rrhoover

Sending love, whisky friend :)

This was written for investors but curious to hear the POV from more founders

Appreciate that. :)

We also entered the market at the right time. 2013 was very optimistic as mobile hit mainstream and barriers to build lowered. We’re entering a similar phase with AI today.

It's been a while since I've published an essay. Hopefully this is useful for a few folks.

I do implicitly as I've gotten to know talented, motivated people

I've been doing a lot of self-reflection going into the new year and thought I would share some learnings building Product Hunt over the past 5 years, along with our YC application video (perhaps against my better judgement). :)

Product Hunt (YC S14) | Full time | REMOTE

We love products, care about people, and thirst to build a community that celebrates making. Our distributed, tight-knit team is headquartered in SF. We're looking for a few fine folks to join us:

Head of Social Media and News: https://angel.co/product-hunt/jobs/325616-head-of-social-med...

Senior Full-Stack Engineer: https://angel.co/product-hunt/jobs/229499-senior-full-stack-...

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️AngelList | Full time | REMOTE

Additionally, we're building a small, strong team to work on a new stealth project inside of AngelList. Our mission: to support startups, makers, and those building and shaping the future of tech.

Senior Full-Stack Engineer, Platform: https://angel.co/angellist/jobs/407418-senior-full-stack-eng...

Head of Community Marketing, Platform: https://angel.co/angellist/jobs/405764-head-of-community-mar...

Community Manager, Platform: https://angel.co/angellist/jobs/435059-community-manager-pla...

Funny you ask. Jacq on our team is planning our next retreat. Earlier this year we brought everyone to SF. The year prior shortly after the acquisition, the entire team (including AngelList) went to Mexico which was a great opportunity to get to know the broader team.

This time we may do an offsite elsewhere, which might be more fun and affordable.

It's been a loooong time since we hosted a hackathon. The last one took place at YC HQ in Mountain View three years ago.

So far we have 1,000+ makers signed up and awesome group of judges, including YC's very own Michael Seibel, participating.

Love the idea of connecting makers with specific beta testers that match their target audience. We're exploring this as well.

Re: "spackling of existing services", you're right. We saw so many people piecing various services together (Mailchimp, Typeform, homemade landing pages, etc.) and see an opportunity to simplify and connect all these things together so that makers can focus more of their time building their product.

Product Hunt's ranking works similar to Hacker News. As mentioned in our F[AQ](https://www.producthunt.com/faq#how-do-things-end-up-on-the-...) is based on the number of upvotes, time since posting[1], and detected voting rings/spam accounts.

[1] Time is an important which introduces a "velocity" factor. For example, a product with 100 upvotes that was posted 1 hour ago would generally be ranked above another product with 100 upvotes that was posted 12 hours ago.

[2] We also slightly modify rankings for logged in users based on topics and friends they follow.

Hey, Sam! You recently announced HN is being split off from YC. What changes will we see to the site/community in the next 6 months?

My favorite quote: "If you are driven by social signals, you shouldn’t be an entrepreneur."

We do have voting ring detection in place and often inform makers of our policy on Twitter when we see them asking for upvotes (often times they simply don't know it's not OK) in addition to highlighting this policy in the email that people receive when they're tagged as a maker.

Hi, @taphangum! Sorry about that. :( We ask that makers tweet at @producthunt to get access if they can't already comment. My apologies if you already tried that but I've updated your account so you should be able to jump in the thread now.

As a long-time follower of the mysterious and opinionated Startup L Jackson, we had a fun time chatting with him on the podcast.

I certainly didn't mean to imply "teams have no leaders, and everybody is equally responsible for the success or failure of the business."

I have very strong opinions and recognize the importance of leadership.

Hi, alediaferia. First off, I understand this might be frustrating. Over the past several months, traffic and activity has increased significantly. We're receiving well over 200 submissions every day and while some of these products end up on the homepage (posted or promoted by curators/moderators), the current design won't accommodate several hundreds of posts.

That said, we're exploring changes with respect to submissions, to scale the community. It may be a while before we introduce significant changes here as this is a significant change, but please know that we're working on making Product Hunt more transparent and inclusive.

I've learned a ton from Nir's writing and talks.

Fun fact: before we published the book Nir had the genius idea of crowdsourcing feedback from his readers. Hundreds of people read a rough draft in Google Doc version, correct (the inevitable) typos and annotating suggestions for improvement. It was a great way to get early feedback before finalizing the book and allow its most dedicated readers to be a part of it. Everyone that helped is listed in the back of the book.

I've never told makers to beg for upvotes and in cases where people have incentivized people (e.g. donating money to charity for every upvote -- yes, that happened), we've removed the post entirely.

We're updating our FAQ (producthunt.com/about) to be more clear. We're also considering sending an email to makers when they engage in the discussion, recommendations and policies on this topic. Would love to hear if you have more ideas on this.

Also, as I mentioned in this thread a minute ago, I favorite people talking about Product Hunt (and often reply, too) to let them know I'm listening. I don't mean this as a sign of endorsement when people explicitly ask for upvotes, although I understand how this could be interpreted that way.

Ultimately, our goal is to empower the community to surface what they want to see and also encourage thoughtful discussion. Sharing ones post and soliciting conversation is important for the latter, and we're making improvements to our recommendation/invite system so that more people can join the discussion.

I favorite to show people I'm listening (read-receipt). It's not an endorsement for asking for upvotes. I realize how this would be misinterpreted so perhaps I'll avoid that in the future.

We discourage people from explicitly asking others to upvote their product and you may notice often times product with a high upvote count are actually at the bottom of the page or removed entirely for trying to game the rankings. It's not perfect but we have systems in place to ensure the products featured toward the top, are what the community genuinely thinks is most interesting or useful.

To follow up on #5, talk like a human. People are generally turned off by PR speak so I recommend makers be personable. :)

Good question, jbail.

The first version of the app admittedly looks very similar to the web experience. We wanted to get something out sooner, rather than later and the most requested feature since Product Hunt launched, has been an iOS app. Our most dedicated fans visit the site multiple times per day so we wanted to make it more accessible.

Although our mobile web version isn't terrible, the native app is faster and easier to use. More importantly, it sets us up to do some interesting things later on, such as interactive push notifications.

Yikes! Sorry about that, goeric. Mind emailing me your phone number and twitter username to ryan@producthunt.com? We're working through some bugs now.

EDIT: looks like we ran out of Twilio credits. Just reloaded!

Excited to finally release our iOS app, created by the amazingly talented David McKinney (http://davidmckinney.com/). This version is still very early and we're working through some bugs but you gotta ship sometime, right? :)

AMA!

Fantastic write-up. Great to see the steps level's took to validate demand with minimal effort and ways he maximized the the opportunity once it started to take off.

Agreed re: page views.

As Peter pointed out, it really depends on the product. Founders have reported as little as 0.5% conversion to as high as 40% conversion from page view to purchase via PH.

There's a big opportunity far beyond the relatively niche startup community we've gained traction in. I respect your skepticism and frankly I'm encouraged by these doubts. Product Hunt is early and will change.

WRT to preferential treatment, YC doesn't get special benefits and looking back on the past several months, you'll find products from other accelerators like 500 Startups, TechStars, etc. as well side projects from non-SV folks reaching the top of the board.