What's up, everyone?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense
of what it's like to be in their shoes.
How did they get to where they are today?
How did they make decisions, both at their companies and in their personal lives?
And what makes their businesses tick?
Today I am talking to the one and only Ryan Hoover, the founder of Product Hunt, and apparently
also known in some circles as the Hoovster.
Ryan, welcome to the IndieHackers podcast.
Yeah, and for everyone else that's wondering where that reference came from, I think it
was somebody in IndieHackers, I'm forgetting his name at the moment, called me the Hoovster.
Now, I hear it all the time.
I hear it all around San Francisco.
Do you?
It's catching on.
All right.
I don't know.
I don't know how I feel about it, but glad to be here.
I've been listening to the podcast.
It's on my feed in the Breaker podcast app, and so it's cool to be on it.
Cool.
It's really cool to have you on here, finally.
We both live in San Francisco, we both run online communities, we both recently got acquired
by a bigger company, so I think we got a lot to talk about.
But perhaps the easiest place to start is, what is Product Hunt exactly?
Yeah, so Product Hunt is similar to IndieHackers.
It's a community of people building and excited about technology, really.
So you'll see a lot of people building apps or Chrome extensions or products or startups
and launching on Product Hunt.
But it's also kind of evolved into a network and a community of people who are also connected
with one another.
And that's why we launched things more recently like chat, so you can chat one-on-one with
other individuals and other projects that we're working on to kind of extend the opportunities
for people to help each other, learn from each other, connect, and so on.
What would you say is the difference between IndieHackers and Product Hunt?
I would say Product Hunt started off the very first version as a place to discover new cool
products.
And it was inspired largely by, if I go back to 2011, I actually used to browse AngelList
ironically enough looking at companies because I'm such a nerd.
And I was just curious to see what people were building.
And so the beginnings of Product Hunt were simply, I want to list a really cool apps,
products and things, and I want a place to share and talk about them with friends.
That was sort of the focus, and it's now become in many ways like a launchpad for companies
to introduce the new products and things to the world.
And from there, it's kind of expanded into other community features.
But I would say IndieHackers, for me, at least from my perception, is very much a similar
type of audience.
But I would say more towards people who are building businesses, at least this is my perception,
in that you have a lot of people who are not necessarily just launching side projects for
fun and they are to some extent.
But many of them are actually looking to build a company and to make money.
And I've also noticed a skew towards a lot of bootstrappers and maybe like nomad kind
of technologists.
So that's kind of my perception of some of the differences, I would say.
I agree.
I would say the exact same thing.
IndieHackers is more focused on people trying to generate revenue, build online businesses.
Definitely skews towards bootstrappers, Product Hunt skews a little bit more towards products
that either have no intention of making revenue or don't necessarily need to generate revenue
up front.
There's a lot of high growth startups on Product Hunt as well.
And so we sort of got it covered between the two of us.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's in both places.
One similar commonality, I would say though, is that they're both places for inspiration
for people who are wanting to break into technology or are in technology today.
And so you go to Product Hunt and you open up the site.
And every day I open it up and I wonder, what are people making today?
And I'm surprised and sometimes shocked by the products and things that people are creating.
And on the IndieHackers side, you go there and you're inspired by these stories of people
who bootstrapped and learned to code in six months and now are making $5,000 a month.
Those are inspiring stories that can hopefully inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs
and creators.
Yeah.
It's striking to me how many people will start working on a business or an app or a product
because of the existence of something like Product Hunt or IndieHackers.
Like on Product Hunt, it's so fun and it's so cool and it's just encouraging to try to
get what you've built to the top of the homepage that people are probably building all sorts
of stuff that they never would have built otherwise because of the existence of Product
Hunt.
Yeah.
And with IndieHackers, I'll look at my metrics.
I'll look at the number of downloads to the podcast, the number of visitors to the website.
And yeah, it feels kind of good to see those numbers go up when they do.
But in a lot of ways, it's intangible.
It's just numbers on a screen.
But if I get an email from somebody or meet somebody at an IndieHackers meetup who says
that they started their business because of a story they read on IndieHackers or a podcast
guest that they had on, then yeah, that's only one person, but it feels a lot more real
and impactful.
Yeah.
There's certainly anecdotes where every now and then someone will email me and give us,
I feel like, undeserved credit to some extent where they said, hey, I launched something
six months ago and that gave me the confidence and the feedback to pursue this further and
now I've quit my job and I'm working at it full-time or I raised money and now I'm building
a team and pursuing this dream.
And a lot of that happens.
A lot of it's not really measurable, but it's super encouraging to see.
It's something that I forward to the team and I want to remind people on the team like,
hey guys, look at this impact that we're making to this one individual.
This is something that happens every single day or every month to some extent for people
across the world.
And I'm sure you get similar emails like that too.
It's encouraging when you start to see the touchy feely aspects of the impact of something
like this.
I can tell you that IndieHackers itself is largely inspired by a website called NoBadList
and the creator of that website, Peter Levels, was himself inspired by Product Hunt and so
it's pretty safe to say that without Product Hunt, there would be no IndieHackers.
Oh really?
So do I get all the credit?
Of course you do, Ryan.
Yeah.
Well, the reality is we're all riffing off each other.
We're all being inspired by each other.
I mean, even if you look at the individual products themselves, it's actually not a good
idea to invent an entirely new, very foreign, hard to use kind of interface and start something
from scratch.
Everyone starts using the same or similar design patterns and technology is sort of
this evolving thing where people are not only being inspired by each other to build things,
but they're also taking design inspiration or marketing inspiration from how others have
done it in the past.
You mentioned that back in the day in 2011, you were inspired by AngelList.
And today, Product Hunt is obviously one of the biggest online communities in the tech
industry.
Did you know it had that potential when you were first starting out?
Not in the beginning.
It was in part because I wasn't giving myself the pressure in the very beginning to say
this is going to be a company or a startup.
And at the time, I didn't know what it would become because ultimately what I wanted was
just a cool place to discover the newest products and apps of the day and have a place to talk
about it with friends.
And it wasn't until, I don't know, some months later after working on it on the side and
being really excited, every single sign up that happened, every single launch that happened,
every person that commented and participated was really encouraging.
It wasn't until several months after that that I realized this is something I want to
do for a decade, for a long time.
And yeah, going back to my days browsing AngelList, I didn't have the thought to, oh, maybe I
should productize what I'm doing.
I think that's actually an interesting exercise for those that do want to start a side project
or a company.
It's almost like, what do you do every day or what products do you use every day that
aren't designed for your use case, for example?
I was using AngelList to browse and discover companies and products.
AngelList isn't built for that.
It's not designed for that.
That's not the intention.
But as I reflect and internalize, that was maybe the first moment where I should have
realized, wow, maybe there's an opportunity to build something like product hunt at that
time.
Yeah, I think that's a great point because if I look back at the origin of indie hackers,
I was spending a lot of time browsing Hacker News, looking for stories that could serve
as inspiration and education for how I could build my own online business.
And that's not really the use case that Hacker News was designed for, even though it was
extremely useful.
And so, of course, I could build something that served that use case intentionally, just
like you did with product hunt.
It's easy to look at all this stuff for the benefit of hindsight and analyze it and see
exactly why it worked.
But of course, things are never really that clear in the moment.
When I think about the beginning of product hunt, getting an online community off the
ground from scratch is extremely difficult, and yet it seems like you did it all perfectly
in the first few months or years after you launched.
You were very strategic and analytical about everything.
Is that just how it seems looking back four years later, or is that how things actually
were at the time?
You know, I'm trying to remember, honestly, what I was thinking at the time.
And part of it was certainly methodical and very thoughtful in terms of the specific things
that I was doing.
But a lot of that was originally inspired by what I felt was right and what I enjoyed
doing.
And so one example of that is I would monitor the people that were signing up on product
hunt.
And I could do it back then because we maybe had a few dozen people sign up a day.
So it was pretty quick to see who that was and look them up and see where they worked
and other things like that.
And I would email a lot of those people individually and not through an automated email from the
founder via intercom, but like an actual email from my Gmail, I would email those people
and welcome them and say something that was very clear that it wasn't automated.
And that was one strategy and a tactic to kind of strengthen the early community.
But there's also something I just enjoyed doing.
I ended up finding myself, this was actually back when I was part time at another company
that I was transitioning out of, found myself admittedly, you know, working on it every
now and then in the office at the other company that I was at because I was so drawn to it.
It was so fun and exciting to talk to these people that were using a thing that we built.
So yeah, to answer your question, it was a combination of just passion and interest and
what I felt was right, but also some thoughtful ways and how I think we could build the community
in the beginning and in the early days.
Ironically, I emailed you today and I got your autoresponder which said, quote, I'm
spending less time and my inbox in order to focus on product hunt.
But what happened?
What happened to loving the emails?
I know the irony.
You know, I turned my autoresponder on and off every now and then and part of email does
give me anxiety and I feel the reality is I can't answer every email or I just wouldn't
be able to get my stuff done or really follow through with the commitments I already have.
So when I put my autoresponder on, I feel like my anxiety levels dropped just a tiny
bit.
And I also find it effective because what will happen oftentimes is people will email
me about support questions and as much as I'd love to help and do support, the reality
is I can't spend my time doing that all the time.
So in that email response, I'll make sure that I direct them to the right people on
the team or the right channels.
And so even though it's annoying to get an autoresponder, I get it from other people
all the time.
It's for your own good for the people that are cold emailing me the support inquiries
and tickets.
I love getting autoresponders.
I have a lot of respect for people who can turn on their autoresponder.
I'm always jealous because I can't do it and so what I do is I just feel bad all day.
That's my email strategy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I thought about doing an experiment which would be turning off my email for a week entirely.
And the problem is I don't think that's realistic.
I don't think I can do that.
But I know that I would accomplish a lot more in terms of like the higher level stuff that
I want to focus on.
What do you think is your favorite thing about running an online community and also what's
your least favorite thing?
I would say my favorite thing, there's a lot of things that I like about my role and what
we're building at Product Hunt.
The favorite thing about community is that I think some of it comes down to the touchy
feely stuff that I mentioned earlier in the sense that you get to interact with humans
and people and you get to connect around something that we're all passionate about.
You don't go and join Product Hunt and participate and contribute if you're not into technology
or if you're not excited about products.
Otherwise, I don't know why you're there.
And that's part of what I think is fun is to talk to these people who are either excited
about technology or building the products of the future.
A lot of the dynamics of Product Hunt are talking to the makers and talking to the people
that downloaded or rather built the app that you just downloaded.
So I think it's a really compelling, interesting dynamic and something I enjoy within the community.
The least favorite thing is probably just also the difficulties of just managing issues
or problems that come up because inevitably things happen, whether it's a mistake we made
or a troll that comes up on the site that causes issues.
Those things happen and they're incredibly important to address.
But those are probably the most difficult challenges, I think, of community building.
Going to the troll component, I haven't seen trolls so much on IndieHackers, but how have
you managed those kind of instances where there's issues or complaints or how do you
manage that?
I think our bigger problem is spammers and so IndieHackers being a little bit more focused
on generating revenue, starting a business, it turns into a channel for people to market
their products.
They say, okay, well, we're all here doing the same thing.
Why don't I try marketing my products to all these developers or all these founders who
I think would be great customers.
And so what happens is, and I wouldn't count these people as trolls, I would just say that
they're a little bit more focused on their own goals and not necessarily contributing
to the community, but we get a lot of self-promotional posts that don't add very much to the community.
I send a lot of one-on-one emails to people and say, hey, you know, here's what the point
of the community is, here's how you might be able to rephrase your posts in a way that
could get a good discussion going and also get people to visit your website.
And then every now and then we get just outright trolls.
We want to come in and downvote everybody else's comments as they get to the top.
We want to create spammy threads and I deal with that through a combination of some algorithms
and some actual code that I've written to automatically detect that stuff and then just
manual effort and a lot of ways crowdsourcing it, community tools so anybody can report
a thread on any hackers and people who have enough points can downvote other comments
to sort of hide inappropriate comments.
And so far so good.
I've been pretty surprised at how positive everybody is, how much everybody wants the
community to succeed, how helpful everybody is.
And I think in a lot of ways, you said the hard part of the community is just dealing
with the little issues that prop up and it gets harder at scale when there's so many
people.
It's just like you're running an HR department for all of your users and it's not easy.
On one hand though, if you build it in the right direction and you have in some ways
like a self-policing community and a base, that also is incredibly defensible and helps
you scale.
And I think the problem with some communities, early on they don't address some of those
issues in the beginning or they don't design the product in a way that can scale and have
some sort of levels of self-policing and then they become just a cesspool or deteriorate
or actually become like a very nasty place.
So I think it's for those that are building communities, it's so important to nip those
things in the bud as my mom would say.
She uses that phrase.
I don't know why.
That's a good phrase.
Where are you from?
Yeah.
I'm from Oregon, Eugene, Oregon.
Oh, cool.
I just read Shudog by Phil Knight, the founder of Nike who spends a lot of time talking about
Oregon in that book.
Yeah.
I've heard good things about the book.
Yeah.
I grew up in Eugene, went to the University of Oregon where Nike has a lot of history
and then moved here to San Francisco 2010.
So it's been a little while.
Yeah.
The Nike book is my only reference point, but as far as I can tell after reading it,
Oregonians take a lot of pride in being from Oregon.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's this weird thing also about Oregonian Jeanette.
For some reason, using an umbrella is lame.
And so I lived in Eugene most of my life and then moved to Portland and I would walk to
work about a half a mile and in Oregon, it rains a lot.
And I would walk with an umbrella because I didn't want to get wet.
And I'd show up at the office and some of my teammates, coworkers, they'd be like, why
are you using an umbrella?
And everyone else, they take a lot of pride in just not using an umbrella but having just
raincoats and walking in the rain and getting their feet soaking wet.
And I just don't get it.
I don't want to raise an organ.
I just don't get that at all.
Yeah.
I don't get it either.
I wasn't raised in Oregon, but I think if I was, I'd be on your side about that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't like squishy feet all day.
Yeah, man.
Wet socks are the worst.
Yeah.
So we've talked a little bit about starting a community.
Do you want to dive into the specifics behind how you actually got product hunted off the
ground?
Because I know a lot of people listening are trying to start communities and I think it
makes sense to want to run a community as a business because it's just fun.
You get to run a business where you spend most of your time talking to people about
the thing that you like the most in the world.
But it's tricky to get off the ground.
How did you get the first people in the door for product hunt?
How did you keep them there and grow the community from that point?
In some ways, product hunt in the community started before product hunt in the sense that
in 2012, 2013, I was actually writing quite a bit and the irony is that I hated writing
in high school.
And I think it's because my teachers made me write about books and other stupid things
I didn't care about.
But then I got into a habit and started really enjoying blogging about technology and products
and I would often write about new products like at the time Tinder when it was early
in Snapchat.
I would try to use writing as a vehicle to learn and to understand why does Snapchat,
for example, at the time open up to the camera immediately or why does it have this particular
design element and did a lot of reading.
So over time, I was able to build a tiny audience, not very many people, but a small enough audience
of people who were excited about technology who were following me and I had an email list
and a few other little projects I was working on.
So that all kind of allowed me to then have an audience of people who were excited about
technology to then build something for ultimately.
And to clarify, I wasn't writing necessarily with the idea of, okay, I'm going to start
a product hunt in two years or I'm even going to start a company in two years and it's going
to be for tech people.
But it just sort of organically happened.
So then fast forward to the early days, product hunt started off initially as an email list
and it was just an idea.
I loved products.
I used to browse the app store, AngelList and other places just to find them.
And me and my friends were also sharing these products oftentimes.
And so I thought, okay, well, there's a bunch of social networks like Twitter and Facebook
to find these things.
They're online publications like TechCrunch, but really what I want is a list, just a simple
list of cool stuff every day.
And I want also a place to talk about these things.
And so email was the easiest sort of MVP.
I'm also not an engineer like yourself and others that start companies.
My background's in business, marketing, product management is more my professional career.
And so I had to get creative.
And so email was sort of the simplest way to get started.
So launch the email and going back to what I said before, I had a small enough audience
of people who were following me so they would subscribe and quickly got a couple hundred
subscribers.
And so that helped a ton in just getting things started and almost in some ways it was also
just validating.
It was encouraging because people were actually reading this email.
If I try to reflect back and if there were only a dozen people on this email list for
the first few weeks, I don't know if I would have had the motivation or maybe I would have
maybe lost the interest thinking that no one else wanted this thing.
So having the first few hundred people subscribing and then also emailing me and saying how much
they enjoyed this email list every day was really inspirational to keep going.
And I think back on Proton and in some aspects like indie hackers too, like those feedback
loops when you're in the early days of some validation or camaraderie or whatnot can be
super helpful.
Oh yeah, the early days of indie hackers I had my weekly newsletter and so I would add
new interviews to the website and then I would send out on Thursday sort of an update of
everything that I changed on the website and improved in addition to the new interviews.
And it was like, I think if you have a normal job, you know, you have a boss, you have somebody
checking in on you who can congratulate you if you do a good job or who will, you know,
you feel some sort of external pressure to actually do things.
I think having that email list for me have created the feedback loop that you're mentioning
where it was super encouraging to hear people, you know, who actually enjoyed what I was
doing and would respond to the emails.
And I felt even before getting the responses just during the week that I needed to work
harder and that I was motivated to get things done because I wanted to be able to send out
a good email every week.
Yeah.
And when you're doing that too, you're kind of putting yourself out there too.
And people have an expectation.
It's like, right Thursday, I'm gonna get the email from Cortland.
And so it kind of keeps yourself honest, I imagine.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think what's cool about how you got your start where Product Hunt was entirely
an email list is one of the things that you mentioned yourself that you're not an engineer
and so you had to get creative.
I think an engineer might have probably bitten off a lot more than that for the most basic
version of Product Hunt and then maybe built something that was overly complex that wouldn't
have had the sort of staying power that an email list could have even with only a dozen
subscribers.
And I think another cool thing about it is that an email list as a community doesn't
necessarily need a lot of interaction.
In fact, people don't have to interact with each other at all for that to be a useful
bedrock of a community.
You just send out the email and as long as it's worth reading, then it works.
And I think it's very difficult to get a community off the ground if you have an empty forum
or an empty chat room and only a few people in there and no one ever talks.
But with email, it's no one really had to talk.
Yeah, that's actually a really astute point.
It's kind of a good way of bootstrapping a community in the beginning because you don't
want that ghost town effect, especially if you're building something that's entirely
reliant on UGC or user interactions.
If we started Product Hunt maybe without kind of a base of a few thousand email subscribers,
it would have been harder for us to get enough curation and posts and comments to make it
feel lively.
And there's like a tipping point in communities where you have enough people where you can...
I don't know if you remember the moment when you could not post something yourself and
the community would still be vibrant.
Oh yeah.
Because otherwise in the beginning, you're like, okay, let me post this, let me go ask
this person to post, let me activate this person here.
It takes a lot of manual efforts to get started.
Yeah, you're just trying to roll this ball down the hill and get the momentum going.
And it was a long slide for me with the Andy Hackers community.
It was months of me posting and asking people to post.
Who was working with you in the beginning days of Product Hunt?
Was this just you by yourself sending these emails?
Yeah, so initially it was just me and I was using a product actually called LinkiDink,
which is no longer around anymore, but it's kind of a cool project out of a small studio
that was in England.
And that system basically allowed me to, from the very beginning, create an email that was
collaborative.
And so it wasn't actually me curating the email entirely.
It was actually me whitelisting.
I think it was maybe 10, 15 people who had access to share these products.
And then everyone that subscribed got access to the list that was sent every day.
And so that piece was already automated.
And then when we got to the point where I realized, okay, well, people seem to be liking
this.
People are subscribing.
Obviously, email is great, but you can't interact, you can't really do much.
There's not much social.
Well, there's really no social engagement.
That was when I decided, okay, well, let's turn this into a site, a place where you can
interact, comment, upvote.
And actually, I modeled it a lot after Hacker News and Reddit.
And going back to what I said before, we didn't want to reinvent the wheel.
Indie Hackers 2 has an upvote mechanism and comments, and it's very familiar.
And that's not a bad thing.
I think a lot of people maybe try to get too cute or unique in some of their product design
decisions.
But at the time, I was like, all right, email is great, but we need a site.
And not being an engineer, I had a couple different paths.
One, I was going to learn React or Ruby or whatever, and just try and teach myself some
basics so I can get something off the ground.
That was one option.
The other was using telescope, which I don't know the current status of telescope, but
it's an open source platform to create something like an email, a combination of a Hacker News
type site or an email list.
That was another option.
And I ended up emailing a buddy of mine, Nathan Beshaw, about this and just got his feedback.
And his response was, oh, I love the email.
I have some time over Thanksgiving, I'll be at my parents' place, you want to work on
it together.
And Nathan's a super talented, very well-rounded individual, super product-minded designer
and engineer.
And so in the beginning, it was him and me kind of working on this as a side project
for a while.
At what point did you decide that this was going to be more than a side project?
That it would be an actual startup?
Yeah, it was maybe within the first five months, roughly, four or five months.
And it was a combination of we launched the email, got some traction, then launched the
site, continued to work on it, continued to grow the platform, ended up paying a guy named
Ricardo in Italy and developer part-time.
I didn't have much money and Italy is just a lot cheaper.
And so Ricardo was available and threw a friend of mine and an awesome guy, actually, a very
humble guy.
So he was working on the side to make sure the site was up and running because Nathan
was working full-time, too.
And we started building more things.
And over time, as it just started growing more and more, I just realized, one, I could
see where this could go.
I could see this becoming much bigger than this tiny little email list that I started
in the beginning.
And two, I love working on this and I could see myself doing this for a decade, as I mentioned
earlier, is kind of a, I think, is a good question to ask yourself before you raise
money especially because you can't really give money back.
And so then there was a point where Protestant started to become more well-known and growing.
And it was actually some folks at YC, YC, the current batch, actually, at Y Combinator,
they were actually using it a lot and it was becoming fairly well-known within that community.
And it was Nicholas, the CEO of Algolia, he actually DM'd me on Twitter and he's like,
hey, Brian, have you thought about joining Y Combinator for Product Hunt?
It wasn't even incorporated.
We didn't raise money.
I wasn't really sure if I wanted to turn it into a company and take that commitment yet.
But I started, one, exploring the option and met with Gary Tan and Alexis and Kevin Hale
and Kat and met all four of them actually just to get feedback on Product Hunt and better
understand what Y Combinator would be for us.
And long story short, ended up applying and then getting in and raising around around
that time as well.
I think in total, you ended up raising about seven and a half million dollars from investors
in the course of running Product Hunt.
But let's pretend for a second that all of those investors turned you down, you never
got into YC, you never got any subsequent money.
What do you think your game plan would have been for growing and sustaining Product Hunt?
Yeah.
So there's an alternate, someone should write an alternate startup tech like diary or fan
fiction or something, but alternative scenarios of what would happen if X or Y didn't happen.
And I thought a lot about this.
In fact, one of the realization was, well, one thing I'll say is that funding is oftentimes
it's a mechanism to hire people and to build things.
And so the goal wasn't to raise money.
The goal was to build a team and raising money was a way to do that.
However, it was actually another scenario that I was thinking and I didn't actually
pursue this and I'm curious what would happen in an alternate reality if I pursued this
direction, but it was actually to open source it.
There was a thought that what if Product Hunt was actually built directly by the community
and everyone could contribute and it was built that way.
And I found that really compelling because one, we are a community of people in technology.
So it's a natural fit, like where our audience and our target demographic is the same people
that would be excited to participate and build on it.
But I didn't pursue that direction and the large reason for that was I hadn't seen it
done really elsewhere.
It's pretty infrequent that you see a very successful company that's entirely open source
and distributed be successful.
And furthermore, how do you manage consistency with design and implementation and all of
these other things that are really difficult to manage?
That said, I find that direction of company building is really fascinating and not to
go down a rabbit hole, but the world of blockchain and crypto and the future of work and remote
working, I think we'll see more platforms emerge that support that type of way of building
companies and products.
It's interesting you mentioned that one of the things that turned you off to that approach
was the fact that you hadn't really seen it done successfully before.
And I think this is kind of a recurring theme too because we've also talked, you mentioned
a couple times earlier, about how some of the early Product Hunt design, Andy Hackish's
design as well, sort of cribbed these features and these details that we've seen working
on other sites.
We've seen Upvotes work on Hacker News and Reddit.
We've seen commenting lead to interesting discussions and so we didn't really try as
hard as we could to innovate in those areas when we could just do what other sites did
that was working and then we could focus our efforts on other areas.
Where do you draw the line here?
How do you know when you should innovate as the founder of a business and when it's okay
to just sort of go with the status quo?
I don't know if there's no math equation.
I think you can put that question through, but one thing that I would evaluate or consider
is try to reduce variables, try to reduce risk and starting a company and going more
traditional route and whether that's VC or bootstrapping, whatever it may be, that's
already really hard.
It's probably not going to work anyway.
So if you try to do that and then you add in this giant X factor of, okay, now you're
going to be one of the few companies to be built distributedly and open source.
It's another huge X factor and so I think that same logic and same thinking can be applied
to a lot of different things.
If you're building, let's say, from a product design perspective, maybe you have a really
creative idea and innovation around some user behavior or design pattern or whatnot.
Maybe it's wiser to innovate in one area, but keep other things more consistent and
familiar and maybe Snapchat might be a decent example of that.
Snapchat was quite innovative in the fact that it deleted your pictures and it opened
up to the camera immediately.
Those were core fundamental principles that made Snapchat unique and different and useful
for people, but it also had similar things like friends and friend mechanics and a lot
of other aspects that are exhibited in other social products.
So I think sometimes it's like this balance of innovating in some areas but not being
too cute or too creative because that can sometimes introduce additional risk and potential
failure.
You only have so many hours in the day as a founder.
You can't really afford to give your full attention to 10 different innovations and
if you do, they're just all going to be crappy anyway.
From a practical standpoint, it's just not feasible to really spread yourself that thin.
Yeah.
I'm curious actually.
There must be some crazy ideas that you've had at Indie Hackers that maybe you have tried
or maybe you decided not to, whether it's marketing or product features or things like
that.
Can you share any of those?
Oh yeah.
I have one that I'm working on right now which is, should Indie Hackers be less of a forum
and more like Twitter?
That's a question that's been going through my mind for a very long time because when
I think about what are the best communities of entrepreneurs online, there's a few forums
that I can name but none of them are really standout products.
If I think where do I see people sharing the best and most interesting updates that are
transparent about what they're working on, it's Twitter.
I spent a lot of time in recent weeks thinking about exactly why that is.
I've been analyzing the differences between the mechanics of a traditional online forum
and a social feed like you might find on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
It turns out that the latter, a social feed, is actually very promising for running an
online community centered around discussing being an entrepreneur.
This is one of the more risky and I think experimental changes that I'm actually planning
on implementing.
Meetups are another thing that we were doing that I don't think was really on my radar
to begin with but Patrick at Stripe has been really big on Indie Hackers meetups.
We just put the word out a couple weeks ago, hey, would you like to be an Indie Hackers
community ambassador and host one meetup a week per month in your city and now we've
got like 120 people in 90 cities across the world who are hosting meetups every month
which is super cool and it's not something that directly impacts the traffic to the website
but it's really cool because it's an avenue for people who live in cities where they might
not have ever met anybody who wants to start an online business and now they can go get
coffee with the person on the street who they never knew existed.
Yeah, I mean we've had meetups early on and they're too, like to your point about measuring
the impact.
It's really hard, it's impossible actually to truly measure the impact and if we'd never
had a single meetup, I don't know how that would have affected like where we're at today
with Product Hunt but there's a lot of value that comes from having a community meet in
person and bond around a similar passion and I think it was last year we had 150 Product
Hunt meetups across the world and we're actually, maybe by the time this podcast is out, we're
introducing more of like a tech events board to not only house Product Hunt meetups but
also other interesting tech events across the world and as much as I personally avoid
meetups in events because I'm an introvert and tend to avoid those things, they do create
a lot of value I think for the community and generally the ecosystem at large.
It's funny that we're both introverts who don't really like going to events and yet
we are working on online communities and running meetups and running podcasts.
I know, Irene, right?
I don't know how we got ourselves into this situation, Ryan.
I know, yeah.
We created our own prison.
We really did.
Can't leave now.
It's too late.
So Product Hunt, since those early days of just being an email list, you guys have launched
what seem like dozens of products.
You've got the basics, you've got your email list, you've got job board, you've got your
podcast, your blog, you've got mobile apps and desktop apps and Chrome extensions, you've
got the core functionality of Product Hunt, which is where people will submit and vote
on each other's products.
But then you've got all sorts of other cool features that you built on top of that.
You've got Product Hunt collections, Product Hunt SIP news, Product Hunt ship, Product
Hunt chat, Product Hunt makers, and the list goes on.
What's the strategy here?
Will I release so many new things and what are some of the lessons that you've learned
by doing so?
Yeah.
So the theme this year, the past six months more specifically has been around two, I would
categorize in two different areas.
One is getting the profitability.
So we historically have not focused on revenue until towards the end of last year.
And based on our current projections, things are going well, we'll be profitable this year.
So really happy about that.
It'll be a great sort of milestone to check off our list.
And then the other focus has been actually around a lot of experimentation.
So it's intentional that we're launching a lot of things.
And I guess I'm fortunate to say that we have such a strong engineering team and team in
general, but particularly on engineering where we have oftentimes each individual product
is led by one person.
And so we're able to parallelize a lot of things versus at previous companies I've been
at, it required three or four engineers to do anything.
And I think that's just, yeah, that's a whole other story.
But a lot of what we're doing is experimenting with different ways based on different ways
for us to create value for our community and for the tech ecosystem.
And so a lot of these things are based on observations of the behavior and product hunt.
So one example is, one simple example is chat.
So we launched chat where you can chat one on one with people, or you can even create
a group chat, but most people use it to communicate privately with one another.
That was a very obvious feature.
And granted, it's not necessarily going to grow our community.
Chat is not something that people come to product hunt for, but it's a feature in a
way for people to build connections with one another.
And we noticed that a lot of people within the comments were giving their Twitter username
and saying, hey, DM me on Twitter or sharing their email and saying, hey, let's take this
offline.
And that behavior was very clear that people were trying to communicate individually privately
with one another.
And so it's things like that that we're expanding on in concert with things like makers to build
product and into a place where people can truly connect with one another and create
more social interaction.
So products and discovering products and geeking out about products will always be a big part
of product hunt, but we want to use that also almost as social lubrication or a way to bring
people together to then connect in other ways.
And fast forward, some examples of that are people helping each other, some are people
connecting and co-founding companies together or starting side projects together.
We want to create more opportunities for people to experience those serendipitous connections
on the network.
There's so much there that I want to talk about.
How do you decide what to build?
The difference between being a company that's not focused on generating revenue and being
a company that suddenly decides that you need to turn on that revenue faucet.
The first I want to go back to some of the early decisions you made, especially the transition
from being an email list to becoming a website, because I'm sure you had a lot of options.
And that must have been nerve wracking to make that decision.
What went into that decision?
And how did you sort of envision the future of Product Hunt back when you were just an
email list?
Yeah, so the direction, the vision has always been the same, but the direction has changed
slightly.
And I'll try to describe what I mean.
Product Hunt in the beginning was very organic in that it was a combination of a lot of apps
and tech products, and still today that's what you find on Product Hunt.
And over time as the community grew more and more, it started to evolve into not just a
place where people shared products they loved and found, but it became very much a place
where makers and people would come to launch their products.
And that actually was, that wasn't something I foresaw, maybe I should have in the beginning,
but it wasn't a dynamic that I expected to happen in the beginning until it just organically
started to occur.
And that's when we introduced things like maker badges and being able to highlight the
maker of this product in the conversation so people knew who they were talking to.
And we also instrumented and productized a lot of ways for us to notify the makers when
their products were on Product Hunt to ensure that they, one, were aware it was on there
and two, could jump in the conversation.
And so in many ways, Product Hunt became not just a place to share cool stuff you found,
but a launchpad for this community of technologists.
And then there's a lot of aspects of Product Hunt that changed, a lot of areas that we
made mistakes in, in terms of redesigning the homepage and the feed and spending too
much time and trying to make the feed more compelling when actually people liked how
it was.
It's also an interesting challenge I think a lot of communities fall into is you have
ideas of what you want to build and yet your community has expectations and familiarity
that sometimes they're averse to.
A lot of times communities don't like change.
And so there's certainly a lot of mistakes in the product design side of things that
we made as it evolved, trying to make it more visual, for example, with inline videos and
images and whatnot.
So there's a lot of mistakes and learnings along the way over the past almost five years.
I was talking to John O'Nolan the other day, the creator of the Ghost blogging system.
And he gave me some interesting advice.
He said, as a founder, you should listen to some people or you should listen to no people,
but you should never try to listen to all of the people.
Who do you listen to the most and who do you ignore when you're trying to figure out the
right decisions to make for running Product Hunt?
Because I know you have several different segments of people who actually use the site
for very different reasons.
Yeah.
It's hard.
I wouldn't necessarily classify an entire group of people that I ignore necessarily,
but I will call out investors a little bit in that some use Product Hunt as a combination
of just a place to stay up to date and what's new and cool and interesting.
And then some also use it to find early stage promising companies or maybe just find the
people that are building really cool stuff.
And of course, we've gotten a lot of advice from investors, especially our own investors
have their own ideas.
And some of them, they're thinking about Product Hunt from their lens.
And so they'll ask for things like, hey, I would love to know who's raising money.
And I would love to...
Why don't you build a fund on top of Product Hunt and fund the most upvoted products?
Or they have a lot of different needs.
And also the investor base is, I don't know what percentage it is, 0.01% of our audience.
So the reality is we don't want to listen too much to investors' needs and build for
them because that's an entirely different product.
If we're building a curated platform for investments, that's what AngelList is to some extent.
It's a very different type of company and product.
Let's talk about some of the things, some of these lessons that you've learned and listening
to some of your users, trying things out, failing, iterating, etc.
What are some of the things that have worked the best for growing the Product Hunt community?
Yeah, let's see.
A lot of what we try to do is observe...
There's a combination of listening to your community and what their ideas are and hearing
them out.
And then there's a combination of observing their behavior.
And so one example that I like to illustrate this is, collections is actually just an observation
of how people were using Product Hunt.
So collections, for those that don't know, it's a way to essentially bookmark or create
lists of products that you want to save or share.
And so it could be something as simple as cool apps that I love, or it could be free
startup tools.
Heaton Shaw actually has a collection he's been managing for, I think, two or three years
of free startup tools.
And he just adds ones that he likes to this list every single week or so.
And so we observed that people were actually saving products to Trello or saving them to
Wunderlist or other third-party tools.
And obviously, to do that, you need to copy and paste the URL and then put it in your
own software and go through a number of hoops to save this thing.
And so we saw this happening repeatedly.
And we realized, well, why don't we make it really easy for people to bookmark these things?
And why don't we allow them to add things to a collection that's ultimately shareable
that we can then use for further curation and also to allow people to explore products
in a different way?
So it's not just about, here are the newest products today, but here's a bunch of really
cool free startup tools, or I have a collection of apps that I continue to add called Nostalgic
Apps, which are products or apps that are just weird and bringing back nostalgic feelings.
So there's one that it's like a radio time machine.
So it plays like music that was popular on the Billboard top 100 exactly one year ago,
for example.
So there's just a lot of things like that that observation of behavior was helpful in
determining, okay, well, let's build for that behavior and make it easier for them to do.
And by doing so, then you think from a strategic perspective, we have more data about these
people and more data about these products and more ways to help people discover other
products as well.
What were some things you did to start getting more users in the door as opposed to sort
of delighting the people who are already product hunt users?
I mean, I know you're doing a lot of manual effort stuff up front, responding to people
on Twitter, responding to people over email when you had your email list, did you keep
doing this manual stuff or did you ever hit on any more scalable ways to get people to
know about product hunt?
Yeah, there's two ways that we grew in the beginning that were very effective and now
less effective because I guess user growth and growth in general, there's these things
that you do that get you to the next milestone, but then oftentimes it's kind of like a well.
You sort of tap out.
You can't necessarily continue to grow exponentially using that same channel or that same technique.
You've got to find something new.
Yeah, yeah, which is the hard part about startups is you always have to figure out something
new.
There were two things in the beginning that were incredibly beneficial.
One, one was actually tech press and this is a trap for a lot of companies.
A lot of people chase tech press because they want to show off how cool they are and it's
oftentimes a vanity metric, but for us, tech press was helpful because the people that
were reading tech crunch are exactly the type of people who would want to use product hunt.
And we had some early tech press, whether it was launch announcements we had or oftentimes
we get and still get mentioned in these publications or these articles saying, hey, here's this
new product at launch.
Here's a link to the product and conversation where we found it or where the maker is answering
questions.
A lot of that was really helpful.
And again, it's not helpful for a lot of companies, practically most companies.
It's a terrible growth strategy to rely on press.
But for the first, let's say six to nine months, it was incredibly helpful.
And then the second lever for us was going back to what I said about makers joining.
So what we realized is there was this nice flywheel that happened and still happens today
in that when we have a person who's launching a product, they end up bringing their own
audience to some extent.
They launch a product and they share it on Twitter or Facebook, LinkedIn, sometimes with
their own email list.
They then bring a number of users and those users contribute in upvotes and comments and
other things like that.
And some of those users are also makers.
They're also people who are building products.
And so there's this nice flywheel effect in that every time there's a product that launches,
they bring in new people and then some of those people stick around and the community
continues to grow that way.
And that's still an important part of product hunt, but it's not something that necessarily
alone is exponentially going to grow us to another like 10 million people per month,
for example.
Yeah, I think what's interesting about growing your startup and hitting these plateaus, what
you were doing earlier no longer works.
You figure something else out that's new is that it gets harder over time because by the
time you've grown, you're now even bigger, which means that a lot of the older, a lot
of the growth tactics that you look at are just not right for the scale that you're at.
So for example, if you're trying to grow your company by, I don't know, answering questions
on Quora, that might be good for getting a few hundred or maybe even a few thousand people
in the door.
But if you've got 200,000 people coming to your website and getting a few hundred people
in the door, it doesn't really move the needle.
What moves the needle at product hunt today?
What are the newer growth channels you're looking at?
And how do you get product hunt to the next level in terms of size and impact?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So there's certainly those things that are helpful in the beginning.
And then at some scale, they're a waste of your time.
Like for me to go on Quora to write thought influencer pieces and try to track traffic
to product hunt is not a good use of my time or anyone's time.
But then there are also some things that you can now do when you get to a certain scale
that weren't possible before.
And one thing that's been very effective in the past year roughly is SEO.
And so the combination of things have happened.
One we've had this website up for almost five years now and we've created some domain authority
on the internet.
We also have a lot of data and a lot of products, over 100,000 products posted and comments
and original content around this information.
And we also have a lot of things that people may not realize.
Some of it behind the scenes, like we have things that are relations to products.
For example, alternatives to products where we're actually tagging and creating a network
of sort of this product network where we know which products are related to each other.
And we use that to then generate effective landing pages like alternatives to Slack or
alternatives to Intercom, for example, which are things that people are searching for.
And so these are things that a lot of the core content community don't even see.
And it's intentional.
It's not that we're trying to surface a lot of this content, but we're able to use all
the content and data that we have to create these pages that then attract search traffic
as well.
And that's something that we wouldn't have been able to do in the first year, maybe two
years effectively.
And what happens when somebody goes to one of these alternative two pages?
How do you think about capitalizing on that traffic that you're getting from searches
and optimization and sort of leveraging it to accomplish your vision at product time?
Yeah, you know, right now we're sort of at the phase where we're continuing to learn
what pages and what types of keywords are working.
And we're not doing anything aggressive in terms of trying to get those people on a retention
channel.
You'll see, I don't know the current state of core and Pinterest, but back in the day,
they would be very, very aggressive with any kind of traffic, especially from search and
force you to log in after you saw maybe one article or after you scroll down the page.
And so those are some things that we want to, since we want to avoid being overly aggressive
like that, but we do want to sort of as the next phase, after we continue to grow the
actual traffic size, we want to think through how do we identify the types of people and
then which channels people are landing on that are driving return visitors or driving
email subscribers or some sort of metric that gets people on a retention hook.
Because the other reality is a lot of these search traffic users are not coming back.
They search for alternative to intercom and they see some other product, they click away
and they're done.
So that's something we have yet to figure out right now.
Well, you're several steps ahead of me.
TeaHackers is primarily a content-based site and yet my search engine optimization is still
pretty abysmal.
Yeah, you know, it's not something I knew really anything about and still don't know
a lot about.
Like I'm not the one, I'm not the expert on this field at all.
And it's also not something I gave enough respect because SEO isn't a sexy thing really
for most people.
It's not a cool thing.
It's also not necessarily fun for a lot of people.
And I think this is kind of a theme too with entrepreneurship is oftentimes you need to
be open-minded and be willing to do the things you don't like to do.
Because actually maybe SEO is the biggest growth lover that you have.
And it's something that you should prioritize even though it's not the most fun thing to
do.
Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned this because I think a lot of people's companies don't
do as well as they could because people aren't as open-minded to exploring and learning about
the different channels that they could use to get the word out about what they're doing.
And it's funny to be talking to you about this because on IndieHackers probably the
most common channel that people use to get the word out about what they're doing is product
time.
So the sort of stereotypical thing is I've built my business, I have a website up, nobody
knows about it.
So I'm going to put it on the front page of product time, which is great because a lot
of people who are looking for new products will find it if it does well.
But it's also sad to see people stop there and not consider things like submitting to
other communities or trying to get to the top of Google or pitching press or any of
the dozens of other channels that might work for their business.
Yeah, yeah, there's an infinite number of ideas and channels and also these channels
change too.
So if you look at, there was a time maybe 2014 and 15 might have been the peak where
a lot of these social mobile apps were leveraging your phone contact address book to grow tremendously
quick.
And some of that's a little bit shady, some of it was a lot of dark patterns to get you
to invite your friends.
But that was very effective and growing for a lot of different companies.
Now today, it's a lot more difficult, one, I think it's because a lot of consumers are
a lot more hesitant to give access to those things.
And they're also, I think, more sophisticated to not invite their grandma to some social
app via text messaging.
And so it's one of those things that there's certain things that will always, well, for
the foreseeable future, be a growth channel like SEO to some extent, search traffic, but
then there are also these new channels that emerge and sometimes die out over a year or
two.
Yeah, I remember talking to David Hauser, the CEO of a company called Grasshopper.
And they were big back in the early 2000s.
And one of the channels that they used back then that still exists, but it's completely
different is Google AdWords, like the advertising on Google search results.
But back then, it was like, I don't know, like half a cent to get several clicks or
something to your website.
And so it was just a massive growth channel for them.
But nowadays, it's much more expensive, much more competitive.
So I would encourage anyone listening who's trying to figure out how to grow their business
and get their first customers in the door to be creative and look for things that are
maybe newer, that aren't as overutilized as some of the more popular channels.
Yeah, yeah.
It's part of people that love, it's a fun profession, growth, and it's not something
I've formally ever been in, but there's so many different, it's a combination of science
and psychology oftentimes, when you think about exploiting, or leveraging might be a
better word, different growth channels.
Yeah.
So I want to talk a little bit about revenue growth, since you are on the Indie Hackers
podcast after all.
But I think to really understand how you're thinking about revenue at Product Hunt, why
you're charging for products nowadays and you didn't used to, we should mention the
fact that Product Hunt was acquired by Angel List at some point in your journey.
Why sell Product Hunt?
Why not keep going on your own, and how has life changed since joining Angel List?
Yeah.
So let's see, it's been about a year and a half since the acquisition, and so going
back to what I was saying before, we went through Y Combinator, we raised two rounds.
One was seed round, and another one was led by Andreessen Horowitz.
And one of those investors in our seed round was actually Naval.
And I had been following Naval, following Angel List for a long time.
And it was kind of at that moment where we connected and stayed in touch over the course
of Product Hunt.
And then fast forward to 2016, sounds like an eternity ago when I say 2016, but we got
to the point where we're evaluating the next steps, what do we want to do with Product
Hunt?
Where are we going to take this?
And started then talking to Naval about what they're doing.
And the conversation started to turn into, how do we work together?
And the beauty of this relationship, not to sound too cheesy, is that we're very much
building for the same audience and have very similar cultural values in that Angel List
is building...
Their goal and mission is to really help startups succeed.
And they do that by helping them get capital so that the game hire and whatnot, and also
hire through talent platform.
And those are two fundamental, very important things, is if you don't have a team and you
don't have money, oftentimes you can't really do anything.
And the thing that they were missing was, how do they get users?
How do you get distribution?
And also kind of an aspect of that that was missing within Angel List is kind of community
and engagement and something that you come back to every single day.
Angel List is awesome, but it's not necessarily a place that you're...
It's not designed to be a place that you come back to and hang out.
It's designed for very important high value transactions.
So when we got to talking and hearing more about what they're doing in Angel List, it
made sort of just like peanut butter and jelly in that a lot of what they're aiming to do
aligns with what we're doing, but we have very different types of directions and almost
complementary values or things that we're trying to achieve.
Has the acquisition affected how you look at generating revenue for product hunt?
And as sort of a follow up to that, how do you look at generating revenue for product
hunt?
And what's your game plan there?
Yeah.
The first, I would say year, revenue was not the first year after the acquisition.
That is revenue was not the priority.
And partly the goal was actually to keep things relatively cohesive and not disrupt the community
because the last thing we wanted to do was we made jokes about rebranding it to Angel
Hunt and putting it under Angel.co and that wouldn't make any sense.
Why would we do that?
That would be a slap in the face to the community and the brand that we built.
And so a lot of our focus in the beginning was let's keep things relatively consistent.
Let's make sure that this transition is smooth because you never know how a community will
react when there's an acquisition.
The fortunate thing is a lot of people in product hunt actually admire Angel List and
a lot of them tweeted that and said, hey, I love product hunt and I love Angel List because
I got my job.
I got hired through Angel List.
So a lot of that was sort of the first year.
And then going back to end of last year, the shift then went to revenue and getting to
a place where we can pay our bills basically.
And our strategy for that has been kind of twofold.
It all fundamentally comes back to what I was saying before in terms of identifying
a behavior or listening to users.
Every single revenue effort that we've done has been driven by some form of that in one
way or another.
And the ways that we're monetizing today is partly through advertising.
And one of the biggest drivers of that is actually promoted products.
And the way we've approached that is, one, we could have approached it as anyone could
pay to get the number one spot in product hunt and give us money.
And that was, we might make more money, but we might also piss a lot of people off and
turn product hunt into pay to play.
Instead, what we are doing now is we're actually allowing people who have been on product hunt
before to get re-featured.
And that's the only people that can pay for a promoted spot on product hunt.
And by doing that, we're able to surface things that people have already expressed interest
in.
These are all products that have many, many upvotes, hundreds of upvotes in many cases.
And so it's not disruptive to the experience.
It's actually, in some cases, additive because it's a cool product that was already like
last week or last month on product hunt.
And we've gotten no complaints from that type of approach and we're able to monetize effectively.
So that's one of a few different kind of advertising-based methods of revenue generation.
And then the other is SHIP, which I can talk more about, just a whole rabbit hole.
But basically that subscription-based SaaS business that we're building based on a lot
of observations of how people are building products.
And we have a thesis around how people can communicate better with their audience along
the way.
Yeah, let's talk about SHIP for a little bit.
So SHIP is your monthly recurring revenue subscription business that you guys have launched.
How's that going and what are some lessons that you've learned?
Yeah, so I mentioned there's kind of two channels.
We have advertising, which is pretty straightforward, pretty obvious.
And then we have subscription-based revenue.
And SHIP is, honestly, it's been an awesome learning opportunity for me because it's essentially
a SaaS business.
It's very different than product hunt, but it leverages a lot of the same things and
is built off of very much all the observations that we've had over the past almost five years.
And basically the idea is we noticed a lot of people are, one, building their own landing
pages for their products, two, they're collecting emails and signing up for things like MailChimp
so that they can email those people, and three, they're using things like Typeform to survey
their users and get more information about them to help inform their product design and
what they're building.
And so people have three to four different products they're using for this.
And as a result, what they're often having to do is export a CSV and import it into MailChimp
and then take the results of Typeform and try to smash it together with your MailChimp
results to be able to target certain people.
For example, if you have a question that's like, are you an Android user or iPhone user,
and you want to email all the iPhone users with a link to your test flight, you have
to piece together three different tools to do that.
It's a lot of work.
And so the idea is, okay, we have people doing this.
Let's make it easier to do all these things and build it in one central platform so that
you don't need to export CSVs anymore.
So the idea with Ship is to just help people build better products and spend more time
building the products and less time building and piecing together all these tools to communicate
with users.
Right.
And I see a lot of indie hackers using Ship for the reasons that you listed.
I mean, it saves them from having to reinvent the wheel every time they want to launch a
new product, gauge interest, put up a landing page, et cetera.
I'm curious what lessons you've learned from launching Ship.
If you could go back a year and talk to the Ryan of a year ago and tell him something
about Ship, what would you say?
That would be, I wish I could do that, that'd be amazing.
I think part of the mistakes we've made with Ship have been, and I think this is pretty
common, is we built a lot of features and the reality is most people use one or two
of the features and they're happy with it.
And a lot of the other things that we built aren't being used.
And I think it's fairly common, especially with tools like this, where you're trying
to build an all-in-one solution, it's really common to try to re or rather build a lot
of advanced features like A-B testing and other things like that that other tools have
without maybe fully realizing like, will people really use this or will enough people really
use this to make it worth the time?
And so certainly the mistake has been, we build a lot of features, a lot of tooling,
but a lot of it's not used and people are happy with just kind of the core basic product.
So that would be the thing I would tell myself is to simplify and try not to go too far down
the rabbit hole in rebuilding some of the more advanced features set.
What do you think the future holds for generating revenue at product time?
So this year will be profitable through the two different general channels that I mentioned.
And then at that point, it's not necessarily a focus, frankly, of then generating more
and more money.
Of course, we would like to, but we're not trying to milk a cow until it's dead.
That's a really terrible analogy.
Yeah, don't do that.
But we're not trying to make a ton of money after this.
Our goal actually is to get the profitability to cover our expenses and then we'll take
some of that focus and shift it back towards building things for the community and user
growth in general.
So it's very much kind of two phases that we're looking at and that sort of next phase
will be probably the end of this year, early next year.
Let's talk about your personal life for a little bit.
How do you juggle living a normal life and also being the founder of Product Hunt?
How much time do you spend working?
And how has your work-life balance changed since getting acquired by AngelList?
Yeah, fortunately, I like what I do.
So work for me is oftentimes fun.
In fact, my favorite thing to do is honestly get up early 5.30 and get to Phil's as fast
as possible and start working.
And there's something, maybe it's not healthy, I don't know, but I just enjoy that.
And even when I was traveling recently and working remotely, first thing I would do in
the morning in Paris, Berlin, and London is find a coffee shop and unfortunately, no Phil's
over there.
But I found a coffee shop that had Wi-Fi and would camp out for two or three hours.
And that was, I don't know, something about therapeutic about it.
And so fortunately, I like what I do.
I feel that there are definitely waves of busyness and I think most founders that I
talk to have that feeling where some weeks are busier than others and I certainly have
those.
I also wouldn't mention and acknowledge the fact that I don't have as, there's a lot of
stresses but they're different stresses than when you're independent as a company.
And when you have a company that ultimately when you're not making money and you're not
profitable, you have a date where you're going to die.
And those are the most stressful moments is thinking about and worrying about growth or
revenue or whatever it may be when you're independent that now we don't have to worry
about today.
And as a journalist, we have a lot of ambitious goals and I have a lot of promises to keep
and we're working just as hard but I'm not worried that we're going to die tomorrow.
When was the time when you were worried that you were going to be dead tomorrow?
We went through two rounds of funding and so then they were very, they're short back
to back.
So it wasn't, it was I think a four or five month difference between these two rounds.
And so we didn't go through where a lot of companies have multiple rounds over several
years.
It's a little bit different.
A lot of it's you end up seeing that there is this point where you need to either raise
around, get acquired or die.
And then of course there's other options too like scaling back and all of that.
And there's certainly moments with stress where you're worrying like things don't always
work, things don't always go to plan, things always take longer than expected.
And so there's certainly some time, some months where there's stresses when you go to the
board meeting and you unfortunately have to deliver really not great news and the metrics
don't look great.
We've certainly gone through moments of that.
And those are the most stressful, stressful times to think of starting, of building companies.
How would you assess yourself as a founder and a CEO?
What would you say are your strongest skills?
And on the flip side, what do you need to work on the most?
I think from a, from an individual contributor perspective, I, my, my skill sets lie in community
building marketing and product management or product in general.
And so that's, that's where I sort of hang my hat.
I defer to other people way better than me on design and certainly on engineering, but
from a similar founder or leader perspective, I think, I think I'm, I don't know, maybe
I should have my team speak for me, but I think I'm good at managing and working with
a lot of people across different functions and listening and being empathetic.
I'm not so great at certainly not good at having hard conversations and keeping people
accountable and setting deadlines and holding people up to the metrics that they, they,
they, they, they set in the beginning.
A lot of that is just not natural for me.
And it's something that I've recognized, you know, over the years and something I'm trying
to, to improve, but it's hard sometimes when you just want, you want everyone to get along
and you want to build awesome products.
Sometimes you have to, to be a little bit more strict and maybe institute an OKR process
and things like that to, to help people do better at their own job.
Yeah.
It's so tough as a founder when you were just working to try to make your business succeed.
And that's hard enough.
But at the same time, you have to learn how to hire and manage and delegate effectively.
That's really challenging to do, especially if you don't have any management experience.
Yeah.
And most, most founders, many of them have managed very small teams or no teams at all.
And that was me actually, I, I, my background is in product management and I didn't have
any direct reports.
Like I was one who would work across all functions of the group, but no one was reporting to
me and I wasn't a manager.
And so when product started it, now I became a manager and I had to learn kind of along
the way and still, still learning and indie hackers, it's just you and your brother.
Is that right?
Or do you have anyone else working with you?
Yeah, just the two of us, but we rely a lot on our community to get things done.
And so as I mentioned earlier, our community sort of moderates and pleases itself.
They create obviously all the content on the community forum.
They run and host all the meetups that we have going on all over the world.
They even contribute to a lot of our written content on the website.
So most of the things we write, it's not blog posts written by me and my brother, but it's
interviews that we're doing with other people, AMAs and roundtables.
Otherwise we just couldn't do very much by ourselves.
Yeah.
I mean, that's impressive because it's really hard to, it's really hard to build a company
with just a few people, especially when you have a living, breathing community that you
can't just turn off.
Yeah, exactly.
So like you can, like you can't go to Burning Man, can you?
I mean, how do you fully disconnect?
You really can't.
You know, I've been getting better at it recently, but it's tough.
I mean, you're right.
I've never been to Burning Man.
Yeah.
I went last year for the first time and that was the, I was offline for a little bit over
a week, I think.
And it was really strange.
It was the first time I didn't think about work at all and that literally hasn't happened
in my life once.
Wow.
So it was a good disconnect.
Yeah.
It sounds badly needed.
Let me ask you, where do you think the maker community is going and where did it come from?
How have things changed in terms of the community behind Product Hunt from when you started
it to where it is today?
Yeah.
I mean, part of the thesis in Product Hunt was an observation that one, technology is
part of our culture and it's in many ways a way to express yourself the same way that
music is a way to express yourself.
And we're seeing kids and people learning to code and learning design and learning all
these things within the technology space with ambitions and aspirations to start a company
or build something that people want.
And that is something that I definitely foresee continuing and something that I certainly
want to support because I think it's good to support these people who are building things
and using code and design and marketing or whatever their passion is to express themselves.
And that's why you see a lot of people who are maybe self-identified makers who are not
building companies and have no intention of necessarily turning this thing into a company
or a business, but they're just building stuff because they want it to exist or they're building
it for fun.
That's a trend that I think we'll continue seeing.
And I hope that the broader mainstream world understands that and acknowledges that it's
okay to build a shitty product because people are okay with people creating shitty music
because it's a person who's learning.
And I just see far too often people who criticize others for building something that they don't
think is a value or interesting or designed well when we really should be celebrating
and encouraging these people to try and explore the world of tech.
There's something about the internet in general where it's kind of like cars where people
get into a car and suddenly they lose all their humanity for everybody else who's in
a car around them.
And on the internet, it happens as well.
Someone will put their product on Hacker News and then everyone just comes in with these
heartless comments that are just needlessly critical without really realizing that somebody's
a real person on the other end.
So I totally agree with you.
We should celebrate the fact that people are trying and that people are being creative
and doing things that five, 10 years ago, they probably wouldn't have had the courage
or the ability to do.
Yeah, certainly not the ability when a decade ago, you'd have to buy a server and it would
cost so much more, but it would also just take so much more time to build something
and get something up and running.
Now there's lots of infrastructure in place to make it easier.
And one committee I'll shout out to is Glitch is one example, is a really cool, interesting
take on and community really of people building like web apps and silly fun stuff.
And there's a lot of really cool kind of inspirational ideas on that platform.
Yeah.
And when you mentioned that it's easier to do this stuff nowadays because it's more affordable,
I think about the same thing with Andy hackers.
There are a lot more people starting companies today because it's way cheaper to do it than
it ever was in the past.
And it's easier to learn.
It's easier to learn how to code.
It's easier to learn how to start a business because there's so many stories online where
people have documented exactly what they did to get started.
And I think, you know, going into the future, we're going to see a lot more people doing
this stuff because it's just easier and cheaper than it's ever been in the past.
Yeah.
And I think there's also something really freeing about being an entrepreneur and building
your own thing on the internet, whether it's bootstrapped or VC backed.
But I don't know, the internet is a pretty awesome place to build and connect with people
that have similar passions.
And we're seeing, I was just talking with some people on the team that's over lunch
around DTC and the rise of a lot of these direct to consumer brands, the internet.
And you know, it's easier and easier now to build that with things like Shopify and some
smart marketing on Instagram and Facebook.
And there's a lot of infrastructure in place to give people an opportunity to create their
own business and in some ways, you know, create their own lifestyle.
Because if you can create your own business and you enjoy working in the internet, you
can work anywhere.
Yeah, you can work from anywhere at any time on whatever project you want to.
I think it's just too promising an opportunity for a lot of people to not at least give it
a shot.
Let me ask you, Ryan, to close out here.
Let's say somebody wants to start an online community.
Is this something they should do?
And if so, what are the steps they can take to try to do it?
Yeah, I mean, I think there'll always be an opportunity to create a community around something.
I think my advice or guidance would be pick a very specific community, an audience.
And if product and, for example, was product discovery platform for everything, if you
went there and there was music and there was some sort of Kickstarter campaign and app,
video game, you know, all these different things, it wouldn't be compelling, it wouldn't
be cohesive.
And the audience, no one would gravitate towards it because they wouldn't self-identify with
it.
I think at the end of the day, product is about tech, and you do see a variety of things
that are not necessarily tech products, but the majority is about tech.
So I think it's so important to find a niche and a focus and ideally a hole in the world.
Maybe there's one way to actually explore this is first look to yourself and be like,
what am I passionate about?
Because at the end of the day, I'm not going to be the one that is going to build an online
community for lawyers because I could care less about law, but I am the one to build
a community about tech and products.
And so I think one piece of advice is to look at what are you passionate about?
And then where do those people hang out today and is there maybe an unserved need to build
a community around this particular interest or demographic or whatnot?
And I don't know, I find infinite number of opportunities to create communities.
I think you could even look at subreddits and there may be opportunities to create basically
your own brand and community around a popular subreddit as one area of inspiration.
Well said.
Well, thanks so much for coming on the show, Ryan.
Can you tell listeners where they can go to learn more about what you're up to at product
time?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Producttime.com slash RR Hoover.
I'm also on Twitter, RR Hoover, where else am I?
I'm on all the social networks.
And yeah, we'll be launching a couple cool things over the next month or so.
And yeah, thanks for having me.
It's fun to be on a podcast that I listen to.
So appreciate the invite.
I appreciate you coming on, Ryan.
Thanks again.
Take care.
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