How is Product Hunt even a business? It's a fine site, but this feels like a development similar to VC firms investing in PandoDaily - control the overall message, ensure Silicon Valley becomes more and more of an insider's club.
Another disappointing move - I want the YCombinator that requested startups working in energy, robotics, healthcare and internet infrastructure back:
Having been a fairly active member of HN, I've noticed the following trends about companies they choose to invest. Companies generally get bucketed into the following:
1. Company did something relatively novel with regards to growth hacking and/or digital hustling ("these guys got 10,000 users in a day")
2. Company/founder built an MVP with little technology experience, but got massive demand by using something off the shelf and wants to scale it with technology ("this girl sold these items using wufoo as an e-commerce and wants to scale now")
3. Company/founder did something important in tech before (sold a company) or had a role in a company people from YC alumni generally have an affinity for ("this guy was the head of marketing for X company, it grew to 100 million users and sold to Google for X million")
4. Founders are from MIT/Stanford/etc and did something cool while they were there ("AngelList says 'TEAM = STANFORD' and one of the founders built a robot")
5. Founders have some sort of extensive domain knowledge in a market that can be a billion dollar business (platform/data play) ("No one is building farm tech ($XXbil industry), but these 6 guys from Iowa are")
6. Company/founders don't fully meet 1-5, but have inklings of one or more and have the potential for a billion dollar business ("Smart scrappy guys who are building the next big messaging app")
There are of course exceptions to all of this, but the general theme is that (1) the business model doesn't necessarily matter (they'll figure it out, all 6 situations make these individuals smart) and (2) the makeup of the team matters more than anything else.
I'd put PH into a 7th bucket: This will never be a big business, but it's a useful tool for other YC companies and we just made a deal to get preferential treatment.
Ironically YC (or at least PG) emphasizes how they want to back companies with a chance of becoming >$1B businesses. It's somewhat sad to see this violated in such obvious ways. Ryan is a talented guy and I've been reading his stuff way before he started working on PH. I'm sure he'll find a way to turn this into a nice business, maybe even pivot to something that has a much larger market size.
However, I agree with the overall sentiment of this thread. PH is a tool from SV insiders to SV insiders, sending exactly the wrong message of what types of products people applying to YC should be working on.
There's a big opportunity far beyond the relatively niche startup community we've gained traction in. I respect your skepticism and frankly I'm encouraged by these doubts. Product Hunt is early and will change.
WRT to preferential treatment, YC doesn't get special benefits and looking back on the past several months, you'll find products from other accelerators like 500 Startups, TechStars, etc. as well side projects from non-SV folks reaching the top of the board.
No doubt there are opportunities beyond the niche startup community. Some opportunities I see are in B2B sales lead generation, M&A deal sourcing, etc. However, all of the more obvious "big" opportunities require significant changes and the result would no longer resemble the current ProductHunt in any way. Arguing that these are a natural extensions of the current product is quite far fetched.
I won't comment on YC companies not getting any benefits out of PH. Your argument that "there are also other products" isn't a real argument.
Again, I have nothing against PH. It looks great, I'm checking it regularly and I enjoy using it. Like others I just don't quite see how it fits into the investment thesis of backing potential billion dollar companies.
TBH I don't see the point of PH when there are sites like AlternativeTo to name one of many that do the same thing and not just with web and mobile apps.
The way I see it PH is just a trendier (and barebones) version of these other comparison sites that happens to be in the same room with the guys making the products that are going to be compared.
That's a conflict of interest, there's no other way to say it, and I wouldn't take the opinions on PH as seriously as those from a 3rd party, same way I don't get a loan from a bank because of the ads they run but because of the rating unbiased consumer watchgroups give them.
Per Sam's recent blog post, there are two nuclear energy companies in this batch. They stand alongside biotech, on demand security, traditional saas companies and media enterprises like Product Hunt, to name a few.
Contrarily, YC investments appear to be more diverse than ever.
Companies evolve with time. Not every business has to look like a traditional revenue-generating machine out the gate. Great products and ideas can take time to be big.
> How did Hacker News evolve from the discussion board for YC, to the discussion board where the first comment on any post involving a YC company is reliably someone crapping on it? What an amazing shift.
The idea that discussion of a company is mutually exclusive with criticism of a company is strange. The comment which prompted that reply by pmarca was
> Every time I read about this company I get a feeling everyone involved is completely insane
This is a bad comment in my opinion, but it's not a bad comment because it's particularly mean-spirited or because it's false. (I don't think that comment is either of those things.) It's a bad comment because it's not particularly germane to the discussion, any more so than the so common variation of "I knew [Employee related to YC Company] way back when [personal anecdote]! [Generic congratulation]!"
That's a roundabout way of saying the following: optimizing for signal vs. noise is not incompatible with optimizing for 'nice' vs. 'mean', but I'd prefer a forum filled with substantive criticism to one filled with hollow praise.
Online retail does an amazing job of selling things that people already know they want. It's terrible at helping people discover things they didn't know that wanted (look at AMZN's recommendation engine -- still very dumb.)
There's a possibility for something big here and makes sense for YC.
YC is all about investing in companies that solve a problem. Gaining early adopters is a problem that product builders have, and Product Hunt seems to be doing a good job of helping to solve that problem.
Early adopters aren't people that read TechCrunch or Product Hunt. Those are just geeks. Early adopters are a specific segment of a customer population that have the pain the most and are willing to try novel solutions.
While it is a problem without any real stats on how many users ares converting and how many are actually becoming daily users, its nothing more than a reddit subreddit.
I agree. Many founders spend much of their time networking in order to gain early users. Not all of this time can/should be eliminated, but if founders can be more efficient in gaining initial users that is a good thing.
They are more than happy to fund those types of companies. There simply are not a lot of people who are both willing and capable enough to undertake such a challenge. I think you've made some faulty assumptions about supply and demand in the startup space.
Product Hunt started surfacing during the previous Y Combinator batch because founders told each other to upvote their products.
Er, on most link aggregator websites, that's supporting a breach in integrity, not a "we'll give you $120k seed money" event.
It's worth noting that this behavior is explicitly punished on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972941) and will get you banned extremely quickly from Reddit.
This also leads to a massive conflict of interest for any YC products that are posted to Product Hunt in the future.
The product started out as an invite-only platform for "product people" who Ryan Hoover "knows and admires" so it was a voting ring for a valley in-group since day one.
That it's managed to get so much traffic and now seed funding says a lot about how the Valley works, and probably not in a good way. It's literally a platform for someone's friends to upvote each other - "conflict of interest for YC" doesn't even scratch the surface.
I do think the platform has value, but only insofar as that it helps those who are playing the VC game by showing them what a certain "in crowd" thinks is cool.
You're correct, we did seed the community with people I knew in startups that I thought would (1) be interested in this type of community and (2) have interesting discoveries/thoughts on tech products.
I won't pretend there aren't voting rings but they're not limited to the "valley in group" at all. We see people across the world trying to game the site, as people do on Hacker News, reddit, and other crowd-curation sites. As I mentioned earlier on this HN thread, we have systems that help combat these rings and in part thank to YC/HN's guidance, we'll improve this.
I also want to point out just a few examples of products that reached the top of the day's board from non-valley, "famous" startup people. E.g.
- Instanerd (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/instanerd) was made by Alex in Skopje, Macedonia as a small side project. It received over 160 upvotes and ~5x the number of comments than the average submission.
That people outside of the "voting ring" or "in-crowd" get voted up by a "voting ring" or "in-crowd" sometimes does not obviate the central criticism - insiders exclusively decide which outsiders are selected.
Ryan, you mentioned in the past that you were taking steps to broaden the PH community and finding ways to invite more people into the fold.
Do you think involvement with YC will accelerate that step and is it still a (very?) high priority--I say "very" because the fact that it seems to be an exclusive list that's not open seems to be one of the biggest criticisms.
This is a problem with Silicon Valley, not Product Hunt. Ryan identified a way to grow his website and get funding. Smart on his part. Now he has the resources to make the site better and more open.
I tried using PH this week. I actually submitted a hardware product (NAS) that had launched that same day, but this never surfaced on the site. On the other hand, some startups that had already launched months ago were trending. From this experience I'm guessing that most, if not all, links are hand picked, rather than community voted. It doesn't feel right.
I don't know why your submission wasn't visible (you might want to contact the PH team directly about that), but with regards to your point about the startups trending that have existed for months: it doesn't matter when you launched, it matters when you were discovered by someone who uses PH and then decides to submit you. All links are hand picked, but they're hand picked by members of the community, then voted on by the community.
> hand picked by members of the community, then voted on by the community
I'm looking over the submitters' profiles and I see many of the same people submitting different items... so I'm deducing that 'members of the community' != 'the community'.
That's because, like Hacker News, there are a relatively small amount of people who actually submit when compared to the number of people in the community as a whole. I personally subscribe to quite a lot of startup newsletters and follow people on Twitter who post product-related news, so I tend to have things to post most days. I assume it's the same for other people who also post on a regular basis.
People will use it for different things. Some will submit products, some will upvote, some will comment and get involved with the discussion, and some will do all three.
I don't know that this is true for Show HN posts (since it's a comparable product). It seems most Show HN's are posted by the creators. And Product Hunt is the other way around because most creators are not allowed to post there.
I want to be clear that YC has no preferential treatment on Product Hunt and you'll find TechStars, 500 Startups, and other accelerator backed startups featured with as much adoration as YC startups. Earlier this week we also helped promote 500 Startups' WMD conference in the email newsletter.
You're right that voting rings, if not dealt with, can hurt the authenticity of the rankings. We have mechanisms to curb that and thankfully guidance from YC/HN on how to deal with this as the community grows. In fact I met with Daniel Gackle a month ago to chat about this.
I think trying to promote your YC startup amongst your fellow batch members is different to asking the tech community as a whole to vote for your product. Perhaps "founders told each other to upvote their products" wasn't the best way of phrasing it, but I imagine it was more like how you'd ask those closest to you to give you a bit of support.
With regards to the conflict of interest, I don't see this being too much of an issue. Whilst PH itself is part of a YC batch, the majority of the PH community won't be, and it's them who collectively vote.
The issue is momentum: with HN/Reddit's time-based ranking algorithms, the first few upvotes are extremely critical. On Hacker News for example, getting ~5 upvotes in the first hour for a otherwise-unexciting product will usually have it touch the front page, and that could be hit with just little collusion.
Getting the rest of the upvotes and the traction to hit the top of the front page, in fairness, is dependent on non-collusive votes. The issue is that subtle collusion may get products exposure when they otherwise wouldn't in a fair system. (although, that's the startup world in a nutshell. I'm not fond of it.)
I think a lot of this won't be dependent on whether or not the submission is for a YC company, especially since the submitter is often not associated with the product being submitted anyway. I do agree with you about the practice being part and parcel of the startup world though!
It’s an interesting product but Erik Torenburg (self-described "Product Hunt Hustler" according to his Twitter profile) is not just a little bit of a Twitter spammer:
He has posted hundreds of reply spam promoting Product Hunt on Twitter. He must be running some kind of script because he has posted so many replies many with product specific screenshots, I can’t imagine someone doing this manually so quickly (every few minutes).
I understand “growth hacking” and sometimes promoting yourself can seem like spam to some, but this really is just spam, and it’s not the good kind. This is probably in violation of Twitter's TOS and not what people should have to be exposed to, especially if you're trying to build a brand. This makes me just want to never use the product, and I really like supporting YC companies and prefer to give the benefit of the doubt and assume good faith in the face of self-promotion. But this is just a little bit too much.
I understand that you want the startup to interact with the comments and I also understand you don't want them to miss an opportunity of receiving and answering feedback, but I'm wondering if it would make more sense to have these automated messages come from a Product Hunt twitter account that's not associated to a person. I believe this would solidify that it's an automated message.
I get the feeling that you're trying to play the messages off as not being automated as they come from Erik, but people already know they're automated. The gig is up. You could simply create an account such as "ProductHuntNotifier" or equivalent and remove any ambiguity.
I still think that the messages are both relevant and important.
You're in a unique position where you can even manually add and promote new startups to Product Hunt yourselves followed by automating a tweet out to the founder(s) and growth hack user acquisition that way. This seems to be the approach you're taking. I do applaud the fact you go so far as to do the legwork of finding the twitter accounts associated with the startup; that task is by no means automated. Most people can't take this approach as they have nothing beneficial to offer the user they're tweeting to.
Because there's some value add to what they're doing, I'm not sure I'd say it's a cut and dry case of calling it spam given it's not fully automated and the startups in question are getting promoted. It seems mutually beneficial in many ways.
Sounds like a missed opportunity for a bot then... It is not like you are really personalizing the message at all. The only human part of this would be deciding which photo to use to entice the developer. (Could this be optimized by a bot and A/B testing?)
I agree with the other comments that this is a useful feature, but would be more well suited for a customized twitter account with a name explaining it better.
the idea of a bot is intriguing, but right now I'm manually finding founders contact info, reaching out, getting them in the system, asking them Q+A's on producthunt.com, cc'ing other relevant players in the convo, and following up with them to see how PH influenced their traffic and how we can help (which, again, founders respond gratefully for all the free traffic)
If anyone has suggestions for ways to automate part of this, as it takes a long time, i'm open!
Ever try emailing founders instead? I wonder if you'd get a better and/or faster response.
Perhaps you could require your product submitters to insert the contact email for the products they are submitting. Then, you could auto email the founder as soon as their product is posted on Product Hunt.
The majority of the tweets you're referring to are notifications to founders when their product is on Product Hunt so they can answer questions that arise. This leads to (1) a more interesting conversation and (2) fewer bummed founders. We started doing this more actively after receiving emails and tweets from disappointed founders that didn't know their product was featured until days later.
Also, we're not using an automated script to send these tweets.
You might as well automate this. I believe it would not be a great undertaking. Also if your only concern was notifying the creator/owner, why would you not DM them on twitter? Or better yet, e-mail them with a bot that scrapes emails off the product site as an example?
Clearly, you guys are also trying to benefit from the increased publicity from using a public message "board" platform instead of a more private form of communication. I believe that may be the origin of some of these concerns. You guys aren't addressing the fact that you are doing this on a public platform to promote your site. Instead, you are still trying to argue that you are doing this completely independent of the traffic benefits....
Most people's twitter settings require that they follow you to DM them.
"e-mail them with a bot that scrapes emails off the product site"
Not a bad idea and we could make some educated guesses as to what the email address is (e.g. support@company.com). That said, we've found some founders aren't as quick to respond to email as they are on Twitter. I personally prefer the more ephemeral nature of Twitter for these type of notifications as my email inbox is already difficult enough to manage.
"Clearly, you guys are also trying to benefit from the increased publicity from using a public message 'board' platform"
We send direct @mentions to founders/startups on Twitter. These tweets will not surface in other's Twitter feed unless they're following both people.
Considering that if you look closely at the screenshots and see that it is Erik himself commenting on products, so as to have a reason to notify users, no, not really.
Maybe if they made it something you could subscribe to, opt-in, I would think it wasn't spam, but as it stands now, getting a notification on all of my Twitter enabled devices about something I don't care about, that I didn't ask for nor subscribe to, is spam. That some are advocating actually "scraping emails" to automate email notifications because this is so useful just leaves me a little bit dumbfounded.
Is getting an email, albeit unsolicited, about a community having a discussion about your generally new product[0] actually unwanted email for the majority of start-up founders? Especially to an email that is specifically mentioned on the site as a suggestions/feedback email. Both Erik and Ryan have said that many founders were happy with the notification.
It seems to me that companies might even actually pay for a service like this and if enough people thought it added value, I don't see where the issue with scraping emails is. Perhaps you could enlighten me or provide a different viewpoint as this would be something that I'd have no issue implementing myself and the fact that it scares you so much has me worried that I would be overreaching if I ever did. I just don't see why an email scraper is seen as inherently evil?
[0] I imagine a system where there has to be a minimum amount of comments and not one in which the only comment is made by Erik (or a bot) and used as the "motivation" for responding to the thread as a founder.
Why wouldn't you care about it? If you are running a business, and the internet is talking about it (on a pretty popular site with lots of traffic), it seems that should be reasonably high on your list of things to care about. Would you want to know that you are on the front page of Hacker News?
Let me tell you my raw impression of PH as an outsider.
It's a cool kids club for cool SV startups as selected by founders and employes of equally cool SV startups, where it's specifically "cool" rather than "notable" or "innovative". Secondly, while you can't join their ranks at will, you will be given a membership to comment on your own product should some cool kid submit it to the PH. Essentially they exchange memberships for adding content to PH and helping build PH's credibility. It's a reasonable approach, but they are just being ... too blunt and obnoxious about it.
You're not alone. I have had similar experience as an outsider on bunch of other similar sites as well. My submissions are "Pending Approval" for over a year. No reply to tweets or emails, when clearly new sites from SF are approved daily / weekly.
I appreciate the feedback, huhtenberg. Can you describe what you mean by "blunt and obnoxious"? Maybe we can improve our /about page copy or something else?
On a related note: we just started handing out recommendations to give people in the community the ability to invite others to join the discussion. This way we can enable the community to help grow itself without opening the floodgate entirely. The site and team simply aren't prepared for it.
I'm a fan of PH, but I don't think it's okay to change course on your answer here. Originally, it was closed to build a community with quality content. Now, it's closed due to scalability? Seems like your angle is changing due to pressure.
Blunt and obnoxious means that you don't bother with a basic reply when contacted for a feature, but then become suddenly one's biggest fans and friends, all forthcoming and excited once the product somehow ends up on the site. This comes across an exceptionally cynical, disingenuous and high-brown attitude. And, tangibly, the only benefit of joining in is the exclusivity of becoming one of the cool kids. But that's of a little value if one doesn't have any SV peeps to impress.
This seems a little blunt and obnoxious. Ryan is trying to help people get their products out there. I'm sure he has a lot of inbound email and may struggle to reply to everyone.
I don't think that is a fair assessment. I have been an active contributor for the past couple of months.
I am NOT part of any club. I live in upstate NH. I'm certainly not cool.
However I do think that you are noticing a trend that I have as well.. the actually innovative or disruptive products end up not getting as much attention as they maybe should.
What I am interested to see is the social graph that get's developed based on our product preferences.
I think it will be less about product leaderboards and more about product discovery.
Well, nobody would use PH if they begged for people to use it. Their success is directly correlated with the fact that they are a cool kids club, and everyone wants in. Psychology 101.
Your comment, ironically, if anything, just made PH more desirable to the majority of the people that read it.
> Second, there is a lack of diversity on Product Hunt. It’s mostly white men talking to white men. “The reason for that is that Product Hunt started out with people in my network, which is still largely guys,” Hoover said. “But we’ve been actively reaching out to women in the community to ask ‘what women do you feel we should give access to comment.’ It takes a lot of time and it’s hard to show progress.”
I feel like this will probably be Product Hunt's biggest challenge going forward. Product Hunt seems like a really well-designed and well-thought-out site, but I can't get myself to use it (for now) because it seems like a direct manifestation of one of the most criticized aspects of Silicon Valley, namely its huge monoculture in which people are only building and promoting products that solve First World Problems (i.e. their own).
With all that said, I hope Product Hunt becomes the type of diverse and open community that I'm sure its founder also wants it to be.
Product Hunt is for the generation who grew up in the real estate collapse. I feel like those same people will all leave for real estate once the market fully recovers. They don't seem to have any real enjoyment or interest in tech outside of getting rich.
The whole scheme that is Product Hunt may very well be the harbinger of the end of the good times.
This goes completely against yc's overall message and is confusing for an entrepreneur like me who aspires to get into yc. YC has always said they only invest in startups that have a shot at becoming billion dollar companies, however small that probability might be.
So a company that has a 100% probability of a $10mil/yr business would stand no chance against a company that has a 1% probability of generating $1billion/yr.
Product Hunt is great and Ryan is great but I just don't see it.
It's really hard to predict what will become a billion dollar company, especially with something as early as Product Hunt. We have several bets to place but what you see today may look a lot different 1, 2, 3 years from now.
Sorry but that kind of logic is a cop out. I can point to tons of other startups attacking small markets that could also become big. The founders are super talented too. I've met many of them personally. If the market you were attacking was expanding at a fast pace then your argument would make sense.
I would love to see a yc partner shed some light here.
I'm not sure I understand how ProductHunt is better than ShowHN. Maybe I just like having everything I read in one place, but after having our product listed on ProductHunt I haven't really gone back.
Ryan: I would be interested to hear your take on why ProductHunt is better/different than ShowHN. I don't mean this to be a jab, I just want to hear your perspective.
I won't say PH is better than Show HN. It's just different. HN has a very engineering-focused culture and you see that in the conversation and products surfaced. Furthermore, you see fewer big startup product launches on Show HN and more side projects. On PH you get a combination of both but often we have well-known founders from prominent startups jump into the conversation. Again, this isn't necessarily better -- it's a different type of content and experience.
Personally, I like to see a variety of submission from VC-backed startups to weekend hacks.
The YC network benefits greatly from having these types of startups in the network. Even if Product Hunt doesn't raise a single dollar in funding or make a single dollar in revenue, they have shown they are able to deliver customers to early stage startups. And by bringing them into the fold, other YC companies get preferential access to a new way to find customers. It's clearly a win/win.
Nice, congrats! I read Product Hunt pretty regularly.
What's the big picture plan for Product Hunt?
Are there going to be features like a directory of products, in addition to new launches? I agree with others that it's a lot like Show HN still, and have always hoped you'd build more specific product-focused features too.
Awesome! I never really thought Show HN would stop ProductHunt from growing. They're similar, but have key differences.
It's also cool that they let you know when your product is on PH and validate posts. Only thing I wish is that they had a little better/more responsive customer service but I guess they are still in their initial stages. One of their moderators posted my product but used a very unfitting title. I tweeted and wrote to them but didn't receive a response until the next day and, if you're familiar with PH, that is simply too late because my product was already buried in the previous days posts...and then I was told they couldn't do anything more to help me. Hope this serves as feedback for the future!
... and just like that everyone all of a sudden hates product hunt on hacker news. I don't understand most of these comments.
Product Hunt is still very new and we're already talking about how the algorithm is no good and bad tweeting practices.
Of course other users are going to ask their friends to upvote their submissions. Of course the founders are going to make sure that quality products are shown near the top. Of course the founders are going to make sure that engagement is higher even if that means notifying users via twitter.
Why can't we just say congratulations!? Why do we have to hate so quickly? Everyone acts like they have been doing this for 10 years and they should have all this stuff fixed by now.
I love PH, and admittedly use it more than HN (check it every morning, etc), but I'm curious to see how it can be turned into a business. To me it seems very similar to the idea of something like HN being turned into a business, which I don't see as a very logical idea.
Either way, I'm looking forward to seeing where YC takes Product Hunt.
Congrats! I've never been able to get my startup featured on PH, but I visit often and love reading about the other startups. Excited to see where PH goes.
I don't understand why the top comments are so negative. Product Hunt is an exceptional startup which has a great fresh perspective for discovering new products and a community of people around this.
Its early days for Product Hunt and while specific criticism is great (X should be improved because a, b and c. I think you guys could try m, n or o), the general whining is in poor form. Almost peanut gallery level. We are better than this in HN :)
Product Hunt lets builders like us get a few "non-cynical" eyeballs. Look at the examples he mentions, what's not to love:
- Instanerd (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/instanerd) was made by Alex in Skopje, Macedonia as a small side project. It received over 160 upvotes and ~5x the number of comments than the average submission.
I won't lie - I'm not 100% certain that this can be a massive business - BUT no one can deny that it brings value to early stage products/co's and will definitely bring value to the YC portfolio.
In addition, you're right - it really can help shed light on products/teams that generally wouldn't get the time of day.
Our product was submitted to producthunt (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/sparta) , we sat at the #1 position for a day - and it delivered a bunch of great prospects. We definitely wouldn't have been able to connect with so many Silicon Valley people so early, had it not been for PH.
Another disappointing move - I want the YCombinator that requested startups working in energy, robotics, healthcare and internet infrastructure back:
http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/