#38 - The More You Communicate with Users, the Higher Chance You'll Build Something They Want - Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's Podcast. Today's guest is Ryan Hoover, the founder of Product Hunt. So Ryan and the Product Hunt team recently launched a new product called SHIP, and SHIP is a toolkit for makers. So if you'd like to give it a shot, you can get a 10% discount on all the pro plans by using the YC friends link at blog.ycombinator.com.
All right, here we go. 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 Product Hunt?

**Ryan Hoover** (0:38)
Solo founder, but had a founding team, so couldn't do it without them, of course.

**Craig Cannon** (0:42)
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.

**Ryan Hoover** (0:49)
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 applying anyway after speaking with Gary and Alexis and Cat and some others and Kevin Hale, getting their support. 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.

**Craig Cannon** (1:19)
So what does that actually mean? Like some meaning roughly what number?

**Ryan Hoover** (1:22)
I don't remember the exact numbers. It was obviously still very small because it was pretty early days, but we were seeing about 50% 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.
And so that really demonstrated that, oh wow, this person, he's single founder and he's non-technical, but somehow this thing is growing and people seem to want it. And when you're, whether you're non-technical or technical 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, then that's ultimate proof.

**Craig Cannon** (2:01)
And 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?

**Ryan Hoover** (2:10)
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. 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 reengage people, because they, our audience, people in technology, they use email every single day. So for technical or 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. 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. And 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.

**Craig Cannon** (3:24)
Yeah, and do you find that, well, you just launched SHIP, like this new product, or a new feature, I guess. Are people using that to beta test stuff, or are these fully functioning products?

**Ryan Hoover** (3:36)
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. So a 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 we'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. They used it to start capturing interest for Beam Panels, their new app that's coming out.