Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
This week’s guest is Ryan Hoover. We've been online friends for a few years now. Back in 2013, Ryan invited me to join a new site he'd created called ProductHunt.
Show Notes
This week’s guest is Ryan Hoover. We’ve been online friends for a few years now. Back in 2013, Ryan invited me to join a new site he’d created called ProductHunt.com. In the last 3 weeks, it’s exploded. He was interviewed on Fox News, he was interviewed on This Week in Startups, AND he just announced that he’s joined YCombinator.
I actually recorded this episode on January 24, 2014 (5 months ago) – before Product Hunt got huge. I thought it would be interesting to revisit that conversation: to hear from the Ryan Hoover that hadn’t yet achieved all this recent success.
Once you hear it, you’ll understand why Ryan’s done so well: he built an audience (by blogging, and creating Startup Edition), and then focused on creating something valuable for that community.
Notable quotes
“I’ve always been entrepreneurial: as a child I created little joke books, and operated gum ball machines.” – Ryan Hoover
“I didn’t know what a Product Manager was 6 months before I became one.” – Ryan Hoover
“We built Product Hunt over 4 days, during Thanksgiving.” – Ryan Hoover
“Inspiration is perishable.” – Jason Fried
“I need to keep reminding myself that I can’t predict the future.” – Ryan Hoover
Show notes
- Ryan Hoover’s blog
- Ryan Hoover twitter
- Product Hunt
- Nathan Bashaw
- TWIST interview
- Fox News interview
- TechCrunch: Ryan Hoover joins YCombinator
- Telescope by Sacha Greif
Note from Justin
I need your help. People don’t know the show is back, releasing new episodes every Thursday. I took a break back in October, and people think the show is still offline. If you could go to iTunes leave a nice review that would be superb.
Also: if you’re listening on Stitcher, please leave a review on there!
PS: By the way, I’m working on something new called Product People Club. Go to productpeople.club, and sign up for the waiting list. I’ll have something to announce shortly!
Creators and Guests
What is Product People?
A podcast focused on great products and the people who make them
Good morning, product people. Well, at least this morning here. It's Thursday morning, and that means it's time for another episode of the show. My name is Justin Jackson. Now first, I need your help.
Speaker 1:People don't know that the show is back. I took a break back in October, and people still think the show is offline. Wanna help me out? If you could go to iTunes, search for Product People, and give me a review, that would be superb. Also, if you're listening on Stitcher, give me a review there too.
Speaker 1:And while you're at it, just share the show with friends. Share it on Twitter. Share it on email. Forward it to them. Write it down on a piece of paper.
Speaker 1:Pass it to them at a restaurant. The more people that hear about the show, the more people that enjoy the show, the more likely it is that we can keep the show going. So I'm back home in beautiful British Columbia. Let me tell you, if you're looking for a good way to rejuvenate your energy, your passion, and your focus, take some time away from technology. I just got back from a seven day trip to a remote ranch in Alberta, and there was no Internet.
Speaker 1:I had very little cell reception, and I feel amazing. It feels like my creative juices have been replenished. So if you haven't already booked yourself some time away this summer, do it now. This week's guest is Ryan Hoover. Ryan started a site called producthunt.com that recently, in the last three weeks or month, has exploded.
Speaker 1:He was interviewed on Fox News. He was interviewed on This Week in Startups. All the tech press loves them, TechCrunch, all that. And just today, he announced that he's joining Y Combinator. I actually recorded this episode five months ago, 01/24/2014, before Product Hunt got huge.
Speaker 1:And I thought it would be interesting to revisit that conversation, see what Ryan was thinking back then while he's in the early phases of building this site. You dig it? I can dig it. Let's get into it. Here's a song from a band I'll be seeing this weekend going to the Armstrong Heavy Metal Festival.
Speaker 1:This is Stryker.
Speaker 2:I'm drinking, Okanagan spring winter ale. Nice. It's a local beer in a terrible can.
Speaker 3:I, you know, I'm, I'm, I kind of like it.
Speaker 2:Really?
Speaker 3:In my mind I'm going, Wow, that looks terrible, but at the same time it's unique, it's different.
Speaker 2:It looks, to me it looks like a cheap beer that you'd get at, in Canada it's going to be different, but like some no name beer that you'd find somewhere.
Speaker 3:Like a Walgreens or something or seven Eleven, yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 2:It's a local beer and when you, like the what's the local beer in San Francisco? Is that Pabst?
Speaker 3:I, you know, I don't know beer honestly. I'm from the Northwest which they're big into like from like Eugene, Portland, Oregon area. They're big into microbrews and I know nothing about it so Yeah. I don't know what's local here. Like Ninkasi though is huge in Eugene.
Speaker 3:It's pretty popular now. I don't know if any microbrew fans out there but
Speaker 2:What's it called? Ninkasi. Ninkasi.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's super hobby generally. I'm not into hobby beers myself so Perfect. Not my
Speaker 2:Okay. People are saying they see videos so let's get started. Hey, it's Justin Jackson here and I am with Ryan Hoover. How's it going Ryan?
Speaker 3:Hey, doing well. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:I'm doing well too. And today we're going to chat about Ryan's new project, a project he co created called producthunt.co. And it's been getting a lot of traction. It had a really, I'd say, a really good launch. A lot of people heard about it.
Speaker 2:So here it is right here. And you can think about it like Reddit or Hacker News for discovering products. And so you can submit a product like Lyle has here and then people can vote it up. And so this one here is
Speaker 1:Good morning, product people. Well, at least this morning here. It's Thursday morning, and that means it's time for another episode of the show. My name is Justin Jackson. Now first, I need your help.
Speaker 1:People don't know that the show is back. I took a break back in October, and people still think the show is offline. Wanna help me out? If you could go to iTunes, search for product people, and give me a review, that would be superb. Also, if you're listening on Stitcher, give me a review there too.
Speaker 1:And while you're at it, just share the show with friends. Share it on Twitter. Share it on email. Forward it to them. Write it down on a piece of paper.
Speaker 1:Pass it to them at a restaurant. The more people that hear about the show, the more people that enjoy the show, the more likely it is that we can keep the show going. So I'm back home in beautiful British Columbia. Let me tell you, if you're looking for a good way to rejuvenate your energy, your passion, and your focus, take some time away from technology. I just got back from a seven day trip to a remote ranch in Alberta, and there was no Internet.
Speaker 1:I had very little cell reception, and I feel amazing. It feels like my creative juices have been replenished. So if you haven't already booked yourself some time away this summer, do it now. This week's guest is Ryan Hoover. Ryan started a site called producthunt.com that recently, in the last three weeks or month, has exploded.
Speaker 1:He was interviewed on Fox News. He was interviewed on This Week in Startups. All the tech press loves him, TechCrunch, all that. And just today, he announced that he's joining Y Combinator. I actually recorded this episode five months ago, 01/24/2014, before Product Hunt got huge.
Speaker 1:And I thought it would be interesting to revisit that conversation, see what Ryan was thinking back then while he's in the early phases of building this site. You dig it? I can dig it. Let's get into it. Here's a song from a band I'll be seeing this weekend going to the Armstrong Heavy Metal Festival.
Speaker 1:This is Stryker.
Speaker 2:I'm drinking, Okanagan spring winter ale.
Speaker 3:Nice.
Speaker 2:It's a local beer in a terrible can.
Speaker 3:I, you know, I'm, I'm, I kind of like
Speaker 2:it. Really?
Speaker 3:My mind I'm going, wow, that looks terrible, but at the same time it's unique, it's different.
Speaker 2:It looks, To me it looks like a cheap beer that you'd get at, in Canada it's going to be different, but like some no name beer that you'd find somewhere.
Speaker 3:A Walgreens or something or several of them, yeah. I
Speaker 2:don't know. It's a local beer and when you, like the what's the local beer in San Francisco? Is that Pabst?
Speaker 3:I you know, I don't know beer honestly. I'm from the Northwest which they're big into like from like Eugene, Portland, Oregon area. They're big into microbrews and I know nothing about it so Yeah. I don't know what's local here. Like Ninkasi though is huge in Eugene.
Speaker 3:It's pretty popular now. I don't know if any microbrew fans out there, but
Speaker 2:What's it called?
Speaker 3:Ninkasi.
Speaker 2:Ninkasi.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's super hobby generally. I'm not into hobby beers myself so Perfect. Not my
Speaker 2:Okay. People are saying they see videos so let's get started. Hey, it's Justin Jackson here and I am with Ryan Hoover. How's it going Ryan?
Speaker 3:Hey, doing well. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:I'm doing well too. And today we're going to chat about Ryan's new project, a project he co created called producthunt.co. And it's been getting a lot of traction. It had a really, I'd say, really good launch. A lot of people heard about it.
Speaker 2:So here it is right here. And you can think about it like Reddit or Hacker News for discovering products. And so you can submit a product like Lyle has here and then people can vote it up. And so this one here is Beats Music. So you can click over and see the product that he submitted.
Speaker 2:And then you can also interact here in comments. And I think you authorize through Twitter, and so you can mention people with whatever their Twitter handle would be and have a conversation. Really slick, actually, and that's something we're going get into a little bit later is how did they get such a great working design and product right out of the gate. Now I got to figure out how to go back. Here we go.
Speaker 2:So Ryan, before we get into things, let's talk a little bit about your background. How did you get into products in the first place?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So let's see where I start. So I won't go back too far but I've always been somewhat entrepreneurial kind of as a child working on different things from creating little joke books and selling them at my dad's video game store to operating like little gumball machines. I've always had kind of that entrepreneurial kind of spirit and my dad has been an entrepreneur all his life running different businesses and starting companies. But my introduction to start up and technology was actually in college at an internship.
Speaker 3:So I in college applied for an internship at a video game company in Eugene and it was the only video game company I think, maybe one of two and got a role as an unpaid marketing intern for a while there and eventually landed a job right after college thankfully. So worked unpaid for four months. It was a great experience, learned a lot. Got a job and then from marketing I eventually fell into product And partly that was due to the fact that I was reporting to the VP of product and over time you noticed I was continually kind of naturally migrating to kind of a product role in terms of the things I was attracted to. So I suggest new product features or ways we can improve the product more so than I was like contributing on the marketing side.
Speaker 3:So yeah, he threw me into the fire as a product manager. I had no idea what I was doing. And actually I've said this many times before but I didn't know what a product manager was six months before I became one which is I don't know if that's embarrassing or not but it's the truth. And so just learn along the way and you know I was terrible product manager like in hindsight which is a good thing. Know, if you look back that far you should hopefully be embarrassed as one of my friends says.
Speaker 3:So moved into product from there and after that company failed, I moved to Play Haven to San Francisco a little over three years ago and ran product there for a while as the only product manager for the first year and a half and then we've grown the company since then.
Speaker 2:Right on. There's a couple things I would love to get into there. Like your dad had a video game store?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I know. Pretty sweet, It's a That's the dream. I know, I know. My routine oftentimes would be wake up in the morning, bike ride to the store, play video games, go across the street, get Pizza Hut and come back and play more video games. That was Man.
Speaker 3:The life of my childhood is great.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. Okay, so let's get into Product now. What is Product Hunt? We talked a little bit about it but what is it How did you come up with the idea? And then tell us maybe how you validated that this was going to be a good idea.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I love talking about products. I love products in general and as kind of a product person I also enjoy learning about how people are creating products and not only from like a entertainment perspective but I like to look at an application like Snapchat for example and kind of dissect and understand like why did they choose this design or why does it do this. And finding and discovering more products is a good way to do that. So you know, it all started where it was one morning and and I've had this idea in my mind of a place to discuss and discover new products.
Speaker 3:Like often times when I meet entrepreneurs or when I talk with the people in the industry, it's the conversation leads to like what cool apps are you finding or what cool products have you found? What's in your home screen? And so it becomes really a conversation piece. And I wanted to take that offline conversation interaction and bring it onto an online space. There's no community or destination that I found specifically for products.
Speaker 3:So it was one morning and I heard of a service called LinkyDink. Were you familiar with it Justin?
Speaker 2:No. Not until you told me about it. Okay. But I remember you sending me just as a background, Ryan sent me this email and said, hey it was something like, hey, let's like share the cool products we're finding And there's this little Chrome extension called LinkyDink. Let me see if I can you probably can't see this, but I don't even know if it's worth showing here.
Speaker 2:But up here in the you'll see in my browser, there's this little Chrome extension called LinkyDink, and literally, like, you click it and oh, I'm not logged in right now, but it allows you to capture kinda like the URL that you're on right now, and then it kinda goes into a list kinda like Product Hunt basically.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly. So I knew about this product. It's from the guys at Makeshift. They launched it maybe three or four months ago.
Speaker 3:A fairly new simple product and describe it as like a collaborative email list. So what I did is I knew about this product, this LinkedIn product and I created a group. I named it Product Hunt was the first name that came to mind. And I invited you and maybe like 20 or 30 or so other entrepreneurs, founders, investors and said, hey, let's I wanna create this thing. I like discovering new products.
Speaker 3:I know you like products. Go ahead and just submit new products that you find to this list. And people started submitting and each night they would send out a new digest of all the products that were submitted. And then I posted on Quib and I tweeted it out once just a link to subscribe. And what was most encouraging well, first off about a 170 or so people subscribed within the first week despite not actually trying to market it.
Speaker 3:And that was encouraging but what was more encouraging was the feedback I started getting from people. So I was actually at a quib dinner once and Jamie from Redpoint like mentioned, oh, that product thing is really cool. And he was one of many people that either emailed me or in person said, hey that product thing is is awesome. I look forward to emails every night. And it was that point where I was like, okay, I'm not the only person that likes this.
Speaker 3:Clearly other people do. And it was at that point that I decided okay, maybe there's something here. Maybe there's an actual product here.
Speaker 2:Yeah and so like at that point, like you said, wow, like okay people are into this. They're talking about it. I'm getting some signal back. What did you do then? Like what do you do once you say, Okay I've got people kind of like this but how do you take it to the next step?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So yeah it was at that point, so I'm not a technical founder or person. I can do some front end stuff but anything back end I have no experience in. So my first approach instinct was to reach out to some of my friends, my technical friends and ask them what they would recommend I use to build it in. So I was considering like Ruby on Rails.
Speaker 3:Something that I was actually leaning towards was Telescope which is Sasha Greif's application which is a super simple way to build something like a kinda hacker news type of Reddit type of products. That was that's exactly what I was imagining. Linking Ink was good but it had no feedback. It had no way for the community to kinda like surface what was the best. So I really wanted to build, know, not reinvent the wheel but just create some sort of Hacker News type of community for products.
Speaker 3:So Telescope was something I was considering and I reached out to a few people. One of them was Nathan Bashaw, he's a friend of mine. I've known him for a little over a year maybe and we've been friends and this was right before Thanksgiving actually. So he responded and said, hey I have some time for Thanksgiving, why don't we work on this together, I can bang this out real quick. And so of course I said, hell yeah let's do this, this would be awesome.
Speaker 3:And literally in about four or five days or so he built the first version. Nathan's one of those super talented guys, really quick, product minded, designer, developer and so on. And he's built these type of products before so wasn't he wasn't doing anything new that he hasn't already done before which is why he could build it so quickly.
Speaker 2:Wow. And so where did he end up building it in?
Speaker 3:Ruby on Rails.
Speaker 2:So he built it in Ruby on Rails. Was there an existing framework or some gems that you guys used or
Speaker 3:You know, I haven't even talked to him about that. I'm sure he reused a lot of the things that he's been using in the past. He built Dash for example, I don't know if you're familiar with General Assembly's Dash product. That's one of his most recent products but many others in the past and similar kind of social community type sites using Ruby on Rails. I'm sure he reused a lot of the same stuff that he's been familiar with.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and did you guys work together? Like were you co located in the same place or was it virtual? How did you guys collaborate?
Speaker 3:So he was back at home actually during Thanksgiving so it was I don't think we I'm trying to remember if we ever met up before then, at least right after that email. I don't think we did. It was all through phone call primarily and we collaborated with just super super simple kind of idea of what the scope of v one would be. We both kind of created our own idea of like wireframes of what it would look like and we were both pretty much in line. We had a little bit of differences which is good to come to a final product.
Speaker 3:But it was lot of just phone calls, you know. We're trying to keep it super super basic and we already knew what attracted people with the LinkyDink product to an extent so we didn't want to create anything drastically different from that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And were you guys like talking every day? Like were you on the phone the whole time? Like four days, that's not very long. Yeah.
Speaker 2:How did that work? Like what was the workflow?
Speaker 3:It wasn't too formal. Mean I don't even remember if we talked every day. Think we did mostly. It was a lot of IMing as well. Talking on the phone and IMing.
Speaker 3:Both him and I had time off, you know, during Thanksgiving and I was also back at my parents place. So he would a lot of it was upfront, kind of getting on the same page of what the product would look like and what the features would be. And then it was ongoing like changes, like he would send the first version which had okay here's a post and there's no comments, there's nothing and it's like I would provide feedback and you know, we're pretty much in line. Due to the fact that the product was so simple, didn't require a whole lot of back and forth after the initial kind of design process.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And let's get into the nitty gritty of like this partnership because it kind of sounds like he said, hey, I could help you build this and you said, yeah, sure. But did you guys discuss anything future? Like did you guys sign any legal stuff? How did you guys decide who's gonna pay for servers and all that stuff?
Speaker 2:How did you figure that Yeah. So
Speaker 3:I trust Nathan a lot and we've not signed any agreements frankly. We're both going to be splitting the server costs and everything but we haven't even bothered telling each other what we each owe. For example, I'm setting up, like I have Mailchimp like somewhere on a credit card, he has Heroku on a credit card somewhere. So it's kind of a mess and you know, probably not the best way of going about something like this but you know, fully trust Nathan, he trusts me and we'll work out those details later on shortly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How did you know you could trust him?
Speaker 3:Good question. Maybe naively I just didn't. I mean I've known him for a little over a year and he's one of those, I don't know, I feel like I can read people pretty well and I wouldn't trust Nathan as much as I would someone who I just met a month ago of course. But he's an honest guy and has morals and everything, so yeah, who knows, I might bite those words later. No, I trust them.
Speaker 3:Mean, we're both we both complement each other's skills in many ways too. So he needs me, I need him in many ways.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well the cool part is that I love that Jason Fried quote where he says, Inspiration is perishable and you guys were inspired and you jumped on it and I mean, of course there could be mess. There's probably going to be mess all along but the cool part is that you jumped on that inspiration and then just kind of wrote it out like four days and you got a lot done.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah and speed is, and Nathan I think would even argue this even more so than myself but speed is kind of like a culture, something that he wants to emphasize in general. Whatever he does he's one about speed. So you you might not make the best decision but making a decision quickly is better than stagnating. And you know we could have spent a lot more time talking to users and trying to figure out what a better design of the product could be but sometimes it's just better to get something out there that might not be as good but something that you can touch and feel and get feedback on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well get it out and then have real people using it. That's the thing I find that the gap, like the longer you push out real people using it, the more you're just guessing and is so dangerous. Anyone that's ever built anything knows that if this gets far out and then you finally deliver something, that feedback that people give you is like, oh well we might as well be back at square one or two.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. I need to keep reminding myself because we have like kind of a road map of things and ideas in our head that I'm super confident that will make the product better, but I also need to keep reminding myself that that actually might not be the best thing ultimately, like depending on where the community and the product evolves and how people respond to it. I can't predict the future so. There's always a level of confidence and there's some things I'm very confident about, some things less so.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The other interesting thing about Product Hunt is it's a community which is a little bit different. Like building a community is different than building a traditional product. How has that worked for you? So how did you like get people to know about it?
Speaker 2:How did you get them to care? How did you get them to sign up? Like how has that worked?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah so basically our marketing strategy has been email pretty much. So my email outbound email has been going through the roof because that's what I've been using to kind of see the community in many ways. So maybe I'll backtrack a little bit. When we first built it, when it first launched, we had the first version after Thanksgiving or shortly around that time, we invited the same contributors that were using LinkyDink and I think we had maybe 30 up to 40 or so for a seven day period of time and I emailed them, Nathan emailed these contacts, these entrepreneurs, founders, people that were into products. And gave him a link, said check it out, log in, give us your feedback, please don't share it publicly.
Speaker 3:And we intentionally kept it quiet. So we had about 40 people. I think it may have grown up to 50 or 60 by the end of that week as we started bringing a few more people on. And we just slowly let the the these early adopters, these early early community members kinda be a part of the process. So not only invited them but we during that period showed them wireframes and also got feedback on new features and updates that we'll be adding to the product.
Speaker 3:And that's for two reasons. One, to get feedback before building something. But two, also to make the field part of the process and and realistically, really they were part of the process and how the product and community formed. So that was a really good way to like create a good foundation of a community. And it was after that first week that you know we ended kind of a public launch and do you want me to go into beyond that or
Speaker 2:Yeah well and specifically because you said email, how did you get those email addresses? Where did they come from?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah so Product Hunt wouldn't exist as it is today or at least not as successful as it is today if Nathan and I did this nine months ago, certainly not. So frankly, product hunt is something that has only been feasible because of kind of the network I've built over the past year or so. And a lot of that's been due to blogging and some other products I've done like Startup Edition. So I've been able to at least create some level of reputation or at least connection with these people that would allow them to be willing to even listen to my email and be interested in a product like this.
Speaker 3:So lot of those first people were just connections, people I talked to on Twitter, through email, people I know in person in real life. And that's the best way to start the community is like friends and people that are like minded.
Speaker 2:Yeah, here's Ryan's blog right here. You've actually probably seen Ryan's work all over the place. He's written on Pando Daily. I always see you getting published places. And then here's Startup Edition, which is the it's basically a newsletter and blog where all these folks contribute a weekly post.
Speaker 2:Not everybody all at once, but there's a question, how do you launch your startup? And then here's the email that goes out. So did promote Product Hunt through Startup Edition?
Speaker 3:I didn't initially. I think it it may have been the third or fourth week that it had launched that I eventually used that audience which isn't huge. It's right now it's like 3,500 subscribers or so on Startup Edition. So that's very small. That didn't help a whole lot in terms of user acquisition.
Speaker 3:And the entire purpose or goal was really to bring product minded people. People we knew would be good contributors, good community members initially. And then from there once we kind of exhausted those people inside of our direct network, get those people to invite their friends. Because communities are always more fun with your friends anyway. It's a lot more fun when you know you have three of your close friends that are also product minded using the same service.
Speaker 3:So that was a good way to expand the community with high quality contributors. And we did that simply by just emailing people saying, hey, do you know like a few other community members that are you know, would be valuable to Product Hunt that would like this? And for some people I would just include, if you're interested, you know of anyone, here's like two sentence intro. You can copy and paste this, send it to them if you want to introduce them to me and I'll just to make it really easy for people to do that because I don't know about you but when people ask for introductions it's like okay now I gotta think of how to introduce somebody, gotta think of the copy for that and people just appreciate that easy copy and paste kind of approach.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So when you say this wouldn't have been possible without email, what you mean is you were sending out direct emails one to one to just everyone you could think of that might be interested and might help spread the word.
Speaker 3:Yep, yep exactly. I could have used ToutApp and I could have I guess saved a little time but for me I like that personal touch. The personal touch matters a lot and I also don't want to I guess it's not about manipulation, it's really about being genuine. And in those emails I would have some sort of a template to an extent of like here's a description of what Product Hunt is, I don't need to reinvent that every single email but I would include something relevant to them or maybe our last interaction or something that is more personal to each of those contributors.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And how many emails do you think you sent out?
Speaker 3:Oh, I don't know. I should check after this. My guess is in the past three months, from the previous three months, my email has gone up like least five x if not 10 x.
Speaker 2:So a lot of email. How many users do you have right now?
Speaker 3:We have almost 5,000 subscribers. So these are subscribers or people that are authenticated on Twitter using the service.
Speaker 2:5,000 people?
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Yeah. We're growing between 8,150 new subscribers a day on the weekdays. So
Speaker 2:Wow. So like you just so we get the full picture of this, you send out a bunch of personal emails saying, hey, this is what I'm working on. I hope you like it. If you know some other people that would like it, check it out. And then from that group, let's say it's hundreds of people, you've grown to 5,000.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so there's definitely yeah, there's some other things that we've done as well. First, our current focus is not necessarily growth or user acquisition, it's still retention and engagement, are people sticking around and coming back? So that's our core focus. And then some user growth has been also important to make sure that you know there's some momentum continuing. Some of the other things that we've done is some of it has been guest blogging and actually the first kind of announcement was on Panda Daily.
Speaker 3:We did a launch on Panda and actually I emailed Carmel who's a reporter there and I had met her once before. I had written for Panda Daily maybe four or five times. So I had They knew me and I emailed her and told her about the project and said hey would you wanna write about this? This would be a really good story. We met up, did an interview, she wrote about it.
Speaker 3:A couple days later it published and that was like our coming out kind of announcement. And you know, it didn't drive like a ton of traffic, it did decent
Speaker 2:Give us an idea like how many views do you think it drove?
Speaker 3:I should try to remember how many. It might have been only like a thousand to 1,500 like unique visitors. So not a ton but the purpose of that was not to get users primarily. The purpose was to show people that it's real, that Product Hunt is an actual product. And it was more to get the community excited than anything else.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. And so keep talking, what's the story? Because we want to know the magic between getting 100 initial users and getting 5,000 users. What happens in between there?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so there's actually, I'll share something that I think I may have included in a post before but something that you guys can think about in any kind of strategy like this is before the night before we had the Panda post, I emailed Me and Nathan emailed maybe a combination of a 100 people, maybe 80 people that were early contributors, early adopters of Product Hunt and told them that, hey tomorrow we're having our big public announcement, it's gonna be on Pando, just wanna let you know. And again that was two reasons, one to make them like kind of part of the process, give them the inside track, inside scoop on what we're doing. And then after that when the actual post was released, we followed up on the email thread and linked them to that that conversation, to that post. And people, again, people like to kind of be a part of behind the scenes process that goes on behind, and they also want to read that article, so it's valuable for them, and in turn they share that. So that Panda post was the second or third most popular post that day for Panda, that's what Carmel told me.
Speaker 3:And frankly a lot of that was driven just because we emailed all of these people, all these contributors and told them that it was happening and they shared it.
Speaker 2:Wow. Wow, okay. So you're helping people feel included, all that stuff. So did the growth come from people just feeling like they had ownership over Product Hunt and sharing it with their friends? Is that where it came from?
Speaker 3:That's part of it, yeah. I wish I knew the exact numbers but part of it is literal direct email recruiting, some of it is press, and then some of it is word-of-mouth. So we've been, I haven't actually measured this, but we've been getting a lot of like tweets and emails, but a lot of people on Twitter talking about Product Hunt and sharing it and saying I use this every single day, this is replacing Hacker News, I'm addicted, we have dozens and dozens of those tweets every single week. Yeah. So people like it and they're sharing it and so we're getting some organic word-of-mouth from that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I shared one product on there and I think I got like 50 mentions on Twitter. Could not believe how many people were sharing that. Never seen anything like that.
Speaker 3:Which product was it, do remember?
Speaker 2:GoodWerp. Oh, yeah. Here I can show it. This is by our friend Valon. He's a JFDI member.
Speaker 2:Let me put it on the screen here. This is his product here and yeah, I couldn't believe it. Like I just thought, I thought, okay, I'm trying to help Veylon out and I thought I'm gonna post this on there, so goodwork.com. And first of all, there was like tons and tons of people sharing it and then there was actually people in the comments engaging Mhmm. Which even like so you've got a lot of users, but I was surprised at how much interaction there was on that one post.
Speaker 2:Like the whole thing really surprised me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, what we've been doing, so sometimes there's very little conversation, sometimes there's a wealth of it and the most popular comments and discussions are when the founders come in and they start discussing and doing a Q and A and AMA really. Yeah. That's something that we've encouraged a lot. I personally love talking directly with a founder in person and on product hunt to understand more about their product and decisions they they came across and and other things like that. And I think I think that was good.
Speaker 3:I think I forgot his name. I'm sorry. Who was it?
Speaker 2:Veylon was the Veylon, yeah.
Speaker 3:Can't remember if he jumped in the comments or not but I think somebody from GoodWork did.
Speaker 2:Cool. And so do you think that's leading some of the, like is that helping drive growth? Is that people are actually sharing this on Twitter? Because there's a little bit of a viral thing built into this product, right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. So there's That's definitely led to some of the growth is when founders see that their product is on Product Hunt. Often times they don't know about Product Hunt and someone shares it and then either someone directly says, hey, your product is on Product Hunt, check this out or they see someone tweet about it and often times founders are monitoring their company names and their product names. That's when it pulls them in there and of course they're incentivized to jump in the comments.
Speaker 3:They're incentivized to get other people to up vote, which in turn people have to log in, they have to give us their email address to upvote. And that's also part of the acquisition is people of course like to, they want to be on the top of the leaderboard. And that's becoming increasingly important of course as our community grows.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Sweet. Well, in some ways, like our relationship is funny to me because you're in San Francisco and I'm here in Vernon and BC and we connected I think because you invited me to be a part of Startup Edition or something.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think I had been following your podcast product people before that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. That's just amazing to me that you reached out and then because I would have never known who you were but there was and there's probably a few like connection points along the way but I think that's interesting that you've clearly built relationships with a lot of people in a fairly short amount of time and I think a lot of it has to do with how kind of inclusive you are, what you mentioned in terms of doing a lot of little small things to help people out.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:People really do notice and I think you're a great example of that if people are trying to look at ways to, especially if you're an introvert, looking for ways that you can connect and network, Ryan would be a great guy to reach out to. You can find him on Twitter at, it's RRHoover, right? RRHoover on the web ryanhoover.me, definitely check out startupedition.com, also check out producthunt.co. Anything else you'd like to mention?
Speaker 3:No, this is fun. Thanks for the invite and this kind of stuff, so you know I
Speaker 2:love Awesome. So you might hear this on Product People sometime in the future.
Speaker 3:Sweet.
Speaker 2:Cool, man. Thanks again.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Thanks, Justin. See you.
Speaker 1:So that's it for this week. Man, that was interesting to listen to that back just now. You know, that that conversation happened five months ago and to see where Ryan and Product Hunt are now. Like I said, he's just joined Y Combinator. There's a lot of kind of people thinking about how Product Hunt could make money.
Speaker 1:And one of the things is that it seems to have attracted a lot of venture capitalists and people that want to fund startups and discover products that they could invest in. So there might be some business opportunities there. Anyway, you guys gotta follow Ryan r r Hoover on Twitter. While you're at Twitter, you can follow me at m I Justin. That's the letter m, the letter I, and Justin.
Speaker 1:You can follow the show as well at Product People TV. And like I said, you wanna help the show out, go to iTunes, search for Product People. Give us an honest review there, and share the show with your friends. Tell them the show's not dead, it's alive. Okay.
Speaker 1:I'll see you next week, Thursday, here on Product People.