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Speaker 1

00:00

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 a solo founder or a co-founder of

Speaker 2

00:13

Product Hunt? Solo founder, but had a founding team, so couldn't do it without them, of course.

Speaker 1

00:17

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

Speaker 2

00:24

Yeah, so I remember applying to YC and historically I always realized or thought that YC, 1, didn't like solo founders and 2, always preferred technical founders to begin with. So I was like, I don't know if YC is going to like me. So I ended up applying anyway after speaking with Gary and Alexis and Kat and some others and Kevin Hale, getting their support.

Speaker 2

00:46

And When I went into YC, when we applied to YC, we already had some traction, we already 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.

Speaker 2

00:58

It was obviously still very small because it was pretty early days, but we were seeing about 50% month-over-month growth in total top-line user visits. And that was consistent for the first, I don't know, 234 months. And so that really demonstrated that, oh wow, this person, he's a single founder and he's non-technical, but somehow this thing is growing and people seem to want it. And when you're, you know, whether you're non-technical or technical or whatever it may be, if you can demonstrate data like that, it's hard to argue.

Speaker 2

01:27

It's hard to say that, oh, actually, no, this isn't useful. If you're demonstrating that people are using your product, then that's ultimate proof.

Speaker 1

01:36

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

Speaker 2

01:45

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 may be something that people didn't want.

Speaker 2

02:00

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's actually a great place to put content, to re-engage people, because they, our audience, people in technology, they use email every single day.

Speaker 2

02:26

So for non-technical people, Things like email or hacking things together with Typeform actually is a really good tool to almost create a product, essentially. You can put Typeform and Stripe together and actually collect money, that's the ultimate test. 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.

Speaker 2

02:50

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. Paul Auditore

Speaker 1

02:59

Yeah, and do you find that well, you just launched Ship, like this new product or new feature, I guess. Are people using that to beta test stuff, or are these fully functioning products?

Speaker 2

03:10

Yeah, it's a combination of everything, really. We built Ship in many ways. It's basically a toolkit for makers and startups to, 1, announce new products that they're creating, collect emails for those products, and then get feedback and communicate with those users.

Speaker 1

03:24

So a

Speaker 2

03:25

lot of these things we were actually doing at Product Hunt for several years through various tools like MailChimp, using Typeform, just basically sending out screenshots and using actually Envision as a great tool to get people to annotate screenshots and give 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 Neistat and his new app.

Speaker 2

03:59

They used it to start capturing interest for Beam Panels, their new app that's coming out. Soon them and other similar people are using it to 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 their audience. And ultimately what I believe is 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.

Speaker 1

04:30

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 what's the plan?

Speaker 2

04:46

Yeah, So historically we've never really charged for anything. 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.

Speaker 2

05:07

The fun part is yesterday we launched, we set up, of course, a Slack bot to notify whenever someone gives us money. Those are the best notifications we're getting. It's like, wow, this person just subscribed for like $249 a month to this thing that we built. It's like, that's awesome.

Speaker 2

05:21

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 and, you know, helping startups with, you know, communicating and marketing and so on.

Speaker 2

05:42

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 in Product Hunt have a lot of talented engineers, designers, marketers, and so on, that might want to join companies that are launching in Product Hunt.

Speaker 2

06:08

So it'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

Speaker 1

06:17

all that

Speaker 2

06:17

kind of

Speaker 1

06:17

stuff. You won't see that from Product Hunt. Yet. No.

Speaker 1

06:21

Yes,

Speaker 2

06:21

yet. Maybe audio playing videos with sound and everything. We'll see. Well, you

Speaker 1

06:26

guys do email well, but you could push it even further. Have you always, so it was first email list, Have you always believed that email was going to be the most effective way for you to stay in touch with people?

Speaker 2

06:37

Yeah, it's always been, you know, a lot of people say email is dead, emails, dumb. I don't like email. People use email all the time though.

Speaker 2

06:44

And it's a great channel for reengagement. Back in 2013 or 12, I can't remember. I wrote in, I used to write a lot and blog a lot and wrote about an article called Email First Startups. Actually, it was 1 of the early articles that I had on Hacker News that got on the homepage.

Speaker 2

07:01

And I was like, well, this is cool. People are reading my thing. It was basically just outlining various startups that started off as emails to begin with. AngelList, ironically, was 1 of those.

Speaker 2

07:12

AngelList 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.

Speaker 2

07:33

It's fairly stagnant. So, when you're sort of testing ideas, email is a great channel for that.

Speaker 1

07:38

That's awesome. We had a bunch of questions around the YC application. It's like application season right now.

Speaker 1

07:44

Oh, yes. That's right. A few of those. Actually, David Adomu, I might be mispronouncing his last name, tell us about a time you successfully hacked a non-computer system to your advantage.

Speaker 1

07:58

This is a YC application question.

Speaker 2

07:59

I forgot what I, OK, 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.

Speaker 2

08:17

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 1 of those was actually selling things on eBay when I was a kid.

Speaker 1

08:31

So I

Speaker 2

08:32

would browse Fat Wallet and Slick Deals, which are these communities and forums where people would post different deals that you can get on, usually electronics. And it would usually involve things with rebates, price matching, and all these hacks that you'd have to work around. Some of them slightly gray hat, it's a little bit shady.

Speaker 2

08:49

In any case, what I would do is browse those websites daily and then find opportunities to buy things that were maybe 30 or 40% off MSRP and then buy them and then sell them on eBay. And I think I sold, It wasn't a lot, like it was $150,000, maybe $200,000 in like 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.

Speaker 2

09:14

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.

Speaker 1

09:22

That's great.

Speaker 2

09:23

So that was fun.

Speaker 1

09:25

There was a whole Planet Money episode about that. Oh, was there? Yeah, people going to, it was a year or 2 ago, Toys R Us and reselling on Amazon.

Speaker 1

09:33

There's this whole culture of that little arbitrage, but you just get enough volume. Here's another 1. What were the main points you were trying to get across in your YC application and interview? This is from Phil.

Speaker 2

09:46

Yeah, I think looking back on it, I believe, you know, part of it was I was going in there again as 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 and idea that we need a place on the internet, a place to discover all these products being built.

Speaker 2

10:07

You know, I think the audience, the YC partners, they understood the pain point that makers and startups are seeing when it comes to discovery. So I felt that that was 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 ultimately. Other than that, it was also just like communicating confidence in some ways.

Speaker 2

10:35

I think you go into that interview, people are nervous, I was nervous. You have these, I think

Speaker 1

10:39

it was... Everyone's freaking out, yeah.

Speaker 2

10:41

Yeah. In my case, it was like 3 to 4 people in front of you drilling you with questions. I remember Sam, Sam Alderman was 1 of them and it's just like, you cut me off a couple times and I came prepared knowing that. So I was like, okay, if they cut me off, I'm just going to move on and, you know, try to be succinct and clear.

Speaker 1

10:56

Yeah. I think that's psychologically very difficult for people. And at that point is 1 of my main points of advice when they're asking like pre-interview, like you can't let that ruin your flow or ruin your energy. A lot of people start to get defensive when they're interrupted and then it just spirals out of control.

Speaker 1

11:13

Oh yeah. So it's like a weird psychological tactic.

Speaker 2

11:18

Yeah. Especially if you have more multiple founders too. It's the dynamic of who speaks when and how do you make sure that you don't look like you're fighting. The last thing you want is 2 founders to look like they already have founder problems in a 10 minute interview, which can be challenging.

Speaker 1

11:33

All right, oh yeah, I did have a question about podcast discovery. So where do you see that going right now? Like obviously you guys have a podcast section.

Speaker 2

11:43

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

Speaker 1

11:46

I didn't realize.

Speaker 2

11:47

Yeah, so this is some of the history in Product Hunt is 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 games and books and podcast was like the sort of fourth category that we introduced. And in hindsight, it was very clear why podcasts didn't belong in our current product ecosystem.

Speaker 2

12:13

1 podcast, you know, discovery and the way 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 like the dynamics didn't really work with just shoving it into the product community. However, the direction and the opportunity that we were tackling with podcasts specifically I think is still something I would love to see.

Speaker 2

12:38

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 podcast is not our business. Like we're focused on product discovery primarily and we're going to stop doing that. Breaker is approaching it in a similar way where they're leveraging community and enabling people to discover podcasts in a new and different way through other people and friends.

Speaker 2

13:06

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. 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.

Speaker 1

13:26

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. So you're like, you're on my vlog, I'm on your vlog. Like, that's how it works.

Speaker 1

13:39

Podcasting is pretty difficult, but I agree. I really love the search on breaker. That's the 1 thing that all the other apps haven't done. Yeah.

Speaker 1

13:48

Yeah. Download breaker. All right. Next question.

Speaker 1

13:53

What were your biggest takeaways from YC?

Speaker 2

13:58

I think part of it is, 1 of the great things about being in YC is you are held accountable in your, it's, it's a, it's almost like to some extent school, like your, your professor is going to be like, did you read the, did you do the homework? Your test results are going to show like whether you learn the thing or not at YC during that 3 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. And at the time, Cass or in Kevin Hale were our group partners and they would ask questions like, all right, did you do that thing we talked about last week?

Speaker 2

14:34

And so it was a forcing function to just get shit done because you don't have much time. And 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, to especially get off the ground because you, you just need to do a lot of work and

Speaker 1

14:52

hold yourself accountable. I am always curious how, how the behavior changes after YC, because there's like, there's this period of, I guess you product on wasn't around all that long before you

Speaker 2

15:04

did YC, right? Yeah, it was about 5, 6 months before we actually entered.

Speaker 1

15:08

Right. So you didn't have that many defined habits.

Speaker 2

15:11

Yeah. But do you find yourself adapting like new styles of running the team after YC or is it pretty similar to the the way you were going about it before? It's hard to say. YC was so focused in that initial phase and then once we we raise a series A basically right after YC and then hired and so our process changed and as it does when you hire another 5 or 10 people.

Speaker 2

15:37

And so in many ways we continue to have to change the way that we're doing things. In fact, 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.

Speaker 2

15:52

So I don't know, in some ways I think a lot of it is, YC instills a data-driven and very deliberate 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 that operating so much, but it certainly changed us in ways that I couldn't probably realize just because it's hard to know what we would be without YC.

Speaker 1

16:21

So. Okay, cool. And so are you guys all, there were a couple questions for you about remote teams. Yeah.

Speaker 1

16:27

What does your distribution look like? Are you mostly in the Bay?

Speaker 2

16:31

How does it work? Yeah, so we're about 2 thirds outside of SF. Okay.

Speaker 2

16:36

So we have headquarters in SF, but from the beginning we've been a distributed team. In fact, the first person that ended up well, paying out of Pocket initially was Ricardo in Italy. He was a developer that came on board, and awesome guy. From the very beginning we had a distributed team.

Speaker 2

16:54

Andreas came on, our CTO, shortly after that. 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 8 or 9 time zones, from Bulgaria, London, Denver, all over the board.

Speaker 1

17:12

And not just community moderation. These people are developers or designers.

Speaker 2

17:17

Yeah, it's a combination of community and engineering. Actually, Julie's in Paris. She joined a month or 2 ago.

Speaker 2

17:26

So we need to hit Asia. We don't have anyone in Asia yet. That's next on the list maybe.

Speaker 1

17:32

So yeah, if you're looking for a job. 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 that could help?

Speaker 2

17:46

You know, It wasn't intentional in the beginning. It was almost a necessity. And frankly, because at the time, 1, not being an engineer, I needed to find engineers.

Speaker 2

17:59

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. And so it sort of organically formed that way. And then in hindsight we realized there's a couple huge advantages to distributed teams.

Speaker 2

18:18

1, 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. 2, it's very expensive to hire in San Francisco, of course. The cost of living here is dramatically higher than it is in Bulgaria.

Speaker 2

18:32

And the third piece too is it's also very competitive when it comes to hiring, especially for an early stage startup when you're trying to take someone from Google or Facebook, they're getting paid, I don't know, $200,000 with beautiful cafeteria lunches. You as a C-stage or pre-funded company, it's harder to convince them to come on board. So I think there's a lot of benefits in building remote distributed teams. The other fourth piece is also we get this global perspective to some extent, where more than half the product community is actually outside the US.

Speaker 2

19:03

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 those communities. 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.

Speaker 2

19:22

And I think more people will be willing to build teams like that because it's easier to work remotely with Slack and 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

Speaker 1

19:38

to it. But nothing like outside of the normal complaints and workflow?

Speaker 2

19:43

Yeah, communication. Sometimes it's difficult when you have overlap of maybe 4 hours working together instead of like a full day. But those are workable.

Speaker 1

19:53

Okay, cool. A few people asked about community. I think they're particularly excited like figuring out how you just got started.

Speaker 1

20:04

1 person asked, Hattie Zhu asked, how did you acquire your first 1,000 users? Sebastian Massad asks, how do you create a community so quickly? Basically the same question. Yeah, how'd you get started?

Speaker 1

20:18

What was your, so you started this email list, but did you have a following before online? How did it go?

Speaker 2

20:24

Yeah, so it started, Product Hunt in some way started years before Product Hunt started in some ways. You know, it's before Product Hunt, I mentioned earlier, I was writing a lot and I would love to play with products and explore products and write about, I was writing 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?

Speaker 2

20:48

I helped Nir with his book, Hooked, and did more writing there. I was building a tiny bit of an audience, not massive, not Casey at all, he's ridiculous, but a big enough audience within this centered tech community to the point where when I did launch Product Hunt, when I announced the email, I had enough people following me to say, oh, I know Ryan, this looks cool, I'm going to try it out. And so it was a combination of having this first 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.

Speaker 2

21:28

So the initial kind of first few hundred, let's say, are just people that I built an audience or a following with for years prior. And then after that, when it launched, it was, okay, how do we grow this community? There's a couple of tactics that we did. 1 was, press was actually a great growth driver in the beginning.

Speaker 2

21:46

And so we worked on getting press or doing guest publishing. I actually wrote, ironically, I wrote in Fast Company something titled how we got our first 2,000 users. We can link to it. Yeah, and this was way back when.

Speaker 2

22:01

And it's ironic that I was writing about that, because my entire goal of writing about that was to get another thousand users. And that worked in the beginning, because Product Hunt was new to the tech industry 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, naturally they wanted to join the conversation, they wanted to share it.

Speaker 2

22:25

And so when we realized that, I would every morning go on Twitter and search for their Twitter username and say, Hey, Jill, your product is over here. People are talking about it. Do you want to join and answer questions? And like 80% of the time they'd say, yes, of course I'd love to.

Speaker 2

22:41

So we did more of that. I just would spend first hour or so of my day finding those makers online and getting them involved. And that led to more and more growth. So it had a natural kind of growth effect in the beginning.

Speaker 2

22:52

And those 2 tactics alone were like what led us to, I don't know, several thousand people in the very beginning.

Speaker 1

22:58

And are the bots effective still? Like, you know, the congratulations. Oh, those, yeah.

Speaker 2

23:04

Yeah, so for those that don't know, we have these Twitter bots that we've set up. 1 of them is to, so going back to what I said before, first I would look for the makers and invite them, and it was all manual. So we're like, all right, this is not scalable.

Speaker 2

23:17

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.

Speaker 2

23:25

And we'd ask, 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.

Speaker 2

23:35

And so that would allow us to, to scalably sort of recruit makers. And that's been still effective to this day. In fact, makers get upset if they are posted and they don't realize it cause they're like, oh, I couldn't answer questions or I didn't have a chance to share it. So we do make it like an effort to make sure they're notified.

Speaker 2

23:55

That's cool.

Speaker 1

23:56

Yeah, it feels like a missed opportunity. I mean, I love getting into the comments like on HN, Product Hunt, all

Speaker 2

24:01

that stuff.

Speaker 1

24:03

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

Speaker 2

24:13

It's pretty even. We're not seeing necessarily growth in a particular pocket. It's maybe unusual.

Speaker 2

24:20

Most startups you see that start in the US are 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 1 in New York and some other cities in the U S but there's also, you know, places like like Paris and Berlin and other places around the world that have these communities of people who love startups and are building products. If you look at our Google Analytics, a heat map of where people are, a lot of it centers around those startup tech hubs, actually, and those are everywhere.

Speaker 2

25:01

For us, it's still quite international and always kind of has been when it comes to the growth.

Speaker 1

25:06

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

Speaker 2

25:14

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 beautiful-looking products coming from Paris or France in general.

Speaker 2

25:30

But I would love to do an analysis or something. We do have an API. If anybody wants to hack something together, use our API to come up with cool visualizations. That'd be cool.

Speaker 1

25:41

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

Speaker 2

25:51

Like as what I like mostly? Your favorite

Speaker 1

25:53

kinds of products? It was by far the most common question. What are your favorite things?

Speaker 1

25:58

What apps are you using? It's like everything of that ilk.

Speaker 2

26:02

Well it's interesting if you look at product in some cases is 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 was 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.

Speaker 2

26:33

Now today, fast forward, things that are built on blockchain and crypto are super popular. Every single day there's at least 2 or 3 things related to that. And it's quite interesting to see these trends happen. And AI is kind of another 1, like people using machine learning and AI in part because there's a lot of opportunity there, but also like the, there's open source code and things that you can use, like introduce that to your product.

Speaker 2

26:59

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 particularly interested in voice-based applications.

Speaker 2

27:17

Like Lylebird is 1 that comes to mind, which I think it was in the last YC batch, which it's kind of crazy, but you watch the 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 what product 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. Paul Matzkoff

Speaker 1

27:51

Yeah, that was 1 of my favorite companies in the batch. It's amazing. It emulates your voice with like 20 minutes.

Speaker 1

27:57

It can do it with perfect accuracy.

Speaker 2

28:00

It's insane. I was going to, they opened 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 you can use this against me

Speaker 1

28:13

Yeah, no fake news is gonna be terrifying. Have you seen the video emulation stuff?

Speaker 2

28:17

Yes, yeah that with video emulation is frightening. So when you see that then you also think okay what's how do we prevent against that? How do we create technology or products to help people not you know fall into this this like hyper realistic fake news feature.

Speaker 1

28:34

Yeah. Has anyone launched anything on product hunt that addresses like watermarks or

Speaker 2

28:39

security checks? Anything like that? Nothing that I can think of right now.

Speaker 2

28:45

That would be interesting though. Yeah, I'm sure there's somebody out there doing it. Yeah.

Speaker 1

28:48

Well, I mean, it's tricky because you want 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 of the onion. So like I did that.

Speaker 1

28:58

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. That's just how it goes.

Speaker 1

29:08

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

Speaker 2

29:12

It's going to be weird. Have there

Speaker 1

29:15

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

Speaker 2

29:21

Brian Feroldi Oh, I mean I'm sure tons. What I tell people is the number of upvotes you get on Product Hunt honestly doesn't mean whether you're going to be successful or not. I mean that should be obvious to people, but some people, they're really disappointed.

Speaker 2

29:35

Like, I got 20 upvotes and people don't like it. Well, the reality is, launching is a one-time thing and whether you're launch successful or not, it's really like startups is a multi-year journey. Some of the most successful startups really are like until year 567 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 4 years usually.

Speaker 2

30:00

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

Speaker 1

30:20

yeah, yeah, totally. It happens in YC all the time. What are your pro tips for launching on product hunt?

Speaker 2

30:28

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, what we 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.

Speaker 2

30:51

Not to, we keep talking about Casey, or I do, but Casey's a good example. Like he has initially, before they built the product, he built an audience, and that audience has grown more and more and more. Now, no matter what he puts out, he's at least guaranteed to get people to care or try it out. And that's hugely valuable.

Speaker 2

31:09

You don't need Casey's level of audience, but going back to my story with 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 over several years, I don't think ProblemHint would exist today. So I think it's a combination of like, my pro tips is like 1, 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 SHIB is designed in our hope is it will help people do exactly those 2 things.

Speaker 1

31:42

Yeah, yeah I mean I would say that I'm engaging with the audience is something you guys do super well. It's like customer service is highly, high up there

Speaker 2

31:51

in your list of priorities. Customer service is seen as a cost center in many cases, but it's actually a great opportunity to engage an audience. What they're doing is they're coming to you and saying, I have a problem or I need help.

Speaker 2

32:04

And many people are like, oh no, they're coming to us. But in reality it's a great thing. People care enough to talk to you. So we use Twitter heavily to interact with people.

Speaker 2

32:14

I use TweetDeck and I command tab to it way too much.

Speaker 1

32:17

And I

Speaker 2

32:17

have a column for every single product I've mentioned and I see almost every single 1 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. It's those small things that make the community feel personable and approachable.

Speaker 1

32:34

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?

Speaker 2

32:55

I mean, I'm a weirdo and I just love doing this stuff, like exploring every single morning, waking up and seeing what people are making. So I'm unusual in that sense. I also don't try to see everything, obviously.

Speaker 2

33:07

It's kind of like some people with their email, they're like, I got to get to inbox 0. The reality is I don't try to get to inbox 0. It's just fine if it's not totally taken care of. So for me, I don't mind it.

Speaker 2

33:20

Our hope with Product Hunt and some things we're exploring is how do we, there's certain people, weirdos like me, who love to consume the fire hose, and then there's some people who just tell me the cool 1 or 2 things this week that I should know. And so we're exploring how do we appeal to both user types, making sure they don't feel overwhelmed, but making sure this audience gets all the information they need. Okay, and is there an offering for the 1 or 2 a week yet? The closest thing, and we've offered this for a while, is our weekly digest.

Speaker 2

33:48

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 what happened this week can get the weekly digest and that'll include the most upvoted products that week. So pretty easy, takes 10 seconds to consume and a lot more consumable than like our feed of just fire hoses. It's crazy.

Speaker 1

34:12

It's crazy to see it grow, man. Yeah, it's amazing. A Bunch of random questions.

Speaker 1

34:19

So Akshar, I'm going to mispronounce this. Akshar Bhonu asked, what is the most counterintuitive thing you learned building product on and then watching it grow and be used? I don't know if I have a

Speaker 2

34:31

great answer for that 1, to be honest. There's things that internally, from a process and leadership standpoint, that I don't know if I'd say they're counterintuitive, but it's challenging to... 1 thing I learned early on as a product manager was I thought it was being helpful in doing more of the work.

Speaker 2

34:49

So to put it and make it more tangible, there's a time where I made a massive mistake of like basically changing 1 of the UX designers work. Cause I was like, oh, it's, 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.

Speaker 2

35:07

What it did was cause frustration and and ultimately I'm not a UX designer anyway, so like I shouldn't be doing that work. And I think that's 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 like build and do what they're good at. So that's like a challenging, almost counter to the thing I think for a lot of people who are used to just doing all the work.