Communicate with Users, Build Something They Want - Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt

All right, so maybe we could start with this question from Stuart Powell, and his question is, "What's your advice for non-technical founders?" As you are a non-technical founder and solo founder, or a cofounder. Prabh is a solo founder but had a founding team, so can do without them, of course.

Okay, so yeah, maybe the best way to go about this is you explain how you made Product Hunt and then share some advice for Stuart.

Yeah, so I remember applying to YC, and historically I always realized or thought that YC, one, didn't like solo founders, and two, always preferred technical founders to begin with. So I was like, "I don't know if YC is gonna like me." So I ended up lying anyway, after, you know, speaking with Gary and Alexis and Kat and some others, and Kevin Hale getting their support. When I went into YC, when we applied to YC, we already had some traction where we had some proof that people wanted this thing.

So what does that actually mean? Like some meaning roughly what number? I don't remember the exact numbers; it was obviously still very small 'cause it was pretty early days. But we were seeing about 50 percent month-over-month growth in total, like top-line user visits, and that was consistent for the first, I don't know, two, three, four months. So that really demonstrated that, oh wow, this person, he is a single founder, and he’s non-technical, but somehow this thing is growing and people seem to want it.

When you’re, you know, whether you're non-technical or typing or whatever it may be, if you can demonstrate data like that, it's hard to argue. It's hard to say that, oh actually no, this isn't useful if you're demonstrating that people are using your product and that’s the ultimate proof.

So when people who are non-technical founders come to you now, what do you advise them? Like how do you figure out how to make prototypes and get something out the door?

There's a lot of ways that you can validate ideas or build products without really coding anything. Product Hunt was an email list in the beginning. So really I was forced, not being an engineer, to not spend weeks and weeks building something that maybe something that people didn't want. Instead, I was like, "Okay, well what can I build, and then what experience could I provide that would maybe validate or test whether people wanted this?"

So I built this email list, sent it out, got a few hundred subscribers initially, and it took me 20 minutes to set up. So it was like the ultimate MVP from a product standpoint. I was like email is actually a great place to put content to re-engage people, because they, you know, our audience—people and technology—they use email every single day.

So for non-technical people, you know, things like email or hacking things together with like Typeform actually is a really good tool to almost like create a product. Essentially, you can put like Typeform and Stripe together and actually collect money. That's the ultimate test. Yeah, like you can get people to pay you money for something, then you're like, "Well wow, they clearly want this."

So I think there's a lot of things you can do without doing any coding. Even if you are technical, it's actually in many cases wise to start testing with those types of non-technical tools so that you can put something out there sooner and earlier.

Yeah, and do you find that will you just launch Ship? Like this new product or a new feature?

I guess, yeah, are people using that to beta test stuff, or are these like fully functioning products?

Yeah, it’s a combination of everything really. So we built Ship in many ways; it's basically a toolkit for makers and startups to, one, announce new products that they're creating, collect emails for those products, and then get feedback and communicate with those users.

Okay, so a lot of these things we were actually doing at Product Hunt for several years through, you know, various tools like MailChimp, using Typeform, just basically sending out, you know, screenshots, and usually actually envisioned as a great tool to get up and annotate screenshots and get feedback.

So you're sort of hacking all these tools together, and we're like, "Okay, well, people on Product Hunt are continually asking us how can I use Product Hunt to start getting initial users or feedback for my product before I'm ready to launch." So we built Ship, and we're seeing people use it for everything.

We were just talking earlier about like Casey and I, standing in his new app. They used it to start capturing interest or beam panels or new apps that are coming out soon, and other similar people are using it then seed it with beta users to get actual feedback on the product.

So long story short, our goal is to create something that people could use to start generating demand and communicating with our audience, and ultimately what I believe is, is like the more you can communicate with your audience, make them feel involved in the process and get feedback from them, the higher chance you are in building something that people want or a good product ultimately.

Mm-hmm, and I think this also relates to another question which is a little blunt, but Diego asked, "Is there a business model in Product Hunt?" Are you trying to go in that direction with the Ship product, or yeah, what’s the plan?

Yeah, so historically we've never really charged for anything. Yeah, outside of a long, long time ago, once upon a time, we did post for charge people for job postings, but then we stopped that to focus entirely on building the community and the audience. Now we're shifting some of our focus towards monetization and Ship is actually the first thing that we've directly charged for outside of those initial tests.

And the fun part is yesterday we launched; we set up, of course, a Slack bot to notify whenever someone gives us money, and so those are like the best notifications we're getting. It's like, "Wow, this person just subscribed, you know, for like $249 a month for this thing that we built." It's like, that's awesome! And I woke up this morning to a bunch more notifications. I was like, this is amazing!

So our strategy going forward here, and especially in Q4, is to think more about what are the things that we can build and provide that people like so much that they’re willing to pay for. And Ship is showing a lot of promise in, you know, helping startups with, you know, communicating and marketing.

And so another piece that we are working on, that hasn’t really shown that you’ll start to see soon, is also leveraging the community and the platform we've built to connect companies with talent. So now that we're inside of AngelList, there's this whole A-list talent platform. It’s a great place to recruit great talent, and we also improbably have a lot of talented engineers, designers, marketers, and so on that might want to join companies that, you know, we’re launching a part-time. There's a nice opportunity to make those connections and, as a result, generate some revenue out of that without being super heavy-handed and showing pop-ups and already having stuff.

Yeah, it makes us see that from Product Hunt.

Yeah, yeah.

Yes, maybe audio playing videos with sound and everything about we’ll see. Well, you guys do email well, but you could like push it even further. Have you always believed that email was going to be the most effective way for you to stay in touch with people?

Yeah, it's always been. You know, a lot of people say email is dead; email is dumb; I don't like email. People use email all the time though, and it’s a great plant channel for re-engagement. Back in 2013 or '12, I can't remember; I wrote in—I used to write a lot and block a lot—and wrote about an article called "Email First Startups." Actually, it was one of the early articles that I had on Hacker News. Oh, cool! On the homepage, I was like, "Well, this is cool. People are reading my thing."

And it was basically just outlining various startups that started off as emails to begin with. AngelList ironically was one of those—like AngelList's MVP essentially was an email digest. But yeah, it was an email list in the beginning, and it's a very simple way to MVP something and see if people actually open it and click on it.

It’s also very malleable, so every single morning or every day when you send that email, you can change the copy, you can try different things. Whereas when you put something in code, it's a lot harder to change; in most cases, it's fairly stagnant. So when you're sort of testing ideas, email is a great channel for that.

That's awesome!

We own a bunch of questions around the YC application; it's like application season right now.

Oh yeah, that's right.

Yeah. A few of those actually—David Adamu, ooh, I might be mispronouncing his last name—tell us about a time you successfully hacked a non-computer system to your advantage. This is a YC application question.

I forgot what I—okay, I can't remember if this was my answer in the YC application or not. It may have been. So as a kid, I was always interested in working on different projects and trying to turn something into money. I hated working for money for time. Like I hated getting paid hourly because if I did a terrible job or an awesome job, I got paid the same—whatever, $6 or $7 an hour.

So I was always trying to find entrepreneurial ways to make money, and one of those was actually selling things on eBay when I was a kid. So I would browse FatWallet and Slick Deals, which are these like communities and forums that people would post different deals that you can get on usually electronics, and it would usually involve things with rebates and price matching, and all these like hacks that you'd have to work around, some of them slightly gray hat—it's like a little bit shady.

In any case, what I would do is browse those websites daily and then find—I used to buy things that were maybe 30 or 40 percent off MSRP and then buy them and then sell them on eBay.

Mm-hmm.

And I think I sold—it wasn't a lot—like one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, maybe two hundred thousand dollars in merchandise. But I really wasn’t—it was almost like enjoyable for me to find and hunt for these things and then make money on it. It didn't even matter how much money I made; for me, it was more like, oh I could turn this thing into like this idea into money.

Yeah.

And so I did that through, I don't know, high school and some in college. That's great!

So that was fun. There was a whole Plan of Money episode about that.

Yeah.

Yeah, people going to, was it two years ago—Toys R Us and reselling on Amazon?

Oh yeah, there’s this whole culture of like that little arbitrage. But just get enough volume.

Here’s another one: what were the main points you were trying to get across in your YC application and interview? This is from Phil.

Yeah, I think looking back on it, I believe that, you know, part of it was I was going in there again as a single founder, non-technical, so I had that concern, and so my approach really was to communicate and sort of sell them on this vision, an idea that we need a place on the internet—a place to discover all these products being built.

I think the audience that YC partners, they understood the pain point that makers and startups are seeing when it comes to discovery. So I felt that that was, you know, a strong thing to capture and to kind of double down on. But really it was just about selling the vision of like how do we create a place where in a world where we have all these products, people can discover the best ones.

I mean, really other than that, it was also just like communicating confidence. In some ways, I think you go into that interview, people are nervous; I was nervous. You have these—I think everyone's freaking out.

Yeah.

In my case, there were like three to four people in front of you, drilling you with questions. I remember Sam—Sam Altman was one of them, and it’s just like he cut me off a couple times. I came prepared knowing that, so I was like, “Okay, if they cut me off, I'm just gonna move on,” and, you know, tried to be succinct and clear.

Yeah, I think that's psychologically very difficult for people.

And at that point, one of my main points of advice when they're asking like pre-interview, you can't let that ruin your flow and ruin your energy. A lot of people start to get defensive when they're interrupted, and then it just spirals out of control.

Oh yeah.

It's like a weird psychological tactic.

Yeah.

Especially if you have multiple founders too—it's the dynamic of how he speaks when and how do you make sure that you don't look like you're fighting? The last thing you want is two founders to look like they already have founder problems in a ten-minute interview.

Yep.

Which can be challenging.

Yep, all right.

Oh yeah, I did have a question about a podcast discovery.

Mm-hmm.

So where do you see that going right now? Like obviously you guys have a podcast section.

Yes and no, we actually kind of quietly killed podcasts.

Oh yeah, so this is some of the history in Product Hunt; you know, early on we of course have been targeting the tech community, and we made some mistakes, admittedly, on some of the execution of some kind of category expansions. We went into like games and books, and podcast was like this sort of fourth category that we introduced.

In hindsight, it was very clear why podcasts didn't belong in our current content ecosystem. One, discovering the—you consume podcasts is wildly different than you discover an app or a product. It's also very frequent; like there's a new podcast every week or more than that. So that good dynamics didn't really work with just shoving it into the Product Hunt community.

However, the direction and the opportunity that we were tackling with podcasts specifically, I think is still something I would love to see. And there's a YC company called Breaker, which you probably know of, which in many ways is executing on the way that we would have or wanted to execute on podcasts if we focused on podcasts.

Ultimately, we decided podcasts is not our business; we're focused on product discovery primarily, and we're gonna stop doing that. Breaker is approaching it in a similar way where they're leveraging community and enabling, you know, people to discover podcasts in a new and different way through other people and friends.

So I think, I mean, from a market perspective, I don't see a world where we don’t have something like that in podcasts—like a place where people can discover and engage and almost geek out about podcasts together. Now to date, those exist in like on Reddit to some extent and various places on the internet, but there's no leader in that space right now.

No.

Well, I think about it in the context of YouTube, and you mostly rely on the algorithm and then like the old-school methods of, you know, basically a guest post: "Sooner like you're on my vlog, I'm on your vlog." Like that's how it works.

Podcasting is pretty difficult, but I agree, I really love the search on Breaker.

Yeah, that’s the one thing that all the other apps haven't done.

But yeah.

Yeah, yeah, so download Breaker.

All right.

Yeah.

Next question: what were your biggest takeaways from YC?

Hmm, I think part of it is, one of the great things about being in YC is you are held accountable. It's almost like, to some extent, school—like your professor is gonna be like, "Did you read the comp? Did you do the homework? Your test results are gonna show whether you learned the thing or not."

At YC, during that three-month process, I’m losing track even. You know, you have this accountability on a week-over-week basis, and you go into these group office hours where you're sharing your updates. At the time, Castor and Kevin Hale were our group partners, and they would ask questions like, "Alright, did you do that thing we talked about last week?"

And so it was a forcing function to just get stuff done because you don't have much time. There’s, I think, that mentality is very healthy. And while it is uncomfortable and stressful in many cases, it’s the best way to, especially, get off the ground because you just need to do a lot of work and hold yourself accountable.

I'm always curious how the behavior changes after YC because there's this period of, I guess, Product Hunt wasn't around all that long before you did YC, right?

Yeah, it was about five, six months before we actually entered.

Right, so you didn't have that many defined habits.

Yeah, but do you find yourself adapting like new styles of running the team after YC, or is it pretty similar to the way you're going about it before?

It's hard to say. YC was so focused in that initial phase. And then once we raised a Series A basically right after YC and then hired, our process changed. And as it does, when you hire another five or ten people. And so in many ways, we continued to have to change things—the way that we’re doing things.

Effectively, we’re still doing that now like this next quarter. We might make some changes in our process again, partly just because you see what didn’t go well last quarter and so you want to change it. So I don’t know; in some ways, I think a lot of it is YC instills data-driven and like very deliberate, like talk to your customers type of culture, which I think is something that I believe we had prior to YC.

So for us, maybe it didn’t dramatically change our culture—the way of operating so much—but it certainly changed things in ways that I couldn’t probably realize just because, you know, it’s hard to know what we would be without YC.

Oh, okay, cool.

And so are you guys all—there were a couple questions for you about remote teams.

Yeah, what does your distribution look like? Are you mostly in the Bay? How does it work?

Yeah, so we're about two-thirds outside of SF.

Okay.

So we have headquarters in SF, and but from the beginning we've been a distributed team. In fact, the first person that ended up—while paying out of pocket initially—was Ricardo in Italy, and so he was a developer that came on board—awesome guy.

And so like from the very beginning, we had sort of a distributed team. Andreas came on, our CTO, shortly after that, and he was, at the time, in Vienna; now he's here in San Francisco. But we now have 17 people across, I think, it's eight or nine time zones—from Bulgaria, London, Denver—like all over the board.

Yeah, and not just like community moderation. These people are developers?

Yeah, there's a designer.

Yeah, yeah, it’s a combination of community and engineering. Actually, Julie's in Paris; she joined a month or two ago.

Cool.

So we need to hit Asia; we don't have anyone in Asia yet— that's next on the list, maybe. So yeah, if you're looking for a job.

Um, okay, and so what are the learnings? I mean, did you set out to build a distributed team? Or was it just by happenstance that you knew someone in Italy, and they could help you?

No, it wasn’t intentional in the beginning. It was almost a necessity.

Mm-hmm.

And frankly, because at the time, one, not being an engineer, I needed to find engineers. And then Andreas and I naturally came together, and we both had this passion for building this community. He then recruited a lot of the early engineers who were based in Europe because that’s where a lot of his network at the time was.

Okay, and so it sort of organically formed that way. And then in hindsight, we realized there are a couple huge advantages to distributed teams. Like one, you can hire anyone in the world; you don't need to hire people just in San Francisco or people who want to move here.

Two, it's very expensive to hire in San Francisco, of course; like the cost of living here is dramatically higher than it is in Bulgaria. And the third piece, too, is also very competitive when it comes to hiring, especially for early-stage startups when you're trying to take someone from like Google or Facebook.

They’re getting paid, I don't know, $200,000, with like beautiful cafeteria lunches. You, as a seed stage or pre-funded company, it's like hard to convince them to come on board.

So I think there are a lot of benefits in building remote and distributed teams. The other kind of fourth piece is also we get this global perspective to some extent. We’re, you know, more than half of the Product Hunt community is actually outside the US.

And I don't know for certain, but I think part of that is because our team itself is distributed across the world, and so maybe there's this level of empathy or understanding of like those communities.

Mm-hmm.

So I think we’ll see—I believe we’ll see more and more distributed teams, more remote workers; it’s sort of this movement towards that direction, and I think more people will be willing to build teams like that because it's easier to work remotely with Slack and, like, various video chat apps like Zoom, which we use and love.

So I'm happy that we’re distributed; it does come with challenges, but overall, it's a lot of benefits.

Yeah, but nothing like outside of the normal complaints and workflow.

Yeah, communication, and, you know, sometimes it's difficult when you have overlap on maybe four hours working together instead of like a full day.

Yeah, but those are workable.

Okay.

Yeah, a few people asked about community. I think they’re particularly excited like, you know, figuring out how you just got started. You know, one person asked, Hattie's you asked, "How did you acquire your first 1000 users?" Sebastian Mossad asks, "How do you create a community so quickly?" Basically the same question.

Yeah, how’d you get started? What was your—so you started this email list, but did you have a following before online? How did it go?

Yeah, so it started, in some ways, years before Product Hunt even started. You know, it was before Product Hunt. And I mentioned earlier, I was writing a lot, and I would love to play with products and explore products and write about—I was running with like Snapchat and all these other new apps and new behaviors, and I was just super curious about, you know, why are people engaged with these things?

You know, I helped Nir with his book "Hooked" and did more writing there, and so I was building a tiny bit of an audience—not massive, not Casey's—not like he's ridiculous—but a big enough audience within this center kind of tech community to the point where when I did launch Product Hunt and when I announced the email, I had enough people following me to say, "Oh, I know Ryan; this looks cool; I'm gonna try it out."

And so it was a combination of having this first like a few hundred people to sign up, which was super important, and then also building relationships with other founders and investors and people that had known me for a long time that made it exciting and allowed them to be comfortable joining and participating in the community.

Mm-hmm.

So the initial kind of few first few hundred, let's say, were just people that I built an audience or following with for like years prior. And then after that, when it launched, it was okay, how do we grow this community? There are a couple of tactics that we did; that one was press was actually a great growth driver in the beginning.

And so we worked on getting press or doing guest publishing. Actually, coincidentally, I wrote in Fast Company something titled like how we got our first 2000 users—read in limited.

Yeah, and this was like way back when.

Yeah.

And it’s ironic that I was writing about that because my entire goal of writing about that was to get, you know, another thousand users.

Yeah, and that worked in the beginning because, you know, Product Hunt was new to the tech engines at that time, and so people would sign up and be like, "What is this thing?"

So we did things like that. We also realized that when makers and founders saw their product on Product Hunt, they naturally wanted to join the conversation. They wanted to share it, and so when we realized that, I would every morning go on Twitter and like search for their Twitter username and say, "Hey, Jill, your product is over here; people are talking about it; do you want to join in, answer questions?"

And like 80% of the time they'd say yes, "Of course I’d love to."

So we did more of that. I just would spend the first hour or so of my day finding those makers online and getting them involved, and that led to more and more growth.

Mm-hmm.

So it had a natural kind of growth effect in the beginning, and those two tactics alone were like what led us to, I don’t know, several thousand people in the very beginning.

And are the bots effective still? Like, you know, I'm the congratulations bot?

Yeah, yeah!

So for those that don't know, we have these Twitter bots that we've set up. One of them is—so going back to what I said before, first I would look for the makers and invite them, and it was all manual.

These were like, "All right, this is not scalable; let's productize this, let’s make this scalable." So then we allowed the community to tag the makers and be like, "Here’s a product I found; here’s Jack, the person that made it," or whatever, and we’d ask, "Like, what’s Jack's username?"

And they would add it, and then we’d have a bot that would say, "Hey Jack, your product was—or you've been added as a maker to this product. Here’s the link."

And so that would allow us to scaleably sort of recruit makers, and that's been still effective to this day.

No, in fact, makers get upset if they are posted and they don’t realize it because they’re like, "Oh, I couldn’t answer questions or I didn’t have a chance to share it."

Yeah, so we do make it like an effort to make sure they're notified.

That’s cool!

Yeah, it feels like a missed opportunity. I mean, I love getting into the comments like on a trending product on all that stuff.

So your growth now, is it coming more from the US, or is it going international as you find these other types of people?

It's pretty even. We're not seeing necessarily growth in a particular pocket. It's maybe unusual—most startups you see very... let's start in the US; they're very US-centric, and you'll see 80% of their traffic or more will be US.

From pretty early on, we’ve had a fairly international audience, and I think it's largely related to where you see different startup hubs around the world. Of course, San Francisco being a major one, and New York, and some other cities in the US.

But there’s also, you know, places like Paris and Berlin and other places around the world that have these communities of people who love startups, and they’re building products.

And so if you look at our Google Analytics, like a heat map of where people are, a lot of it centers around those startup tech hubs, actually. And those are everywhere, so yeah, for us, it’s still quite international, and it always kind of has been when it comes to the growth.

Are there particular types of products that come from particular areas that you can kind of like group automatically or distributed?

It’s pretty distributed.

Yeah, although there's some trends we'll see.

I think for whatever reason Paris is very design-centric in general, so you'll see a lot of design-related or like beautiful-looking products coming from Paris or France in general.

But I would love to do like an analysis or something. We do have an API if anybody wants to hack something together use our API to like come up with cool visualizations.

Okay, that’d be cool!

Have you looked back at the products that you’ve loved over the past couple of years to figure out if there are like three lines for you in particular, like this is what you’re attracted to?

Like what I like most?

Your favorite kinds of products?

Yeah, by far the most common question really, "What are your favorite things?"

Well, it’s interesting if you look at Product Hunt. In some cases, it’s like a representation of the theme at the time or the trends. So if you look back a couple years ago, let’s say back when Secret was blowing up, there were a ton of apps building anonymous social experiences.

There were every single almost day or week, there were like multiple different apps that were like in that space because it was a time when everyone was like, "This is working, and maybe there's an opportunity to build new experiences around this theme."

Now today, fast forward, like things that are built on blockchain and crypto, of course, are super popular. Everything—there's at least two or three things related to that.

And it’s quite interesting to see these trends happen. And like AI is kind of another one—like people using machine learning and AI—in part because there's a lot of opportunity there, but also like there's open-source code and things that you can use to introduce that to your product.

So, I don't know; it’s interesting to see these trends over time. Me personally, I like all kinds of things in terms of—I like to explore new ideas, and especially if people are using new platforms and new interactions in different ways.

Take voice, for example. I'm pretty interested in voice-based applications. Like Lyle, Bird is one that comes to mind, which I think was in the last YC batch.

Which it’s kind of crazy, but you watched a demo, and it takes a sample of someone's voice and then is able to recreate it to create, basically, make it sound like Obama is saying something he never said.

So some like crazy applications for that, and those are the types of products I get really excited about because it’s a lot of about what Product Hunt is about is really like seeing what could be made in the future—what might change the world, or at least maybe a tiny part of your life.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that was one of my favorite companies.

Yeah!

And yeah, it’s amazing it emulates your voice—was like 20 minutes? It can do it like perfect?

Yeah, it’s insane!

Yeah, I was going to define; they open up the beta, and I was gonna record my voice, and then I got nervous. I was like, "Oh, I mean, we’re recording a podcast, so you sort of have my voice already," but I was like, "We’re gonna use this against me."

Yeah, no! Fake news is gonna be terrifying!

Have you seen the video emulations?

Yes!

Yeah, yeah.

That with video emulation is frightening!

Yeah, so when you see that, then you also think, "Okay, how do we prevent against that? How do we create technology or products to help people not, you know, fall into this hyper-realistic fake news feature?"

Yeah.

Has anyone launched anything on Product Hunt that addresses like watermarks or security checks?

Anything like that?

Nothing that I can think of right now—that would be interesting though.

Yeah.

I’m sure there's somebody out there doing it.

Yeah, well, I mean, it’s tricky because you've got like people believe what they want to believe. So like, if you did any amount of research now with a photo—I used to do Photoshop for The Onion—so like I did that; I like made fake news professionally.

Nice!

And yeah, you know, you see like the article just gets picked up in China and people just want to believe it.

Yeah.

That's just how it goes.

So yeah, we’re headed toward a world that’s kind of scary. It's gonna be...

Have there been any products that launched on Product Hunt that didn’t do well and then proceeded to do very well in the real world?

Oh, I mean, I’m sure tons! Like what I tell people is like the number of upvotes you get on Product Hunt honestly doesn’t mean whether they’re gonna be successful or not.

I mean, as that should be obvious to people, with some people, they're really disappointed, like, “I got 20 upvotes and, you know, people don’t like it.”

Well, the reality is launching is like a one-time thing, and whether your launch is successful or not, it’s really like startups is like a multi-year journey.

Mm-hmm.

Some of the most successful startups really are like until year five, six, seven is when they really are taking off. It takes a long time; you don't hear about those because, you don't hear the first four years usually.

Nope!

So I'm sure there’s tons—tons of them. And the other piece is like Product Hunt doesn't today isn’t encompassing everyone in the world either. So like if you’re building a product for a particular type of audience that doesn’t use Product Hunt today, then like it’s probably not a surprise that you didn’t get a ton of upvotes or attention or whatever.

But then, yeah.

Yeah, totally!

It happens in YC all the time!

What are your pro tips for launching on Product Hunt?

Yeah, so part of it goes—not to sound too promotional—but part of it is the reason why we built Ship. So what we've realized is a lot of people get into, you know, a box and they build a product that they think they love that the world will love, and maybe they will, maybe they won't.

But they don’t really interact or get feedback from a community, nor do they actually build an audience and get people following them in advance. Not to—we keep talking about Casey or I do, but Casey is a good example.

Like he has initially, before they built the product, he built an audience. And that audience has grown more and more; now no matter what he puts out, he’s at least guaranteed to get people to care or try it out.

Mm-hmm.

And that’s hugely valuable—you don’t need Casey's a live audience. But going back to my sort of Product Hunt, if I didn't have, you know, this first few hundred people willing to sign up that I had built that audience for for over several years, I don’t think Product Hunt would exist today.

Mm-hmm.

So I think it’s a combination of like my pro tips is like one, be okay with building an audience in the sense that an audience of people you’re actually targeting, and also engage with those people, get them involved, and get feedback from those people early on.

And Ship is designed in our hope is it will help people do exactly those two things.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I would say that engaging with the audience is something you guys do super well; it’s like customer service is highly—yeah, high up there.

And your priorities—customer service is seen as like a cost under, in many cases, but it's actually a great opportunity to engage an audience.

Like what they're doing is they’re coming to you and saying, "I have a problem," or "I need help."

And many people like, "Oh, now they're coming to us." But in reality, it's like a great thing—people care enough to talk to you.

Yeah, so we use Twitter heavily to interact with people.

I have—I use TweetDeck and I command tab to it way too much, and I have a column for every single Product Hunt convention, and I see almost every single one.

So I can see what people are talking about, what they're sharing, if there's issues that come up—make sure that I respond to them.

So small things that make the community feel personable and approachable.

Is it ever overwhelming with the amount of new stuff? Like I'm constantly overwhelmed by the amount of like cool things that come through YC, and that’s just like a tiny fraction of the world.

Yeah.

Do you ever have—you built up like an intense stamina for like consuming new products, or are there ever points where you’re just like, “I don’t need a new app today?”

I mean, I’m a weirdo, and then I just love doing this stuff—like exploring. Every single morning, waking up and seeing what people are making, so I'm unusual, in essence.

I also don't try to see everything, obviously. It’s kind of like some people with their email, they’re like, "I gotta get to inbox zero."

The reality is, I don’t try to get to inbox zero; it's just fine if it's not totally taken care of.

So for me, I know I don't mind it.

Our hope with Product Hunt—some things we’re exploring is how do we—there are certain people, weirdos like me, who love to consume the firehose.

And there are some people who just tell me like the cool one or two things this week that I should know.

And so we’re exploring how do we appeal to both user types, you know, making sure they don't feel overwhelmed but making sure this audience gets all the information they need.

Mm, okay.

And is there an offering for the one or two a week yet?

The closest thing in—we’ve offered this for a while—is our weekly digests.

So we have a newsletter that goes out either just on Mondays if you want, or Monday through Friday.

So the people who are maybe less actively engaged but still want to know like what happened this week in the weekly digest, and that'll include like the most uploaded products that week.

It's pretty easy; it takes 10 seconds to consume, and a lot more consumable than like our feed of just fire hoses and stuff.

Absurd!

It’s crazy!

A bunch of random questions. So Akshar—I’m gonna mispronounce this—Akshar Banoo asked, "What is the most counterintuitive thing you learned building Product Hunt and then watching it grow and be used?"

I don't know if I have a great answer for that one, to be honest.

I think there are things that internally, from a process and like leadership standpoint, that I don't know if I’d say they’re counterintuitive, but it's challenging to—one thing I learned early on as a product manager was I thought I was being helpful in doing more of the work.

So to put it, to make it more tangible, there's a time where I made a mistake of like basically changing one of the UX designer's work, saying like, "Oh, this isn't quite exactly right to spec; let me just like spend the weekend and fix it, and we'll save everyone time and like I'll do him a favor."

I did the exact opposite! What it did was cause frustration, and ultimately I'm not a UX designer in any way, so like I shouldn't be doing that work.

And I think that lesson early on is something that I think a lot of product managers or CEOs or founders need to realize is that you're used to doing all the work in the beginning, but as you grow a team, you ultimately have to give up work.

And it might feel like you’re being less productive and less effective, but—and maybe you are technically in the short term—but long term, you need to want to hire the right people, and then give them autonomy to build and do what they’re good at.

So that’s, I got a challenging almost counter to, and the thing I think for a lot of people who are used to just doing all the work.

Yeah, I think that’s an important learning, and it’s one that I'm still kind of like grappling with on side projects—just managing people well is insanely high leverage, like way higher leverage than even if I was the best programmer in the world.

Mm-hmm.

But it’s hard when you get satisfaction from making.

Yeah.

So there are a couple AngelList questions. So now you’re part of AngelList, and potentially related to the fund.

So Amir asks, as part of AngelList, has Product Hunt considered investing through a syndicate or other form in the top featured products or even just the top makers on Product Hunt?

Yeah, you know, early on I think the first like months of Product Hunt, some of our investors actually were like Ryan, "You guys should start a Product Hunt indicatory fund of some sort."

And at the time—and even to this day—that was not important.

What I realized is if we went down that route, what we would do is prioritize building like a platform for investors.

And that's ultimately not what we're set out to do.

That doesn’t mean we’re not going to build features for investors and make those connections, but that’s a very different community and a very different product than a product discovery platform for the world.

And so it's funny of its—there’s always been kind of a theme or an opportunity that said we may do things with the AngelList fundraising team. Right now, we're not actively doing anything on the product side, but what we have been doing is bringing the communities together and hosting dinners and smaller meetups with founders and investors.

So nothing too crazy, really pretty lightweight, but it’s been a cool way to bring these two communities together who have a lot of overlap and similarities.

Mm-hmm.

And there's talk though that you are now investing in startups; this is true?

Yeah!

Yeah, so I—the day before I left for Burning Man, Axios spread some news about it, which is fine; I wasn't meaning to announce anything publicly, but news got out there.

And you know, basically, I've raised a small fund using AngelList's angel fund platform, which they announced two or three months ago.

It’s sort of in beta; it’s sort of quietly out there. But basically, people are familiar with AngelList syndicates for the most part, which are ways for people to raise money for a particular deal or a particular company.

They're great for people who are just getting into investing, or they're great for people doing like giant SPVs for very specific investments, but they're not as good for people doing ongoing investments.

So they realize this; they've been working on it for several months, and they release angel funds, which is essentially—this is a cheesy way of saying it, but it’s like a VC in a box in the sense that they do all the work for you in setting up an actual VC fund.

Okay?

They do the legal paperwork, they set up the banks, they even—Samet on the team is super helpful in talking to LPs on the telephone, like old-school style—to get them comfortable with some like the side letters and things like that.

So they do all of this work that would normally cost maybe a hundred thousand dollars to set up—all for like twelve thousand dollars.

And they take a piece of the carry, and as a result, you have a fund just like you normally would, and you can invest in a startup just as a regular VC.

So it’s not deal-by-deal basis, but you have committed capital from LPs that you then invest.

So I raised a fun after talking to Nevada and a bunch of other people—a three million dollar fund—and just investing in, of course, early-stage companies, everything from 50,000 to 200,000, and yeah, it’s been fun.

I called it the Weekend Fund.

Wait, it has a couple different meanings for me.

Well, one, Product Hunt is my full-time thing; I'm super, super pumped—still loving what I'm doing.

In many ways, Weekend Fund is like my weekend side projects in some ways.

Weekend is also something like, you see a lot of founders starting projects in the like Product Hunt itself—that was like a weekend nights and weekend project.

A lot of those things start off as like really humble and small and grow into something big, so those two meanings mean a lot to me.

And it’s also more friendly than like Hoover Capital or so.

Yeah, I don’t know if there's a hue tie there, but the best.

And do you have a particular thesis that you’re going for?

I imagine there are tons of learnings from Product Hunt; what’s your goal?

You know, it's intentionally fairly open in that I'm not strictly defining or looking at like e-commerce or biotech space.

In fact, I'm excited to invest in areas that I could be helpful in first. Like actually biotech is a place where I'm probably not going to be as helpful as I would with maybe a community-based product, as an example.

So a lot of it is trying to invest in companies I think I can be helpful with. There are some areas and I'm particularly interested in—like we talked about remote and distributed teams.

I'm very interested in people building products and tools and things for this new future where we're seeing more distributed teams and people working remotely.

I also see voice as a really interesting space; it's hard to know exactly what voice will play in people's lives.

But inevitably, voice will change the way people interact with technology in different ways.

Like my Google Home right now is my audio player; it's just easier than opening my iPhone to like play Rufus Wainwright or whatever.

Mm-hmm.

So those are two areas I’m like particularly interested in, but you know, the investments I’ve done now to date have ironically been a little bit community-focused, which is something I have experience running.

I guess not ironic.

Yeah.

But those are things that I get excited about and okay.

And want to support.

So we have another interview coming up actually later today with Courtland from Indie Hackers.

Okay.

And you asked him a question, but I'm gonna ask it back to you, and that is—ask—I forgot what it is—what do you believe that most others do not?

Oh man, oh my face, I finally faced it—of course I added a smiley face!

Oh man, I asked this question; I don’t have a good answer for myself.

You know, I think this—I think 50% of the people in technology will agree, and maybe 50% won't.

I think that this technology makes the world ultimately better, and there are certainly some downsides that you see and negative things that happen in startups and technology, but ultimately like technology is like this—this water is here because I can drink this because of technology.

And I always believed that progressing in more startups and founders and people succeeding is ultimately good for the world.

But more specifically, I think the extreme future that you read about in sci-fi books and see in movies, I think the world where we live in VR is actually a good thing.

And I know a lot of people get really scared and nervous about like a future where we all live in like Ready Player One or at least like some sort of virtual world like that.

I actually think it’s an awesome thing, and the reason for that is ultimately if you can recreate and build relationships and live a life that's in a better world than your own—like we live in a great place, and we're very fortunate, but a lot of people are not.

And they live in, you know, dirt shacks, and if they could escape and go to a different world and live there, that seems like a great thing.

So, I know there’s a lot of negative things that can come from a world where people live in virtual reality, but I also almost don’t see a future where at some point—that’s where the majority of people spend their lives because we're already pretty close.

Like this phone in my pocket and my computer screen; I already live inside of that most of the day.

Mm-hmm.

And I think most people do, or they watch TV—like the average American is, I forget if it’s four hours to eight hours a day, but it’s something crazy—they watch a lot of TV.

And you can kind of imagine that extending into that screen and that technology extending into their everyday life through VR and AR and other things like that.

So I think it’s a good thing; I think we should embrace it and be responsible with it.

But also I—I don’t think it’s a bad thing that people live inside of technology differently.

How much time do you spend in VR on an average day?

I actually don't spend any time; I don’t have any VR equipment.

Maybe I have a Samsung headset somewhere in a Gear VR, but I don't right now; it’s—I haven't found an application that I really enjoy, and it’s too cumbersome, too heavy.

But eventually, it's going to be, you know, glasses; it’s gonna be comfortable; eventually, it’ll be in my car.

So I feel like anything you can imagine almost will happen at some point; it’s just a matter of time, yeah.

And so I just don't see a world we don’t have that.

It's almost like, will it happen in my lifetime? Not sure, but I bet it will.

Yeah, I also completely agree with you that even the fact that, like, just because your life in San Francisco is great, doesn’t mean that other people wouldn't want to be LeBron James for four hours a day.

Yeah, yeah!

If you could, you'd fly.

I mean, there are so many cool things that I wish I could do, and I already live a very fortunate, awesome life here.

And the other piece to that too is like, of course, VR is not accessible to the people in the dirt shacks right now today.

But technology, it innovates, and it becomes accessible to let’s say the 1%, and then it becomes more accessible to more and more people, and then the price is lower and lower and lower.

So it's a—I guess I want to mention that point because I don't want to say like, "Oh, how is someone like that who makes, you know, 20 bucks a month? You can afford Oculus!"

Well, just imagine a future where inevitably it becomes almost free.

Yeah, and I think that’s inevitable too.

I mean, if you just like look at the graph of smartphone distribution and said—yeah, same.

Yeah, and the prices are going up too!

You can buy a $1000 iPhone now.

I know that's for like the 64-gigabyte, I think one; it’s more than I'd say—yeah, like a 256, I don’t know what the price is, but you can expect 13, 14—probably all right, so yeah.

I guess that's probably the last question.

So Soren asks, "What does Ryan think of the rising crypto assets and their implementation in products?"

Hmm.

Oh, it’s something I’ve been following this space, of course, but I’ve not dug in nearly as much as some other people.

I actually don't—well I own a little bit of Filecoin, but I don’t own any other cryptocurrencies, so I haven't actually taken the plunge.

Maybe I should—well I certainly should have.

But I think it's a—what I will say is that, one, it’s really interesting when you see these almost like greenfield opportunities and new platform shifts—like we’ve talked about voice a little bit and how that has a potential to change behavior and create new variances; same thing with blockchain and crypto and other things like that.

It has an opportunity to open up new pathways, open up new doors for makers and founders and companies to create new experiences that may actually change people's behavior dramatically.

I mean, we're already seeing this to some extent with fundraising—people are launching an ICO instead of going to VCs, and you know, the deals they’re getting, it's like, it’s unheard of!

Like you basically are getting way more money, and you don’t have investors to pay back; like you own everything.

And I mean there’s just a lot of like crazy things that flips everything on its head.

And so there’s a lot of interesting things happening there. AngelList has been, you know, working with Coin List and trying to legitimize and bring some trust to the platform and the ecosystem.

But honestly, I think even the people who are deep into it are still like, "I'm not sure where this is gonna go yet."

It's hard to predict. It's the same, somebody—I forgot who it was, I wish I could credit them—is it's hard to predict.

You know, early in the worldwide web days, like is that, that a Facebook would be—you think, like it's hard to extrapolate and go that far because you just don’t have the mental model or the infrastructure built yet to imagine what's gonna be created with this in two, three, four years.

Mm-hmm.

Great!

Actually, last question: how do you spend your spare time? What do you do for fun?

I love—maybe in the past two to three years, I’ve enjoyed going to concerts and seeing live music more and more.

I went to Coachella back in 2015, and that was one of those aha moments. I was like, this is so fun; this is great!

Like go there, with some great fans—go dancing, listen to good music—and so I loved doing that.

I also just love—I love my alone time and going—I go to Phil’s coffee shop all the time; that's where Product Hunt probably started actually—it was, you know, Phil’s coffee shop.

And I enjoy on the weekends especially like going there and catching up on work, and it was a weird thing.

But I’ll get up at 6 a.m. tomorrow, probably, and just work and hang out and drink coffee.

So I know, normal stuff I guess.

Cool!

All right, thanks man!

Yeah, thanks!