Product Hunt: A Passion for Products, the Makers Behind Them, and the Community Around Them

More products are being created and developed faster today than ever before. Every day new services, sites, and apps are introduced. But with this surge in products, it’s become more difficult to get noticed and connect with users. In late 2013, Ryan Hoover founded Product Hunt to provide a daily view of new products that brings together an engaged community of product users with product makers. Today marks the next step in the growth of the company.

Interconnecting a Community

When you first meet Ryan it becomes immediately clear he has a passion for entrepreneurship and its surrounding ecosystem. Well before starting Product Hunt, he hosted intimate brunches to bring founders together. This came out of another email-based experiment named Startup Edition, where he assembled a weekly newsletter of founder essays on topics of marketing, product development, fundraising, and other challenges company builders face. This enthusiasm is prevalent on Twitter where he shares new products and regularly interacts with fellow enthusiasts in the startup community.

Ryan’s background comes from games, an ecosystem that is regarded as one of the most connected. Gamers love to stay on top of the latest products. Game makers love to connect with gamers. There’s an even larger community of game enthusiasts who value being observers in this dialog. Ryan grew up in the midst of a family-owned video game store so it’s no surprise that he has an incredibly strong sense of community. That’s why after college, he got involved in the gaming industry, first at InstantAction and then at PlayHaven. Each of these roles allowed Ryan to build the skills to foster both the product and community engagement sides of gaming, while also creating successful business opportunities for the whole community.

Spending time in the heart of gaming, between gamers and game makers, Ryan saw how those makers that fostered a strong sense of community around their game had stronger engagement and improved chances of future growth. Along the way he saw a wide variety of ways to build communities — and most importantly to maintain an open and constructive environment where praise, criticism, and wishes could be discussed between makers and enthusiasts.

About a year ago, Ryan launched, in his words, “an experiment” — a daily email of the latest products. After a short time, interest and subscribers to the mail list grew. So with a lot of hustle, the email list turned into a site. Product Hunt was launched.

Product Hunt started with a passion for products and has grown into a community of people passionate to explore and discuss new products with likeminded enthusiasts and makers of those products.

Product Hunt: More Than a Site

Product Hunt has become something of a habit for many since its debut. Today hundreds of thousands of “product hunters” visit the site plus more through the mobile apps, the daily email, and the platform API. Every month, millions of visits to product trial, app stores, and download sites are generated. And nearly half of all product discussions include the product maker, from independent hackers to high-profile veteran founders.

Product Hunt is used by enthusiasts to learn about new products, colored with an unfiltered conversation with its makers. It servers the industry as a source for new and trending product areas. For many, Product Hunt is or will evolve to be the place you go to discover products in the context of similar products along with a useful dialog with a community.

Product Hunt is much more than a site. Product Hunt is a community. In fact, Ryan and the team spend most of their energy creating, curating, and crafting a unique approach to building a community. His own experience as a participant and a maker led him to believe deeply in the role of community and engagement not just in building products, but also in launching new products and connecting with customers.

This led the team to create a platform for products, starting with the products they know best — mobile and desktop apps and sites.

The challenge they see is that today’s internet and app stores are overwhelmed with new products, as we all know. The stores limit interaction to one-way communication and reviews. If you want to connect with the product makers, there’s no way to do so. Ironically, makers themselves are anxious to connect but do so in an ad hoc manner that often lacks the context of the product or community. Product Hunt allows this type of community to be a normal part of interaction and not just limited to tech products.

Product Hunt is just getting started, but the enthusiasm is incredible. A quick Twitter search for “addicted to product hunt” shows in just a short time how many folks are making the search for what’s new a part of a routine. The morning email with the latest news is now a must-read and Ryan is seeing the technology industry use this as a source for the most up to date launches.

Product Hunt’s uniqueness comes from the full breadth of activity around new products and those enthusiastic about them:

Launch. Product Hunt is a place where products are announced and discovered for the first time. Most new products today don’t start with marketing or advertising, but simply “show up”. Makers know how hard it is to get noticed. They upload an app to a store or set up a new site and just wait. Gaining awareness or traction is challenging. Since the first people to use most new products are themselves involved in making products, they love to know about and experience the latest creations. New product links come from a variety of sources and already Product Hunt is becoming the go-to place for early adopters.

Learn. Learning about what’s new is just as challenging for enthusiasts. Most new products launched do not yet have full-blown marketing, white papers, or other information. In fact, in today’s world of launching-to-learn more about how to refine products, there are often more questions than answers. Community members submit just a short tagline and link to the product. Then the dialog begins. There are robust discussions around choices in the product, comparisons to other products, and more. Nearly half of the products include the makers in the discussion, sharing their stories and directly interacting with people. And these discussions are also happening in the real world, as members of the community organize meetups across the globe from Tokyo to Canada.

Share. Early adopters love to share their opinions and engage with others. On Product Hunt, the people determine which products surface as enthusiasts upvote their favorite discoveries and share their perspective in the comments. Openness, authenticity, and constructive sharing are all part of the Product Hunt experience, and naturally this enthusiasm spills outside the community itself.

Curate. With the help of the community, the team is constantly curating collections of products into themes that are dynamic and changing. This helps raise awareness of emerging product categories and gives consumers a way to find great products for specific needs. Recent lists have included GIF apps, tools used by product managers, and productivity apps. One favorite that shows the timeliness of Product Hunt was a list of iOS 8 keyboards the day after iOS 8’s launch.

One attribute of all products that serve an enthusiastic community is the availability of a platform to extend and customize the product. Product Hunt recently announced the Product Hunt API and already has apps and services that present useful information gathered from Product Hunt, such as the leaderboard and analytics platform.

Product Hunt + a16z

When I first hung out with Ryan outside of a conference room, he brought me to The Grove coffee shop on Mission St. We sat outside and began to talk about products, enthusiasts, and community. It was immediately clear Ryan sees the world or products in a unique way — he sees a world of innovation, openness to new ideas, and unfiltered communication between makers and consumers. As founder, Ryan embodies the mission-oriented founders a16z loves to work with and he’s built a team that shares that passion and mission.

Andreessen Horowitz could not be more excited to lead this next round of investing, and I am thrilled to serve on the board. Please check out Product Hunt for yourself on the web, download its iOS app, or sign up for the email digest.