[Silicon Valley Heartbeat] How Product Hunt Grasped Fundamental Behavior of Early Adapters

Have you heard of Product Hunt effect? It’s the unofficial term used among the entrepreneurs who previously got featured on Product Hunt and accordingly attracted a lot of users and even investment. To give an example of Fittr app, featured on ProductHunt soon make it into the top 5, and they received 13 downloads a second.

Founded by Ryan Hoover, Product Hunt is a web and app based platform that rank new products on a daily basis. Currently ProductHunt e-mails that list top 10 new products are sent to 100,000’s of people, including press and investors which  brings traction for the startup. Product Hunt received US$6.1 million investment led by Andreessen Horowitz. 

“There hasn’t been a platform for products in the technology space. You see good conversations about products on Hacker news, forum and Twitter, but there was no destination for product enthusiasts.” Product Hunt CEO Ryan Hoover said in an exclusive interview with TechNode.

 Started off as an email list and then late April, 2014 the company was incorporated and went to Y Combinator. “It began with my networks. I simply emailed to fellow entrepreneurs, investor saying that submit cool products to this list every day. So it started with 20,30 people initial contributor list.” Hoover said. 

In fact, Product Hunt is not wholly new concept. Hoover added that he just took the piece of the social behavior of people loving to share new stuff specifically on the product. “People have been sharing cool new product for a long time and we just grasped that fundamental behavior and built the product around it.”

Currently, Product Hunt runs an international team around the world. Hoover revealed that “The difficult part is communication on different time zones and not being able to stand on white board together.” However, he said, there are more pros than cons. “It works well, if you get the right people in your team.”