Product Hunt

Product Hunt's cold-start playbook: whitelist, curate, evangelize daily

Sam recounts how Ryan Hoover bootstrapped Product Hunt: hand-curated nerdy friends, a rule to only post undiscovered products, whitelisting so only trusted users could post (killing bots and moderation cost while creating exclusivity), and personally thanking/recruiting on Twitter every morning for ~9 months.

“Then he made it where you had to be whitelisted to participate in the community, meaning the average person could not just go post. So that solved the bots problem and the moderation problem because he was only letting trusted people post and anybody could view. And that had this double effect of it was now exclusive. People wanted to get in. They would beg to get in, they would prove themselves, and if they got in, they would be on their best behavior so they wouldn't get kicked out.”

Steal thisWhitelist posting in a new community so only vetted users contribute; it kills spam and makes membership exclusive.

Influencers should buy dead tools and resell to their audience

Andrew's riff: an influencer with a big audience can acquire a failed marketing tool (that died on customer-acquisition cost) for ~$5,000 on Product Hunt's graveyard, then sell it to their existing followers with free distribution.

“And so you could go on Product Hunt, find something that's failed 6 months ago that's a simple marketing tool because they were trying to acquire people with PPC. And then you just say, great, I'm going to acquire for $5,000 and sell it to my audience. I think there's tons of opportunities like that.”

Steal thisIf you have an audience, buy a dead tool that failed on paid acquisition and resell it to your followers for free.

Get in early when a platform is still nascent

Jack's edge across Product Hunt and collectibles platforms is the same: join when there are only a few hundred users, because small and new means less competition and more arbitrage opportunity.

“So I think Product Hunt is similar with the collectibles thing in terms of just like, I joined when it only had a couple of hundred users. And so it's like identifying something nascent and then seeing if there's, obviously when things are small, there's more opportunities around because there's less competition.”

Steal thisFind platforms with only a few hundred users and become the power user before the crowd arrives.

Buy abandoned Product Hunt apps for $5K and grow them

Andrew's unexecuted idea: scroll back six months on Product Hunt, find the coolest products that fizzled because the developer couldn't market them, and offer the founder $5,000. To them it's a dead project; to a marketer it could be a $5M business.

“And so what I was thinking is, it'd be smart to go through Product Hunt, go back 6 months, and just look at all the coolest shit that came out, and then start approaching all those developers and saying, "Look, I'll give you $5,000." And to them, they're like, "This is useless to me, I've already shut it down, I don't wanna pay for hosting." to you that could be a $5 million business?”

Steal thisAcquire fizzled Product Hunt apps cheap from developers who can't market, then bring the distribution.

You Probably Need a Haircut hit 150K uniques in 24 hours

Greg Isenberg launched a 'virtual barbershop' (youprobablyneedahaircut.com) during COVID lockdown by seeding it to a few journalists and posting on Product Hunt. It drew roughly 150,000 unique visitors in the first day.

“Like you just seed it with a couple of journalists and throw it up on Product Hunt and before you know it, like, I don't know, we probably had 150,000 uniques in the first 24 hours.”

iMovie vs Final Cut: positioning a tool for pros, not beginners

Vlad frames Webflow's positioning against Wix/Weebly as the difference between iMovie and Final Cut Pro — template-pickers vs. an abstraction layer over HTML/CSS/JS that lets professionals build fully custom sites from scratch. The proof point: on Product Hunt, custom launches are either hand-coded or built with Webflow.

“The way I think about it sometimes is those other website builders are kind of like iMovie and then Webflow is sort of like Final Cut. Final Cut Pro, right? Or After Effects. You know, like super pros are using it.”

Steal thisPosition your product as the pro-grade tool in a category of toys — the depth ceiling is your moat.

Rebuild Product Hunt entirely in a no-code tool as a marketing stunt

Discussing no-code tools like Parabola and Voiceflow, the pair float rebuilding a full app — Airbnb, Twitter, or even Product Hunt itself with all its logic, database, upvoting and comments — using only no-code tools, which Vlad calls a good marketing idea.

“Like rebuild Product Hunt itself, right? In a no-code tool, right? Where you're, you're doing all the logic, all the database stuff, all the like visual components, all the kind of state changes, upvoting, comments. Sounds like a good marketing idea for you guys.”

Steal thisProve your no-code tool's ceiling by publicly rebuilding a famous app with it.

Shaan's missed mastermind portfolio: Calm, Clearbit, Product Hunt

Shaan regrets not blindly investing $10K in every founder in his early mastermind groups, which included Calm, Clearbit, Product Hunt, and Zola Electric. The lesson: don't count yourself out as a player.

“if I had just written checks to all of them blindly, I said, you know, like with no judgment, I'm just writing the same $10,000 check and all of you guys, you know, Calm was in that, in that crew.”

Steal thisIf you're already in the room with great founders, be willing to write checks; don't count yourself out as an investor.

Launched with one $12 sale on Product Hunt's page 2 and almost quit day one

Moiz launched Native 12 days after buying the domain with zero inventory, made by a mom-and-pop hobbyist. His Product Hunt launch landed on page 2, got a single sale, and he nearly killed the business — $12 a day, age 30.

“We get one sale and I'm like, okay, this business is over. Forget about like, I'm not going to do all this hard work to sell $12 of deodorant every day. I can open up a lemonade. Like, I'm 30 years old and I'm basically was having a revenue of $12 a day.”

A 3D-rendered product photo and a Product Hunt favor turned 1 sale into 51

With no physical product to photograph, Moiz used a 3D render of the deodorant bar and a bathroom hero image. A friend got him an exception to relaunch on Product Hunt's front page a second day in a row, producing 50 sales and validating the idea.

“So we got some guy to like 3D render the image of what a Native deodorant bar would look like. And like, that's the image that we have associated with Product Hunt. On our website, we have a hero image and the hero image is just a bathroom. It doesn't even have a photo of Native deodorant on it. Because no native deodorant exists at this point. But on that second day, we get like 50 sales”

Become the #1 user of every new platform

Jack's repeatable playbook: when a new platform launches, post daily to top its leaderboard. He automated a midnight Product Hunt post to stay the #1 user uncatchable — which drew inbound from a Sequoia partner and a stream of startup deal flow.

“And so, I just posted each day and then I made it a bit more scalable. Again, I'm a crappy software engineer. If I was doing this again, I would just hire someone off Upwork, could probably get it done for like $10 or something. I basically did this myself, but I could have hired someone for $10. I created just a script to automatically schedule a post to Product Hunt each day at exactly midnight. That's when the leaderboard resets.”

Steal thisPick a brand-new platform with a leaderboard and post daily to lock in the top spot before anyone else shows up.

Frame new ventures as 'experiments,' not projects

Ryan Hoover deliberately launched Product Hunt as an 'experiment' with no goal beyond testing whether people found new products interesting. Lowering the stakes from 'company' or even 'project' to 'experiment' removed the pressure that kills early ideas.

“It was an experiment. That's what I called it. Actually, if you look back on the tweet, the word I used was an experiment and there wasn't really an intention or a goal other than just exploring, like, do people find new products really interesting and Do they subscribe to this email list I created?”

Steal thisLaunch your next idea as an 'experiment' with a single question to answer, not a company to build.

Product Hunt started as an email list with 20-30 curators

Product Hunt began as a simple subscribe-able email list that gained a couple hundred subscribers in days. Crucially, Hoover didn't curate the products himself; he recruited 20-30 known founders and investors to share what they found.

“couple hundred people subscribed in the first like couple days, but. From the beginning, it wasn't me curating the products. From the very beginning, it was like, okay, I know a lot of people, founders, investors, people who are in technology who are always exploring new things like yourself. And I think it was 20 or 30 people were sort of the curators, the people that were just sharing new products they found.”

Steal thisSeed a community with a small group of trusted curators rather than producing all the content yourself.

Less than 1.4% of Product Hunt visitors come from the Bay Area

Despite the persistent 'Silicon Valley clique' perception, Hoover checked the metrics: under 1.4% of visitors in the prior 30 days were from the Bay Area. Product Hunt went global almost immediately.

“I checked the metrics the other day and it was less than— what was it, 1.4% I think of visitors in the past 30 days were from the Bay Area. Wow. So that's expected when you get to a certain scale, but it's a tiny micro kind of.”

Product Hunt sold to AngelList for $20M

After going through YC and raising from Andreessen Horowitz, Hoover sold Product Hunt to AngelList. The publicly reported price was $20 million.

“you eventually sell the company. I think publicly it's come out that you sold the company $20 million to AngelList.”

Product Hunt's CTO hired himself by building a Chrome extension

Andreas, who became Product Hunt's CTO for ~4 years, first caught Hoover's eye by scraping the pre-API site to build a Chrome extension that showed the day's top products in every new browser tab. He demonstrated value before any job existed.

“one day he launches a Chrome extension for Product Hunt. And so this was also, again, experimental phase, not even incorporated, but he launched this Chrome extension, which he created by scraping the site. We didn't have an API or anything back then, scraping the site. And every time you'd open up a new tab, you'd see the day's most upvoted products every day. And that caught my eye”

Steal thisBuild something useful on top of a company you want to join—it can make hiring you a no-brainer.

Building the community brick by brick with personal emails

Shaan reads the actual second email Hoover sent him in November 2013: a Product Hunt MVP with ~175 subscribers and 30 contributors, asking for opinions and offering mockups. Hoover personally pounded out emails and tweets to early users, which made each member feel like an insider.

“my Product Hunt LinkyDink MVP, you were using LinkyDink at the time, is showing signs of traction. I haven't promoted it outside my own blog, Quib, and a couple of tweets, and I got about 175 subscribers and 30 kick-ass contributors. But what's even more encouraging is the unsolicited emails and face-to-face conversations people telling me they love it.”

Steal thisHand-write personal emails to your first users and ask for opinions—it converts know-it-alls into evangelists.

Use press as a tool by helping journalists do their job

Press rarely drives sustainable users, but it worked for Product Hunt because TechCrunch readers were exactly Product Hunt's audience. Hoover fed journalists like Josh Constine cool new products, which earned backlinks and goodwill—being helpful kept Product Hunt top of mind.

“every now and then I would email someone at, let's say, Josh Constine at TechCrunch and say, hey, Josh, I know you're like really interested in consumer social. Here's this new app that we found through Product Hunt. It's really cool. And for me, it was hopefully it was helpful. In some cases they're like, oh, cool, Ryan, you know, whatever. In other cases they're like, oh, that's really cool. Can you introduce me to the founder?”

Steal thisFeed journalists genuinely useful leads in their beat; the backlinks and goodwill follow naturally.

Product Hunt's costly bet on gaming, books, and podcast verticals

After raising a Series A in ~2015, Hoover expanded Product Hunt into gaming, books, and podcast verticals, reasoning each had the same creator-wants-distribution dynamic. He spent months designing and hiring vertical community leads—but it didn't drive growth and the products weren't good, his biggest costly mistake.

“Probably the biggest costly mistakes, which I take full responsibility for, was— this was about 2015 or so, so this was after we raised our Series A, we had long runway, lots to explore. Part of the vision and the direction was, okay, we had a really amazing community in technology, cool place to discover new apps and tech products and so on. We believe that this can expand into other categories that have similar dynamics.”

Launched on Product Hunt page 2, got ONE sale, almost quit

Native launched with no inventory and only contracted small mom-and-pop manufacturers. Landing on page 2 of Product Hunt, it got a single $12 sale and Moiz Ali nearly killed the company on day one.

“We get one sale and I'm like, okay, this business is over. Forget about— like, I'm not going to do all this hard work to sell $12 of deodorant every day. I can open up a lemonade— like, I'm 30 years old and I'm basically having a revenue of $12 a day, right?”

Find the one big risk, and the unique edge that solves it

Ryan Hoover's investing lens: assume everyone has already tried everything, so something must have changed (consumer behavior or technology) and the team must have a unique ability to solve the single biggest risk. For Product Hunt, the one risk wasn't tech, it was building the community.

“what is the big risk in this company? And I also make an assumption that everyone has tried everything. And so either something has to have changed, whether it's like a consumer behavior shift or technology shift, and that founder or that team also has to have some sort of like unique ability to like solve for the biggest problem or risk. So with Product Hunt, Product Hunt is the community piece. It's not hard to build Product Hunt from a technical perspective. The product design is important, but fundamentally it's all in how you build the community in the beginning.”

Steal thisIdentify the single biggest risk in a business and ask what changed and what unique edge the team has to solve it.

The mastermind portfolio Shaan didn't invest in

Shaan realized that the founders at his early SF mastermind dinners — Calm, Clearbit, Product Hunt, Zola Electric — would have been a phenomenal portfolio if he'd blindly written $10K checks to each. He'd done the relationship-building right but didn't yet think of himself as an investor.

“Clearbit was in that crew. Product Hunt, Zola Electric, which is the biggest solar company in Africa. Like, so that portfolio would have done amazing. And so, I looked back and I was like, man, I did the first part right, which is what you're saying. You know, I just spent time with interesting people and added value to them through sharing sharing ideas, insights, whatever, helping, being helpful. But then the lesson I learned was, why wasn't I investing? And to me, I kind of asked myself this and I thought, because I wasn't thinking of myself like an investor.”

Steal thisIf you already sit at the table with great founders, start thinking of yourself as an investor — don't count yourself out.

Become the #1 user of a brand-new platform

Jack's playbook if starting over at 20: spot a just-launched platform like Product Hunt early (under 200 users), post daily until you're the #1 user, automate it with a cheap script, then leverage the leaderboard visibility—Sequoia partners and startups came to him because he was prominent there.

“I saw Product Hunt. It launched, had, I think, under 200 views or something. I was like, oh, this just seems pretty interesting. And then I just started using it every single day. I just would post new products to it every single day. So, you know, a few minutes of work each day. And then quickly, I just became the number one user on the site, and they had like a ranking board.”

Steal thisFind a new platform with a leaderboard, become its #1 user through daily consistency (automate it), and convert the visibility into connections and deal flow.