Ryan Hoover on Product Hunt's Acquisition and Lessons Learned About Launches with Dalton Caldwell

Welcome to the podcast, guys! It's going to do well. Are you good? Good. Alright, Ryan. So, for those of our listeners who don't know who you are, what do you work on?

So, I started a company five years ago, almost—actually, just over five years ago—called Product Hunt. It's a place to discover new products. You see a lot of makers and companies launching their new apps or their new products to the world. It's kind of like Reddit or Hacker News, yet people are commenting, asking questions, and uploading what they think is most cool.

Mm-hmm. Insulting. I'm Dalton. I'm a partner at Y Combinator. I'm also the head of admissions, so that's the selection process for who we fund. I actually worked at YC when Product Hunt was in NYC, and so I remember it from the inside, kind of what the story was. Were you there for the interview?

I was not.

Do you remember who it was?

Yeah, it was Sam. Who else was it?

It was such a blur. It was ten minutes of just rapid-fire questions, and I was like, "Right, anyway, I can't remember who else it was." Yeah, anyway. Alright, cool. Yeah, so Dalton, I think he has a question for you to start it off.

Yeah, so maybe to start with, because I remember it so well from being there, walk me through from the formation of Product Hunt into applying to YC, into getting into that interview that is already a blur. Was I there?

I don't even know.

That's a very common thing, by the way. It's almost like an out-of-body experience. People don't remember them that well, so it's not just you. I can hear that a lot. There’s a lot of anxiety when you go into it, frankly. Someone gave me this advice, actually, during YC: before you do anything like that, before you do a pitch, pump your chest physically. It might have been Kevin Hale that said this.

Yeah, I could be wrong, so sorry, Kevin, if I'm putting words in your mouth. But there’s a step where you can, like, pump your chest physically, and that act of physical nature of doing something that feels a little bit aggressive can inspire some confidence. And, you know, it's actually—I may have done that a few different times throughout my career, I'm not gonna lie.

I've never heard that advice before, but yeah, that was okay. Travis and Jordan Peterson's first rule in his book says, "Stand up straight with your shoulders back." Anyway, alright, okay. So you blacked out during the interview, but yeah, what else was the process like?

Yeah, so see, where can I start? So Product Hunt—I'll do the beginning really, really quickly—started off as a side project. It was right between startups. I was leaving one startup and kind of tinkering and interviewing at other startups. I started Product Hunt. It started off as an email list, got some traction there. That then turned into a website, and we looked at a lot of inspiration from Reddit and Hacker News and other communities. Like, how do you—what systems do we want to take inspiration from? How do we want people to engage?

And so we built that. That got some traction, and it’s probably for—I want to say—four months after the email started when the website was kind of operating. There was still a side project; it was not incorporated. It was still a thing I woke up every morning super excited about and found my mind continually focusing on it 24/7. But I still didn't know what we wanted to turn it into. It was around the four-month time period that I just got a DM from Nicholas from Algolia. Yeah, they were in the previous YC batch, and I interviewed them.

Oh, well, he DMed me and said, "Hey, Ryan, you know a lot of people at YC are using Product Hunt. They're launching their products there. Gary Tan would love to meet you. Have you thought about joining YC?" It was the perfect time because I was sort of at that crossroads where I'm like, "What do we do with this? We could keep doing it as a side project, we could make it a company. If we make it a company, how do you build? Do you raise money, do you not?" So, a lot of questions.

So I initially said, "Oh, I’d love to meet Gary." We went to the Grove on, I think, Mission Street, and my questions for Gary were pretty transparent. I was like, "Hey Gary, this is working. Here are the numbers. I love doing this, but I'm not sure I want to take VC funding. And I mean, if I go into YC, if we do YC, does that mean we're on that path?"

Gary said something along the lines of, "Well, when you strike lightning in a bottle, it doesn't happen very often." And I say that not arrogantly; it's not that Product Hunt is the most amazing best thing in the world. It's not. But very few times in your life do you build something that is like, "Wow, there’s something there that is true." That advice stuck with me. Gary was never pressuring me to say, "You should do YC" or "You should raise VC funding." But that advice or that feedback was really insightful because he's right: "Am I ever gonna have a time in my life where I build something that's starting to show some sort of traction, something that people want?"

Ultimately, do you remember what the growth rate was when you applied to YC?

Yeah, if I'm not mistaken, I think we were like 50% month-over-month. And that's not counting like with 100 users in month one, but it was like over the course of a few months with some users. And actually, going into the interview—I'm fast-forwarding a little bit—but we found out some things that worked on the growth side. A lot of it was very manual. Me basically emailing makers and founders and tweeting at them. I found out that when I messaged them, they would join the conversation; they would share, and that would drive more traffic to the site. There was a nice flywheel effect that still exists today. When I discovered that, I was like, "Well shoot, let me do that more often! Let me do that as fast and as quickly as I can going into the interview so that I can say honestly in the interview, 'Yeah, we have 50% month-over-month growth in the past three months.'"

And so anyway, having those types of metrics gave me a lot more confidence. You know, I didn't have to pump my chest to feel confident going into the interview, even though it was kind of anxiety-inducing because it's such a quick process.

Yeah, I've had similar conversations with folks like the one Gary had with you. Sometimes, what I do is actually discourage someone from doing VC financing if they have a side project working, especially if they're making money. They could support themselves on it, and it basically gives them that cool freedom that so many people dream of. Sometimes I'm like, "Hey, keep doing that, okay? You’re living the dream. The grass is not greener on the other side." And if you do want to decide to raise money, just make sure you're doing it for the right reasons, that you're really excited about it—not that someone told you to or you're seeking approval from authority figures trying to say, "Right, you wanted to come."

And so what it sounds like was good in your case is you were, like, very on board. Versus again, sometimes you see people pushed down this path where they have something working, and then they regret it in the future.

Yeah, because it’s a one-way door. A good job, right? Or a good lifestyle?

Yeah, I mean, it's this weird thing, right? Where you think, "Like, startup equals software!" So, like, because I'm making profitable software, therefore, it is a startup. But it can equally be a small business.

Yeah, and more likely, semantically, you could call it a startup too. I just—maybe it’s like the VC line in the sand. It's not for everybody.

And especially, like, I really respect there are so many great indie software developers building Mac software, and they make a good living. They got it. I think they have a lot figured out that other people don't. And so those people, I’m like, "Yeah, I don't know if this is—I think you keep doing what you’re doing."

Yeah, that’s the thought process that went through my head. So there was a scenario, and I was trying to imagine, "Well, let's see if—first off, I didn't have much in savings, and I'm not an engineer." And that was one of the things as well: I needed people to help me to build this thing and build out the roadmap that I have in my brain. And one way to do that is you get money to pay them. Well, how to get money? You could do it through VC or you can, you know, make money in the product itself. There are other means to get money.

But I was certainly evaluating, "Well, what if we never raised VC money? What if I could pocket twenty thousand dollars in my pocket per month off of the business? That’d be amazing!" And it's not what Wirecutter did. Do you know the Wirecutter folks?

Yeah. Didn’t they strap it off of the affiliate links?

Yeah, and they never raised, is that right?

Yeah, it's possible. I don't know if Brian and the team raised; maybe they did friends and family—like a certain—but they never raised like a real VC full round.

Yeah, and that's 30 million.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I did. Well, there you go.

Yeah, and even look at what Gabe’s done with Technium, which has been around forever. It’s been a force in like a thing that everyone in technology knows about, uses every day.

Yeah, and hasn’t he raised money?

And if he did raise money, the product would change dramatically. They’d have to figure out and change a lot of things for conferences, that would be my guess.

I've actually talked to him about this. So, I don’t think that’ll be his first choice, but yeah, it doesn't seem like he’s the conference kind of guy.

Does not. You know, this is a little bit of a tangent, but what did you think of when indie hackers started to come up? Because that was a little bit after Product Hunt, and it’s very similar, and it's within this exact niche.

Yeah, I’ve been thinking more and more about it. In my head, I describe it as, like, maker communities, and I would put Product Hunt in that category. Indie Hackers, Lattice Path, is certainly one of those, and a bunch of others. These are sort of communities that are designed, and some of them are verticalized around a specific function, or whether it’s like Dribbble for designers, Stack Overflow for engineers, and/or its demographic base—like Lattice Path for women. There’s this whole ecosystem of maker communities on the internet, and I find it really fascinating because it's largely built into the thesis of Product Hunt, which was always, "Well, I love discovering products." There’s, like, this cultural relevance and interest within products and technology, and more and more people are building products.

In fact, in the next five years, there are going to be a ridiculous number of products being built, partly because it’s more accessible. It’s easier. You don’t actually need any money to build anything. Anyone with the motivation and internet access can, like, build something. So, I’m going off on a tangent a little bit now, but I see Indie Hackers is certainly filling this sort of niche and this focus around bootstrapped entrepreneurs, and that’s, like, their focus within this kind of maker community ecosystem.

For me, and what Courtland's done is great. I participate in the community; I’ve been on this podcast. I’m seeing him today, actually, just funny.

Okay, I love what they’re doing!

But not all companies that go through YC ultimately raise money afterward, right? Like Zapier is a good example.

Right, and they predated Product Hunt, right? So I think kind of what Dalton was alluding to. So you had this, like, point where you could have raised money or could have not raised money.

Mm-hmm. And so demo day—like, why did you decide to follow that path?

Yeah, so the story with us going through YC: we raised a round around the same time we got into YC, and part of the strategy was, one, we’re building something for the tech community. Strangely, it was important or rather beneficial for us to get a lot of notable tech people involved. So we raised money from like GV, Greylock, SV Angel, and a bunch of other great investors. Having them involved was just helpful to have that support community.

Granted, we probably gave up more equity than we needed to; we raised a million before going into YC, before Demo Day, when we were targeting like 400K. But we got great people around us. Fast forward through Demo Day, Marc Andreessen reached out kind of in the middle, and he’d been following it and was interested. We met up, and that happened. Three or four weeks later, he contacted again, and this was pre-Demo Day. It was sort of, "You know, how are things going?" I knew what that meant. They were interested.

Long story short, they ended up doing a Series A. They preemptively—I mean, we were pretty early, especially for a Series A. Especially at that time, the metrics were great; the vision or rather the opportunity was massive. I felt that it was better to work with a great firm and raise more capital now than risk in six months raising with maybe not as good of a firm, with maybe not as strong numbers. And that money then would allow us to continue for several years building the company and hiring and building out what we wanted to build.

And so I think my perspective working at YC is your experience was a hundred percent a side effect of the lightning in a bottle effect you had. It's not at all representative with ninety-eight percent of the people in YC. That is just not how it happens.

And the reason is people don't have buzz or excitement. Because you were in the community, they were participating in the community. It's very hard—especially in that era—everyone was using your site.

So you see these things sometimes when there are social products that take off? Yeah, everyone is on them all the time. I mean, I'm not going to lie; I can think of where there were big things that were hot, and everyone got excited about them. But it’s fascinating hearing you say that because seriously, that is no one's experience. Like, he’s like 1% of the batch has that experience, and the other thing that I would say is like those aren't always correlated with the companies that do really well in the long term.

What I'm trying to say in a nice way is like, when you see this, and it’s usually because someone has a hit on their hands, and so all the investors circle around and do all this extra work to do it. But if you look at like a great example, I like to talk about is Coinbase—like he couldn’t raise from anyone! I think he got like half a million bucks.

Yeah, the 2013 winter, summer, 2012. Oh, wow.

Absolutely! There were companies like what amazed where they couldn’t get people to return their phone calls, and I think they couldn’t put together that much money. There are some long-term investments. I’d love to be an investor in that, you know. I wasn’t, like, I think the price is pretty good.

And so what we’ve seen from our side of the table and YC is like excitement around the core product or feeling like other investors are excited about it and things like that definitely give a founder like yourself tons of leverage. But that—I actually have learned to not take that too seriously as an investor as a signal for how the company will do. It’s more of just like, "Oh, you know, like people like scooters," or something, you know?

There are other examples of these hype cycles happening, and to try to remember that it’s the long-term things that really matter, like retention and growth and revenue. And those are super predictive at Demo Day.

Yeah, so, anyway, I just, like, I remember that too when everyone was like so excited to back Product Hunt and everyone wanted to work with you, and they put tons of work into it.

Mm-hmm. And like, yeah, other founders probably were like, "Why can’t I be that?"

Like, yeah, I think part of the challenge is, you know, some of the best investments are somewhat contrarian. So Coinbase being a great example in 2012, you know, crypto and that whole world was just like a totally different era, and you know, the best investments oftentimes get a single founder at that time, right?

Yeah, it was a single founder. Everything was—he was doing it.

Yes! I didn't know it was like Brian Armstrong, like just Brian!

Yeah, it was like, cool, like, yeah, I’m the Bitcoin guy and it’s just me.

So he had a lot of—it was not a slam dunk at Demo Day for Coinbase. It takes some conviction for like the future. People that didn’t invest saw a future of crypto and what it could become, and so they placed a bet on him. That’s where I think maybe it gets challenging. If it's already super hot, then there are probably also a lot of other companies competing for that same real estate.

And I think Product Hunt is probably not the best example because we're not—it’s not like a Lyft and Uber situation. It’s not like we have a zero-sum game when it comes to competition with other companies. But, yeah, I think that's true.

I’ve seen, you know, there’s some—I’m trying to think back on the batch—who were—you were in summer 14, right?

Yeah.

So I think Ginkgo is extreme. They probably have hundreds of employees; they’re a biotech company. Again, I think they raised fine, but there was not this hot buzz.

Oh, Ginkgo Bioworks? They’re from Boston; they're, you know, doing synthetic biology.

Yeah, you know, I don't think that my country Singh was cold-emailing them.

Yeah, yeah, and so, like, who else was in summer 14? But there were the nuclear companies, remember? The Octo and the fusion and the fishing company were in summer 14.

So, there was, like, stuff like that. But it would be easy to forget. And this is also what's fascinating working here, man, is people think that YC funds consumer companies and that this is our bread and butter.

Yeah, like, I think it’s like 5% consumer.

Yeah, it's funny. People think that most of Product Hunt is actually consumer as well.

Yeah, it’s probably, I don’t know, 50% at most is consumer; there’s a lot of B2B stuff on.

Yeah, well, I mean, they’re just the loudest.

Oh, that makes sense!

Reddit, like Drop, Airbnb. But man, if you actually look at the data, which is my job to do, a huge percentage is, like, good old-fashioned B2B enterprise. There’s a lot of hard tech these days, and people just don’t think about them.

Mm-hmm. And it’s not because they’re not good businesses; they’re just less fun to talk about then, and they just don’t maybe like—I don’t understand biotech.

Yeah, it’s less exciting for me simply for that reason, because they just don’t understand it. Wait! And you don’t know where the market's going, right?

Worried—like, when you think about Airbnb, you’re like, "Oh, I could see myself doing that!"

Yeah.

And then you just start doing it. So I’m curious, Dalton, about application surprises on your end, because I think both of you guys, having done investments as well, can understand like the market gets really frothy. Maybe I don’t want to do that deal, and I have to be principled. Or maybe you do do the deal, and that’s how it goes. What were the companies that were like, "I don't know about this?" and then they went on to be quite successful?

Well, there’s a lot of famous cases of people that we fund, and then they end up pivoting into something wildly different, and that ends up being pretty good. So my example, that I had a front-row seat for was Brex. I funded them to do a VR headset thing.

And I was—

It was a credit card company?

Yeah, well, I didn’t know that. And I was—I interviewed them; I was the group partner; I was their main contact. Throughout the whole thing, you know, they didn’t know a lot about VR headsets, I think. And you know, this sort of came out during the batch and during office hours, that, you know, perhaps they might want to consider something they knew more about. They had prior built something sort of like Stripe for Brazil when they were younger, and so the idea was like, "Hey, maybe you should work on some FinTech stuff that you know more about."

And it was like, "Well, what should the product be?" I’m like, "Well, what can you sell all the people in your batch, like you should talk to people where they want." And so the credit card thing just kind of came out organically.

Hmm.

And that was like six weeks before Demo Day.

Wow.

And so there’s no way you could have known that the folks working on the VR headset idea—they didn’t know much about hardware—were going to end up being a pretty good company.

Yeah.

So you were just surprised; you liked them as engineers, right place, right time. And look, you know, lots of people that are super high caliber, but that was one where certainly there was not a lot of hype about their VR headset idea.

Yeah. And I think—it could have just gone all the way through it. I think it would have been a struggle.

Do you remember what that conversation was like? Because I think this is a super common question we get for the podcast.

Yeah, people who change their ideas—what were those conversations like with them? What was the progress looking like? Did they even have a product?

They did not. I think they ran into some pretty fundamental issues that they didn’t know how to fix, and they didn’t know how to get around them. They hit a roadblock, and I definitely did encourage them to, maybe in a very nice way, to maybe—like, I always encourage people if they're thinking about maybe pivoting to go more towards something they're deep experts in, that they know more about, nothing less about, right?

And so you knew all about community, like you were in the right place for you, and you still are! Right? So you want to find a good cohesion of a founder doing something that plays to their strengths. Sometimes people pivot into stuff that they know nothing about, and I’m pretty sure that is not correlated with success.

It’s, yeah, it’s like if you try to pivot into biotech!

Yeah, like, "Oh, like biotech seems me!"

Yeah, Product Hunt is, in many ways, better or worse than—it’s just what I love! I love products, and it’s what me and my friends were doing. It felt just fun, and actually I tend to—when I talk to founders who are people who want to start a company, sometimes people overthink it. Like, "I need to start a business, and I need to think about markets and everything." I’m just—I’d like to change your frame of mind. Think about it as an experiment or a side project.

And when you put your frame of mind of, like, a side project first, you start to—you sort of settle. Most people start to settle in. Well, what would I want to build or what could I use? And it’s just a lot better way to start, I think, personally.

So, do you think there’s a way to play it over again where you could’ve, should’ve, would've monetized or expanded faster? Because, again, if we're talking about non-venture-funded things, it’s that choice, if you’re bootstrapping, about whether or not you charge for your product, right? And so, just like, where would you advise yourself? You know? If you had a time machine, you could advise your younger self. What would you have told yourself around monetization, or would it have been like, "You know what? I wouldn’t change anything." Like, yeah, that’s a valid option.

It’s, yeah, it’s one of those things. There’s a lot of mistakes I made, of course. And so when I think about the mistakes, I think, "Well, I should have done differently." And then there’s another part of me, though, that thinks, "Well, with the information I had at the time, I probably still would have made the same decision."

So, the reality is, I don’t think things would have changed, and it’s also hard to know if I did that, would that have actually been worse than what happened? Totally fair.

So, the things that I think we made a mistake on that I take responsibility for are a few different things. One of them is we should have dedicated a little bit of time and focus on revenue in the beginning, before we were funded. We were—I was paying the Heroku bill out of my own credit card, and it wasn’t expensive, but like a couple thousand dollars a month, maybe at one point. And I was like, "Well, I don’t want to pay this, so let’s do job ads."

And so we did job ads to make like four thousand dollars a month. So, not much, but like there’s clearly very easy money, like with our community. It wouldn’t have taken much work to make a little bit of money to increase our runway.

Ultimately, the challenge is always, especially with consumer-focused startups, is as soon as you start making money, then VCs will start judging you based on that revenue today. And so, strategically, there are some challenges there—what's unfortunate about it. And I think a lot of investors think, "Yeah, for what it’s worth, I would always tell someone like to make that money. Like I wouldn’t judge someone for having small amounts of revenue."

Yeah, if this was in someone's application, they’re like, "Yeah, we’re making this money from job ads." That would be like, "Cool!" Like, "Yeah, makes it very smart!"

Like, I would in no way cause me to be less psyched about the company if I read that in, like, an application or something.

Yeah! I mean, I’m trying to think of a scenario where that would be hurting their company. Like, maybe if it was affecting growth negatively somehow, right?

Like, you know, I’ve seen banner ads for jobs—I feel like in a lot of media companies what people end up starting with is affiliates. And so, that’s certainly how Wirecutter works. It’s like, if you click on the thing, you buy it on Amazon, they get an X percent, and it’s very hard to build a huge, huge, huge company doing that. But it certainly helps when people are doing communities or things around discovery, right? That's a pretty tried-and-true way to pay the bills.

Yeah.

And yeah, I think there's a difference between a good job board. But then if investors perceive it as, "Well, that’s the business model, and that’s the mechanics of how you’re going to make money—and if it’s not impressive, then there’ll be less excitement."

It’s just weird! It’s this weird game that you have to play!

So, one thing would be make money, extend runway, and start proving out some ideas early. Taking making money takes a while. We focused on that last year, and now we’re profitable.

Yeah.

And so that was like our number one goal: Just cover our cost, and that just took a while. It took a lot of experimentation to get there.

And I push on this again. I’m just picturing back in the batch, you kind of could have gone deeper on products—like really deep on just tech products and done like, I don’t know, a partnership. There are ways you could go deep on that.

I remember there were ideas to expand to discovering other kinds of things, and like you could discover a name. I don’t remember the current status of that feature, but games is one of those.

How much diversification about the kind of stuff you discover? That’s one way to do it. The other thing you’ve done is use the traffic you have and bootstrap things like a job board, or there’s a scenario where you literally could have become AngelList, right?

Like you could have gone really deep on that.

And so I can—I can, like, it’s your company, but I could pitch like five different scenarios where you could have sort of zeroed in on what you are most excited about as a founder.

By going deep on those, it would become more evident if you know—those are all wildly different companies I just pitched.

But from that lightning in the bottle that you had, you could have, like, gone deep on one of those. And it seems like your decision was to stick with the core tech product thing, and you wanted to be really thoughtful about your community.

And I remember there were some redesigns. I don’t know, like, walking through how you liked when you had all these options on the table strategically, how you decided what was exciting to you.

And you were like, "Yeah, I don’t want to do a job board; that sounds horrible."

It was a very good—you don’t—

Yeah, I think I would agree with you about that statement, but yeah, you could have—I think we could have made very easily 30K or something at some point, you know?

Yeah, a month without restricting the user experience for that.

You know, I do remember the slide that I presented at Demo Day, actually, with sort of the long—I think it might have been the last slide, which was like the future vision. Which was, "Okay, we're starting with tech.” That’s like a core. Longer term, we want to expand to gaming.

I’m actually from the gaming world before all this, and so I’ve seen the challenges of game discovery for consumers but also for people making games. All Steam done indie games, you know. Like, a platform-agnostic Steam kind of community—actually, it’s like that alone is a huge business on its own!

Fashion and like, we even—I love music. I love discovering music. That’s even an area. So we were thinking initially at one point, like, "Let’s—let's—that’s really, really amazing community." Initially, "Endless expand and replicate this model across multiple verticals,” and that actually still, to me, is super exciting.

Yeah! I was sold! Like, I remember the slide, I was like, "Wow," I was like, "I was convinced!"

Right?

Yeah, this is definitely—because you have this initial kernel. It’s so hard for founders that start where they can never get traction on the first product. Then you can’t be creative. But you had—you had this, like, excitement and kernel and capital.

And so, like, I was super excited. I remember the Demo Day prior, I was like, “Man…” I remember talking to you in like the green room or something.

Yeah, man! I’m like super psyched!

Like, this is, yeah, why—

Well, I don’t forget what I did. Exactly, it was like, "Duh." But yeah! And everyone has, like, you can imagine Venn diagrams. Everyone is interested in multiple things.

Like, I love music, and I love games, I love tech. That’s like my Venn diagram! Someone else might love fashion and beauty and tech, and so the idea was to take all these circles and, like, slowly expand into every kind of product category.

And the learning, though—there’s—I was a little bit naive, I think, in thinking that we could quickly replicate communities in these different verticals. The nature of even game discovery is quite different than product and tech discovery.

And so in hindsight, we tried to expand too quickly. In the beginning, we didn’t properly build, like, a core solid gaming committee. That was the first vertical we moved into—weird gaming!

Then we did books, and then we did podcasts, because podcasts also suffer from a discovery, like, a problem, and in Wrexham and YC application idea, really.

Oh yes! You have cast everything, but definitely podcast discovery is in that people send it to me every batch. What do you think of this? Say there’s like one dozen companies—it’s very common.

Sorry, a very hard—

And so, yeah! We learned what happened is we ended up having almost the entire community still focused on tech, and their frame of mind for using Product Hunt was tech.

And the result was very little engagement in these other kind of side communities, and we were unsuccessful in getting them spun up to be like their own standalone community where people could find the best game or really visualize it daily basis for that type of call.

Do you think you have a template now of how you may have done that in the past? Like the right people to hire, maybe even create a new name; it’s not called Product Hunt anymore!

Yeah, yeah! We talked—we internally talked about a game hunt and like expanding, even buying hunting.com and like expanding out that way, and kind of making a more general purpose.

I think this is one of the questions—I would love to see how this play would play out, but I don’t know if it would work!

And one scenario is we would build out separate domain entirely, and what that would afford us to do is create an entirely different experience designed for gaming, which would be more visual, more videos, more imagery.

It might be—it would require people to have better ability to focus in the platform that they use, whether it’s mobile or Xbox or PlayStation or whatnot, and that’s a very different experience than browsing.

I feel like you’re so good at community! I can just picture you could have used like really cool video reviews or you would have had like the equivalent of a maker.

Like, I can see it, right? Like, I guess it’s part of my job, but like just you describing—I'm like, "Yeah, that would be very different than all the other video game discovery things," and like, that sounds really useful!

Yeah, exactly!

Right? There’s nothing like that right now, and still, like, somebody should build it!

What we’re now focusing on is actually doubling—so, that was one horizontal note: go really wide, build, you know, a network of properties potentially, instead.

What we focus on is let’s go deep, because actually, as big as this is, this is also really big, you know, focusing entirely just on technology because who doesn’t have an iPhone, first off? Or like, an Android phone?

You know, there are some people in the world, but like more and more people are adopting just a smartphone in their pocket. That alone, every person that has a smartphone in their pocket could be a user of Product Hunt!

It doesn’t mean that we’ve designed a new experience for everyone today, but the market opportunity, and the influence of technology is increasingly growing.

So, we sort of honed in—I don’t know, three years ago? Probably honed in on that direction and said let’s go deeper into technology and focus on that vertical and focus on our bread-and-butter instead of trying to spread so thin.

I mean, so going deep there, like sometimes people go upmarket where they’re like, "Okay, we’ll also do this thing for enterprises." And you could have helped people discover enterprise software, and man, that sounds super—it looked real, okay!

So I can't help but like brainstorm on the stuff, so I'm just—you know, back in the day when you had everything lined up—the round, were there things that you could have been excited about that were not selling out your vision of what it could be, but that would have, like, allowed you to go super deep on this?

Because, again, you have resources now, but it’s a different setup than if you were like trying to build a company that, you know, could employ a thousand people or become the, you know, future of everything.

Yeah, so one thing that was suggested earlier, Leon, by a few of our investors, because their lenses as investors and investors were using Product Hunt to find and stay updated.

A few different investors and people suggested, "Hey, you should start a Product Fund."

Yeah!

"You should build a fund on top of Product Hunt, invest in—use the data in the community and everything to source and find really early-stage opportunities."

And I was pretty adamant—it’s tempting as it is to explore that, because I’ve always been interested in investing—pre-Product Hunt, I don’t think it was the right direction.

This is where I personally just don’t think that was the right—that would have been the right outcome. It would have actually changed Product Hunt dramatically into a much different type of business, and it’d kind of be more like AngelList, potentially.

Then again this—I was saying is like there was a way you could have, from your starting point, could have actually been AngelList if you went down that path.

Yeah. And so again, I’m not even saying it’s the right one. There’s also like Kickstarter; you could have been like, "Oh, let’s help people!"

Like, you know, imagine that you could—remember those experiments people did where if enough people took an action, it would unlock something launching?

Do you remember that? There was like a charted hype machine. Did like a bunch of sites like ten years ago did this stuff.

Yeah, but you would create collective action around people’s launches and either help them actually sell products or monetize their moments or get their initial user base.

And I know you do begin to testers, right? That's pretty cool.

Yeah, we’ve experimented with some things. Again, we sort of built a tool for people to collect beta users—like emails and that kind of thing. ‘Cause like there's ways that instead of taking equity in companies, you still could have provided like pretty deep services.

Deeper than just clicking on our my website and maybe signing up. And like, I think you both have happily paid for it, like for sure!

So, yeah, anyway. It doesn’t matter now. But, like, I'm just, like, super fascinated on thinking through just what a great thing you had and all the ways—like, like I’ve been in Silicon Valley a long time. It’s just like these little micro decisions that make a difference between, you know, Facebook being Facebook and MySpace.

Or like sites we haven’t even thought of, like, I don’t know, Tagged? Remember that? And like High Five?

And like, I remember all these people—all those companies.

Yeah!

And like they were there, you know? But little micro decisions have really huge effects over time!

Yeah, and I’m fascinated by that, and I think part of it—this is a channel—going back to the money thing too. When you do raise a lot of money and you feel like you have infinite runway, you should treat it like you don’t.

And truthfully, there are some things that I prioritized on the team because I wanted it myself, like some redesign work that we did.

Which redesigns are oftentimes a trap, like there are times when you want to do redesign work. But often times, it’s realistically not going to change your numbers at all that much, especially with something like what we built where we have a community of people like—they really don’t care if the upload button looks a little bit shinier!

Like, they’re gonna use it or not because of the content, like the conversation, the people there.

And we’re all that—they dig redesigns.

Yeah, yeah!

Yeah. Although Dig—I don’t blame them for that. The—for, I don’t know, I think that direction was directional, like intuitive. It was moving. It was when Twitter was taking off, and like, "How do you build something that’s even more accessible and builds more retention loops through following?"

And that type of thing, I think there were some good ideas there, but it’s hard. Can we?

It’s really hard to because, you know, don’t—like, change.

Don’t they?

They don’t, and we’ve made changes that the community has been upset about, and in some pieces we’ve reverted; in some cases, we let them get used to it.

But I think this is a very real problem. Like, a lot of venture-backed companies don’t have that same sense of urgency that, you know, like indie hacker-type companies have. They’re like, "Hey, listen, I could work on a redesign for the next month, or I could like optimize my sales funnel and like make, you know, a hundred thousand more dollars!"

So now that you guys are within AngelList, you could be a little more slack, maybe?

So how are you creating that urgency? Like, what are you focusing on right now?

Yeah. So we have—so last year, and we have three KPIs actually that we measure. Revenue is one of them. That was our number one priority last year—not because we were running out, because we just wanted to build a model that could scale and cover expenses.

So we hit profitability last year!

Second metric was just user growth. How do we get more people using Product Hunt?

And the third is community contributions, and that’s measured by the number of people upvoting, commenting, contributing. That’s important because it’s basically the measurement of health. If we have nobody voting, then we have nothing. So we want to make sure that's good.

This year, we're switching it around. Revenue is not the number one priority; we’re switching towards user growth, and we're focusing on kind of a couple different themes.

One of them I can’t share too many specifics on, but it’s a lot about focusing on how do we help people find the best products or the products they should be using. So Product Hunt has always been about the new products—come here, open up the website, you discover things that you never would have searched for because they didn’t exist yesterday.

And it’s kind of a place to get, like, a firehose of new, cool stuff. But a lot of people—in fact, probably more people in the world have a greater desire to find the best products for specific things!

And it could be something like, "I switched from Android to iPhone. You know what apps should I be downloading and using?"

And exploring some of it might be, "I’m starting a new company. What’s the best analytics tool for this budget, for these needs?"

So really focusing on, on this, and building out like a true product graph is kind of what we’re moving towards.

And so that’s one theme: let’s solve for that use case.

And one, by the way, when we build products, we have pretty good process down where we’ll have usually one engineer to start with on it, and they drive the project forward alongside like Julie or Dan on the design side.

So we’re able to, like, do a lot of projects at once, which some people might say is a bad thing, but for us, it works really well the way we’re set up.

And so that’s one thing we have going on. Then we have, going back to maker communities, we want to focus more on the social networking kind of side of Product Hunt and technology and making itself.

And we’ve kind of experimented and dabbled with some of this, but we’re starting to hone in on something that I think is gonna work. We’ll see if it does, around virtual co-working.

And I don’t think I’ve used those words publicly at all, but there’s this—the people who are most engaged on Product Hunt are working on side projects; they’re freelancers; they’re remote workers, and they’re just really curious and eager, and they have a desire to, one, meet other people like them, get help from other people that maybe have a different skillset, whether it’s design or engineering.

And, and also there’s an aspect of loneliness too! If you’re working on a project by yourself, like—and especially if you’re not in Silicon Valley or like a tech hub—like, where do you go?

And so we want to build out ways for people to do all those things on Product Hunt and really support this, like, future maker kind of ecosystem going forward.

Yeah, I see applications along those lines of basically remote work as a big trend. And people are trying to think about tools and like any—mmmmm, there are a bunch of ways to attack the problem, but for sure, I’m very familiar with excitement around making it easier, better, faster for folks that are working remotely all over the world to work together and collaborate.

He’s got the tooling. I mean, we got Slack, but tooling-wise there’s not a lot of—

Not much!

I mean, there’s not much. Brian and I both talked about this—we’re both in long-distance relationships!

Yeah, and he was just tweeting about it, like, "What are the solutions people are using?"

Yeah, it’s super hacky tool WhatsApp, FaceTime kind of stuff, but that’s it!

Yeah, and it should be like—like—this other realization is I think some people forget is most people also don’t have a large following online, whether it’s Twitter or Facebook or whatever.

And when you’re building something and you want feedback, at best, you ask your friends, and your friends give you really terrible positive advice because they don’t want to hurt your feelings.

And so there’s a greater need among this giant audience of people to have some sort of support network while they’re building and exploring.

Yeah, so I was curious about this. So there are a bunch of questions, basically people asking for advice. I'm like, "What makes a successful Product Hunt launch?" And like, did you guys ever consider going in that direction—like more educational content for your users?

Yeah, we have a FAQ use and like how-tos and things like that, but we’ve never really gone deep into the educational side. I think this kind of goes back to her saying, like, there are many different things that we could build for Product Hunt, and as much as I’d love to help educate people, it’s not, I think, a core focus for us.

But yeah, I think the general advice really wouldn’t come to, like, people ask me all the time, "How, what’s the best way to launch a product?" And sometimes it’s just simple advice, like make sure the imagery is really clear, the tagline is really clear, you know, bounce it off a few people that don’t know you or don’t know about your product and speak like a human, not like a marketer.

You know what I would love to hear about is an example of your favorite company that’s ever launched on Product Hunt—that you’re most proud of, almost like that you helped enable their success. And maybe the reverse, but I realize you can’t—but just like what’s an example of no one specific but just how someone can get to number one on Product Hunt and have a good launch, and then actually like they didn’t make something people want, and they turned everybody away. And like you know, what you’ve learned and internalized about someone with a great launch that in it sticks, and they really go off into the stratosphere versus, kind of like, "Oh, people checked out my silly thing," and then there’s nothing there.

Like, I love to hear that!

Yeah, there are kind of a couple—there are two different things that come to mind, one more recent, actually. And this isn’t a start-up, actually; it’s not a company, but there are a number of kind of self-described like indie makers or people who are just eager to build things, not necessarily to make money—sometimes they do, but sometimes it’s just to build things and show it, show it off and like be creative and explore.

And we do this thing called the Golden Kitty Awards every year, which Canon nominates different products in different categories. We have one category for, like, Maker of the Year, and we sort of take a look at all the three upvotes and some data from the past year to determine who that is.

And, and I apologize, I might be forgetting his name, but Andre, if I’m not mistaken, in Europe, he won Maker of the Year, and this is a younger guy who learned to code a few years ago, launched his first product a couple years ago on Product Hunt after learning about 30 or 60 days.

And then since then, he’s just—he’s almost like he’s got the bug! He’s got the bug to build! And I like to think that at least Product Hunt helped in some way, and giving him feedback because otherwise, when you build something, you spend all this time and no one uses it, no one sees it, it doesn’t mean that they have to like use it forever, but like getting some sort of feedback loops is so important when you're building something.

He now has since built and launched tons and tons of different products, and I was happy to see, like, he won Maker of the Year, and he even recorded a video and put it on Twitter, and was like, "Thanks, everybody." It’s like so happy!

So there’s like the sort of heartwarming, like it’s great to have a tiny, tiny piece of supporting these like future—well, these makers or maybe future founders of companies.

But then going to a company example, one that really sticks to mind is Meerkat. Do you remember Meerkat?

So, I’ve got to know Ben; I actually saw him last weekend, the CEO of Meerkat, now House Party. And Meerkat was such an awesome—it ticks so many boxes that were like perfect in terms of the messaging was really clear. It was— I think the tagline was something along the lines of "Broadcast live video to your Twitter followers." It was very specific, actually.

And the product design was built for leveraging in a Twitter graph, which I think today still is underutilized, actually! And quickly, it roaster prominent, like blew up—everyone was using it for a little while.

And the problem was that the product itself was not retentive. And you know, most people are really bad—including myself—at live video. It’s just really hard to create good content, and to watch live—you have to watch it when it’s live too.

So there are all these challenges with the product when it comes to retention and being something that works. But what they did realize, kind of within that, was some people were sort of hacking it and using Meerkat to hang out with friends, and that’s what ultimately inspired House Party, which is an app you open up and you and your friends immediately are in like a video chat, and you can just hang out in chat.

And it’s solving this, like, underlying desire of connection and being together with like people remote, and your friends maybe back home, or your girlfriend, or whoever.

Hmm, and that was just like an interesting example because it blew up immediately, and, and yet at the same time, it required Ben and the team to be thoughtful and like honest with themselves.

Like, they could have run—they could have run out of money and run the company into the ground if they were persistent in thinking that this would work—that Meerkat would work as it is today.

Yeah!

Instead, they had to change.

That’s really smart!

Like, yeah! And that’s a great example!

We were talking earlier, like, knowing where that decision point is. And they didn’t—it wasn’t like a hard pivot where they did something radically different, but clearly—yeah.

I’m really curious to know, Dalton, you’ve probably read, like, what, 10,000 applications? A lot about an infinite about all of the applications?

Yeah, you know, I’m just kind of connecting the dots now, but like both of you guys basically like review products all year round, and I’m curious like how much time do you actually spend on Product Hunt in like—are you filtering through it in the same way, or are you just curious about, "Oh, this is a cool side project; I'll try it out?"

I think the most important thing that I look at is how serious the founders are and if they really made something and showed it to people. So it’s almost like it doesn’t matter if the product is good!

So many people that apply aspirationally—maybe you want to build something someday, possibly!

Yeah!

But for the people that are serious enough to really make something and be brave enough to show it to other people and be willing to take all of those—like, you know, it’s really scary to do that, you know?

And so when you see someone that’s actually made something and they're willing to share it with the world, and they show that commitment, but they're serious about it, I am paying attention to you, and I care less about like the scale of the revenue, like I was saying earlier. I care less about if the design is really good.

Like those things are nice, but man, the difference between someone that’s serious and not serious is all the difference in the world!

Does that make sense?

So, how do you evaluate that in applications? How do you know this?

You can see if they’ve done something! Like, again, like do you even do you have a prototype? Do you have a first user?

Mm-hmm.

Have you made a dollar of revenue? Like, again, it depends on the type of company it is, but you can see the difference between, "Hey, I want to raise money before I work on this!"

Yeah, that’s a certain sort of thing, and that's not really necessarily our bread-and-butter.

Then the people that you can tell that they’re gonna work on their dream no matter what, with or without you, and that you can hopefully help them in some way.

And again, I would put you—like you did it! Like, no one told you, "Hey, you should go make Product Hunt." You should make this email list!

Like, you weren’t trying—I don’t think trying to please investors; you were just trying to do something you thought was cool!

Yeah!

And that was the kernel of goodness that you had! Right? Like, you figured that out on your own without authority figures telling you to do it, and like that’s really special, and that’s a huge signal!

Yeah!

One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is I was fortunate in that I’d been working in a previous company for three years. After three years, I was like, "I gotta—I'm gonna do something different."

I gave notice; that turned into a part-time role, actually, so I cut my salary in half for 20 hours a week. That gave me plenty of time for Product Hunt!

So I was lucky in that I could financially support myself as I was tinkering and building. And a lot of people just don’t, especially in San Francisco!

And I’ve been thinking more about this challenge, and maybe it’s that—be curious if YC is thinking about this—but like, how do you give people that opportunity to quit their job and give them six months or 12 months, whatever the time is, to do that?

Because you know, you can do a lot of nights and weekends, and I think people underestimate that, but there are also some people just have challenges and like having a no and to truly see something through without quitting their job!

Yeah!

So, in Startup School, which is the online course thing that we have, anyone could participate. You definitely don’t need to be full-time. There’s even for a small percentage of people that are really serious, we give them grants!

Mm-hmm.

I think this is all in our blog.

Yeah, I’m, like, "There’s how much do you give?"

Ten thousand, yeah!

To everyone? Or just a small subset?

Just a handful.

Yeah.

To, like, a hundred companies.

Yeah!

Oh wow! So you know, again, we can’t be for everyone, but those are people—those are people who were really serious! They were really working hard, and we, you know, that could be really helpful to them. And again, the whole point of Startup School was like, even for people that haven’t quit their job, it gives you a chance to be serious and structured in your thinking, right?

Put on your calendar and make progress! There are so many people that want to start a startup, and whether or not they quit their jobs, they never like begin!

Yeah.

Like a lot of people, man, like would never even think about, "I should go part-time; I should go twenty hours a week." Like, a lot of people never get the confidence and never feel like they’re good enough, and to do the thing!

So I think Startup School is awesome!

There, yeah! But for you, like, what motivated you to be like, "Yeah, you know what? I can do part-time; I can make this work!"

It was more that I just knew—I just knew deep in my heart that I need to do something different because I—I felt like I wasn't learning.

And I love the company, love the team. But it—you know, there’s certain moments I think in everyone’s career. People who have worked with me, you know, that I’ve transitioned out, you know.

It’s been a good transition because I saw like, "I get it, like, I know why you’re leaving, and I know why it’s maybe not a good place for you anymore."

So for me, I just—I forced myself!

And I—I knew it was just gonna leave entirely and not do part-time, and like I have a little bit of money saved; I’ll figure it out!

And maybe I was a little bit, I don’t know, naive in that sense, but it did work out. And you know, there’s a reason why I actually named the fund I started Weekend Fund, though, too.

Because I think a lot of amazing companies and amazing things can be built on a weekend if you can afford the time!

And I think a lot of people tend to now—I don’t want to—some people have family; some people have financial burdens, like things like that that certainly are debilitating.

But I think for a lot of people, there are no excuses not to be working on the weekend and like trying and making some progress!

Yeah! Well, if you want to do it, start it!

But not everyone, like, it’s not for everybody, but like too—if you’re curious, you have to start! And man, does that screen out a lot of people if they don’t, like, start!

Yeah!

Yeah, yeah! And the progress—there’s something about, as I speak with companies and look at them from an investor side a little bit, progress is like everything!

And just even if it’s—it doesn’t have to be, you know, 50 percent month-over-month growth, but I’ve invested in companies after following them for even just two or three weeks of giving me more confidence based on what they’re shipping and how they’re interacting with their users, and those types of small micro, like, day-to-day interactions really matter a lot!

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a great place to wrap it up, but yeah. Thanks for coming in, guys!

Yeah! Thanks for having us!