In this episode of the 20 Minutes VC, host Harry Stebings interviews Ryan Hoover, the founder and CEO of Product Hunt. Hoover shares his journey from losing passion in a previous startup to creating Product Hunt, a platform that has experienced phenomenal growth, won TechCrunch's "Best New Startup" award, and attracted investments from top firms like Andreessen Horowitz. Hoover, renowned for his talent in product development and community engagement, emphasizes the importance of manual, personal outreach and understanding user feedback to grow a community. He also discusses Product Hunt's user-driven approach, including openly sourcing feedback for new features and designs. Furthermore, Hoover touches on future plans for Product Hunt, aiming to expand beyond early adopters to the mass market, and the potential for monetization given the platform's user intent to discover and engage with new products.
"Now I'm so excited to welcome today's founder. He is a friend and a massively rising star in the industry. It is, of course, Ryan Hoover, founder and CEO at product Hunt, one of my favorite sites, which I'm without a doubt on every single day."
The quote introduces Ryan Hoover as an influential figure in the tech industry and the founder of Product Hunt, a site highly regarded by the host, Harry Stebbings.
"And so I decided to leave. And during that kind of transition, I just had some ideas. And one of them was this thing that for some reason I called it product Hunt."
This quote explains the moment of inspiration for Product Hunt, highlighting the spontaneous nature of its naming and conceptualization.
"It all starts from the very beginning, I guess, in that to make a community work, to build something like this, you need to really focus on the people in the beginning and do a lot of, frankly, manual labor, manual things to get it going."
The quote underscores the necessity of hands-on, personal involvement to cultivate a successful community around a new platform like Product Hunt.
"So it's not the technology really that makes product kind of work, it's really the people that use it and come back every single day."
This quote highlights the philosophy that the value of Product Hunt lies in its community rather than its technological sophistication, emphasizing the human element as the core of the platform's success.
"And so a lot of times that's one of the reasons we want to get that feedback from people, also kind of acclimate people to understand, okay, this is the direction we're heading, and here's why we're changing this."
This quote emphasizes the necessity of user feedback in helping users understand and adapt to changes in a product's direction and design.
"User testing is one of the most insightful things, but also painful things to watch because you see them using this thing that you spent all this time building, and you're like, this is beautiful. I've built a masterpiece. And then they look at it and they're like, what the hell is this? I don't understand."
This quote captures the emotional experience of founders watching users interact with their product during user testing, highlighting the gap between creator intention and user perception.
"But how do you plan to transition that from early adopters then to the mass market?"
This question addresses the strategic challenge of scaling a product beyond its initial user base to attract a more general audience.
"There's no reason why podcasts shouldn't be on the home page, a place where you can just click one button to start listening to this podcast."
This quote highlights the importance of making content such as podcasts easily accessible on the main page of a platform to enhance user experience.
"So I'm actually excited to explore non startup, non technology podcasts. But a few that I love are this week in startups with Jason Calicanis."
Ryan Hoover expresses his enthusiasm for discovering podcasts outside his usual interest area, while also sharing some of his favorite technology and startup-related podcasts.
"And the reward for doing so, the whole reason why they do that is to find something interesting or inspiring or something they might want to use or download or purchase."
This quote explains the motivation behind the user flow designed for Product Hunt, where the reward for engaging with triggers (like emails) is the discovery of appealing products.
"about email is it's part of a lot of people's daily habit. It's something they look at every single day. And if people give us permission to email them, then we become part of that daily routine."
This quote emphasizes the significance of email in daily life and how permission-based email integration can make a product a regular part of users' routines.
"And then the other kind of component, the last piece of that flow entirely is the reward is, okay, you open up the email and then you navigate to, let's say, a collection. And we've added some different hooks where you can follow collections now."
This quote describes how following collections on Product Hunt creates a loop of engagement, with email updates acting as the reward for following.
"So if you go to producthunt.com slash collections, you'll see a number of featured collections there."
Ryan Hoover recommends visiting the collections section of Product Hunt to explore the variety of curated lists of products.
"Before product Hunt, I used to read a lot of blogs, actually, and a lot of articles, and I would get into a habit of sharing all the articles that I found useful."
This quote reflects Ryan Hoover's habit of sharing useful content on social media, a practice that helped him build a network before Product Hunt's success.
"I was very surprised to hear that he's going to maintain CEO role in both companies. I don't know how he can do it."
Ryan Hoover comments on the surprising news of Jack Dorsey holding CEO positions at two major companies, highlighting the difficulty of such a task.
"On Twitter specifically? I think it's a lot of it is just engaging, actively participating, being authentic and real and adding value to the conversation..."
Ryan Hoover advises on how to effectively use Twitter to create a network by being genuine and contributing meaningfully to discussions.
"Yeah, at its core, people come to product tent, to download, use, sometimes purchase products. And so at scale, I'm confident that we'll find ways to generate revenue out of that..."
Ryan Hoover explains that while Product Hunt is not currently focusing on monetization, the inherent user intent to download and purchase products indicates future revenue opportunities.
"Yeah, it was my first time, and it was very different than in, I think, most situations for a long time. Product hunt was a side project, and I was working on it."
This quote provides insight into Ryan Hoover's personal experience with fundraising, highlighting that it was his first time and that Product Hunt began as a side project, which influenced the process.
We're growing 50% month over month. And when you have traction and you have a big vision and you have a big market opportunity, all of those things combined makes fundraising a lot easier than if you just have an idea on paper.
This quote emphasizes the ease of fundraising when a project shows significant growth, has a clear vision, and targets a large market opportunity.
Just having that opportunity to take that time to build it up, to prove that people actually wanted this thing, that's what made fundraising a lot easier.
Ryan explains that being able to dedicate time to develop the project and demonstrate its demand made fundraising simpler.
The other thing that I would say is we were a little bit lucky in that we built a product that investors use.
He acknowledges the luck involved in creating a product that is directly used by potential investors.
One of the biggest moments so far has been I was walking, this was maybe a year and a half ago. So really, really early in product hunt, I walked into a Phil's and I overheard these two guys talking about product hunt and said, oh, our product was on product hunt. It was amazing.
Ryan recounts a memorable moment that validated Product Hunt's influence outside of his direct interactions.
Yeah, that was really fun. It was actually my first crunchies and I arrived with Corley and Mike on the team and we had a great time.
The quote reflects Ryan's positive experience at the Crunchies award ceremony.
But with, I guess as a CEO role, your kind of ultimate job is to hire yourself out of a job in many ways.
This quote encapsulates the CEO's responsibility to build a team that can effectively take over their duties.
But someone that comes to mind is Heaton Shaw. Just because he super willing and giving of his time.
Ryan expresses admiration for Heaton Shaw, highlighting his generosity and helpfulness.
What I do love is there's this book that I read a long time ago that is something that most entrepreneurs probably haven't heard of is it's Jesse Schell's the art of game design.
Ryan recommends a book that provides valuable insights into user psychology and can be applied beyond game design.
In five years you'll see product hunt turn into a community and a site for all kinds of people and all kinds of things, and it will be a place where you can find all kinds of things, know whatever you're most passionate about, and you can find like-minded people to connect with and geek out about that stuff.
Ryan shares his vision for Product Hunt's expansion and its role as a hub for connecting passionate individuals.
Yeah, thanks a lot for having me, harry. And I just love that you're doing this, and I remember seeing it first pop up on product Hunt maybe six months ago.
Ryan shows appreciation for the opportunity to be on the show and acknowledges the host's accomplishments.
I'd like to say a huge thank you to Ryan for giving up his time to be on the show today and for those kind words.
Harry Stebbings reciprocates with thanks and acknowledges Ryan's contribution to the podcast.
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