivikas • 12 years ago

52 50 12 years ago

Key questions I have: Does product hunt generate any revenue currently ? (I know it isn't directly related to valuation, just curious) How big is the current team?

vishalzone2002• 12 years ago

not sure about any revenue. But I guess they are 9 right now. Ryan sent out a blog article about his journey in his newsletter today : https://medium.com/on-startups/the-artifacts-of-product-hunt...

jitnut• 12 years ago

I guess they do via sponsored hunt in a newsletter!

Alex3917• 12 years ago

So just as a data point, I actually co-founded a YC startup a few years ago that was working on a similar problem. On paper it seems like a promising space because there are 300 - 500k new consumer products launched each year in the US, not including media titles.

What we found though was that probably 98% of these products were completely commodified, as in a new brand of 2% milk or a new kind of paperclips. We would go to industry events with, say, 20,000 CPG food products, but of those there were maybe only 5 - 10 per year that were interesting enough to actually be worth talking about. And even reaching out to contract manufacturers directly to get new products at the very beginning of the pipeline yielded limited results.

We were actually offered funding, but ended up shutting down the startup instead because we found that while we could make money doing bespoke projects for companies with large budgets, the market just wasn't there to build the products that we initially wanted to build. If Product Hunt can innovate on the lead gen though then it's definitely cool space, and I'm excited to see what they can come up with.

wastedhours• 12 years ago

Congrats to Ryan. Am assuming there's a biz dev play here, what do we think? Affiliate revenue, "featured" products, native advertising curated lists (e.g. Samsung sponsors a list of cool Android apps...)?

AznHisoka• 12 years ago

featured products make the most sense. In the end, they're all a form of native advertising.

minimaxir7• 12 years ago

I am really not a fan of PH because I don't trust it at all (previous longer rant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8362759). Votes are gamed when everyone is spamming for upvotes on Twitter (https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=product%20hunt%20upv...) although Ryan mentioned in replies to previous rant that he would "write a bullet point in the FAQ about asking for upvotes," which won't stop it at all.

Addiitonally, there's an unusual amount of pandering, to use an apt word, to Product Hunt / Ryan Hoover in submissions to PH ("We have special Product Hunt functionality/branding in our product and Ryan took a quirky selfie while using it! That means we're awesome!") The problem with that this distracts from actually objectively good products, a counterpoint to PH's mission to "find the best products," and it shouldn't be a surprise that many top PH submissions end up fading into obscurity, which is a disservice to everyone.

opendais9• 12 years ago

Ya, I avoid it as well as since its pretty clear they don't mind it being gamed since it lets them tap people's social networks [e.g. twitter followers] for traffic.

Its a useful growth hack for most things but for this its kinda the opposite.

crazypyro• 12 years ago

Well when the founder was the initial twitter spammer, its kind of hard to turn around and tell everyone not to do it without drawing criticism.

andreasklinger4• 12 years ago

We do a lot to filter those kind of votes. We are just not so open about it and it's not so much common knowledge.

Bit longer comment from above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8427499

ajiang• 12 years ago

Isn't this a problem that can be easily fixed in the same way that HN looks for vote rigging? Seems like one week of work in putting in a fraud detection / collusion / vote weighting system. Also seems to be just a minor growing pain, a feature just ignored so far because it hasn't been important to work on, but once it becomes a bigger concern by the community, I can't think of a good reason why it wouldn't be resolved.

Pandering is hard to stop, but again as the community matures, you'll likely see counter culture develop in the community in the same way HN commenters complain about the first comment to any article being a negative response about the submitted content ;)

opendais9• 12 years ago

The problem is they've made it pretty clear they won't bother as its been mentioned multiple times and the general response is "Oh, we'll add a FAQ bullet point" or the like and then it gets blown off.

"May I incentivize people for upvoting my product?

Please don't. People should upvote things they genuinely like or find interesting, not because they're bribed with free (metaphorical) candy. :)"

http://www.producthunt.com/about

That is as close as it gets.

minimaxir7• 12 years ago

Isn't this a problem that can be easily fixed in the same way that HN looks for vote rigging? Seems like one week of work in putting in a fraud detection / collusion / vote weighting system. Also seems to be just a minor growing pain, a feature just ignored so far because it hasn't been important to work on, but once it becomes a bigger concern by the community, I can't think of a good reason why it wouldn't be resolved.

It would be relatively simple to stop: Hacker News implements a behavior where upvotes on direct links to a HN submission from a non-HN referrer do not count. Of course, there's a workaround (not disclosed here) to this behavior : if PH implemented a similar system, everyone would just use the workaround, as there's a strong financial incentive for the average person to upvote-beg (Hacker News has flagging which strongly offsets any upvotes for inappropriate articles using this method, while PH downvotes are equal power to upvotes). Additionally, there's a strong disincentive for PH to stop upvote begging (each upvote beg tweet is a free name drop for Product Hunt), which is why I'm not fond of the "bullet point" instead of "tell the user that upvote begging is bad"

andreasklinger4• 12 years ago

We have anti-vote-ring and anti-vote-spam in place. Similar to HN actually. They and also people of the reddit team help us a lot.

Additionally we have a moderator team that additionally looks for in-balanced behaviour.

I understand that a lot of people are asking on twitter for upvotes - so far we are able to filter those in the rankings. We are considering to communicate the policies even more public - but step by step.

Disclaimer: CTO @ PH.

lomapur2• 12 years ago

Do you know about any better alternative to PH ?

I'm not trying to say "It's the best, if you don't like it get lost", but I love startups and I'm honestly curious.

opendais9• 12 years ago

https://pay.reddit.com/r/startups https://pay.reddit.com/r/entrepreneur https://pay.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness https://pay.reddit.com/r/kickstarter

Sorta. PH is a bit better focused because its designed around its idea.

minimaxir7• 12 years ago

Incidentally, most companies that "launch" on PH end up just submitting their product to Hacker News the same day, so there's really not much difference. (the new "show" tab may put a better emphasis on such posts)

morgante• 12 years ago

Show HN?

lolwutf• 12 years ago

My frustration with Product Hunt is that it gives underperforming biz folks a whole new shiny label to add to their resume: Product Nerd!

'Product Nerd' = professional opinion giver = get back to work!

gfodor• 12 years ago

Something tells me they try to avoid saying the name aloud

bluker• 12 years ago

How is Product Hunt any different from HN? HN has already created a culture of upvoting the best tech products from people who know their shit. I may be naive but how can the PH experience improve upon the already exceptional HN experience?

kristofferR2• 12 years ago

Product Hunt is about Products, Hacker News is about News.

minimaxir7• 12 years ago

That's a false dichotomy. There's a reason "Show HN" exists and has existed for years.

benologist• 12 years ago

To me Product Hunt complements HN in a really fantastic way - it's made HN a much smaller target for every startup that wishes success was as simple as hitting HN's front page once or twice a week with some contrived content. Those guys have a better outlet, and we have better content.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

Am I having a deja-vu or did this already happen a month ago?

minimaxir7• 12 years ago

The raise was leaked a month ago: today is the confirmation.

petercooper2• 12 years ago

They raised $1m about a month ago: http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/21/product-hunt-announces-seed... .. so I'm guessing total is now $7.1m with the newly announced $6.1m? (Unless they were separately announced parts of the same round.)

ilghiro2• 12 years ago

I love ProductHunt. A lot. Many lots. I take a look at it most days.

At the end of the day though it's just a good list. There's no barrier to entry and as soon as they add in any revenue streams that justify a huge valuation (which I certainly can't figure out anyway) then what's to stop "Product Hunt - No Ads" from stealing the "market"?

xpose2000• 12 years ago

I have two things to say.

1. I agree with what minimaxir said. It seems like friends of friends of friends control the entire place. HN seems less "controlled" than PH. Even Ryan himself went above and beyond to make sure that Alexis' friends were able to comment right off the bat. (https://twitter.com/rrhoover/status/489931085048860672) In hindsight, this paid off since he got funding and I don't blame him. But to the average user who has been waiting to comment - it's incredibly frustrating.

And why the heck is commenting disabled by default anyway? Why does it sound like a good idea to only allow friends of friends a voice to comment? Provide some type of "participant threshold", and then allow everyone to comment and block those who abuse it.

2. They got 6.1M in funding. I am not from the startup "funding" ilk, but that sounds like a ridiculously high number to me. What could they possibly be building that requires that much capital? The site and premise of it now is fairly simple to implement and code. Perhaps they have grand plans that are way above my head?

opendais9• 12 years ago

2. They got 6.1M in funding. I am not from the startup "funding" ilk, but that sounds like a ridiculously high number to me. What could they possibly be building that requires that much capital? The site and premise of it now is fairly simple to implement and code. Perhaps they have grand plans that are way above my head?

The only thing I can think of is competing with AngelList as it operates in a neighboring market with alot of customer overlap.

People interested in VC, Startups, Jobs @ Startups.

brentm• 12 years ago

They have to be rolling out Product Hunt for X. There are a lot of verticals where it will be way bigger than this one. They'll need a lot of capital to roll these verticals out before everyone else does. Look at Stack Overflow and their large network of somewhat independent niche sites.

petercooper2• 12 years ago

But to the average user who has been waiting to comment - it's incredibly frustrating.

One thing is when you're a "normal" user, see a discussion you could add true value to, and then realize.. d'oh, I can't comment. While I still enjoy looking at things PH links to, I've stopped reading the comments because I've found seeing a comment you can't respond to is more irritating than I'd have ever previously imagined :-)

NicoJuicy2• 12 years ago

Lol, 6.1M for a HN-alternative for products (and the HN original has been created by one guy solely).

That's pretty sick :s

NicoJuicy2• 12 years ago

PS. I made a HN with Tags and custom input fields (it's not completely finished yet)... I thought about selling it for 8 K. (already have a client)

But if anyone want's to give a million, i can get arround the NDA.

Fyi, it's made with Asp.Net MVC, a JS View Engine and i'm not kidding either. Lower bids are also welcome.

ljk• 12 years ago

the third highest voted product on the page right now is a $125 monitor stand....

ilghiro2• 12 years ago

the second highest voted product is a newsletter

korzun• 12 years ago

This is the same play as PandoDaily. Free channel of press for VC's and their connections.

giarc• 12 years ago

I browse PH everyday, however it seems like I only need to do it once. The list seems stagnant; it looks the same at 9am as it does at 5pm. So unlike HN, reddit, FB I spend maybe 3-4 minutes on PH. I would like to see their metrics on site visitation to see if perhaps others share this issue.

Product Hunt Gets $6.1M Series A Funding from A16Z and Alexis Ohanian

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