#4 - How Product Hunt's Ryan Hoover Built A $20M Community From Scratch

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
All right, everyone, we have a quick ad for HubSpot. But I want to let you know, I actually use HubSpot and I use their sales tool, which is what this ad is for. HubSpot sales platform, it makes it just easier to sell stuff, to do it faster, to look at your pipeline, to see what sales are gonna happen. Just prospect to cold outreach and get more customers faster and easier. Plus, it's easy to learn and free to start. So you guys can check it out, hubspot.com/sales.

**Shaan Patel** (0:25)
And so you sell the company, you got money now. What happens that first day money hits the bank?
Were you sitting there refreshing Wells Fargo?

**Ryan Hoover** (0:33)
Some people, they love to go celebrate with a big thing. Actually, me, I flew to LA that day. I think it was a Friday. And we actually just went to a restaurant. And I ordered, of course, a rotisserie chicken and like some Brussels sprouts.

**Shaan Patel** (1:09)
I wanted to have you on because you're my friend. We haven't caught up in a little while because you've been traveling and doing all kinds of interesting stuff. B, you're probably unique. So like most of the people I have on this show are-

**Ryan Hoover** (1:20)
I'm special.

**Shaan Patel** (1:21)
Yeah, you're special. You're a special snuff. Most of the people I'm trying to have on the show are like the greedy capitalist pigs. Like, I like that. I'm like, oh, you found out that you can buy and sell this one arbitrage and you levered up and you did this crazy thing. But you're very different. Obviously, you've done well in business, but I think that's a byproduct. To me, you're a really thoughtful dude who has built a really cool business yourself, plus invested in a bunch of other interesting companies.
And you're different. You're like the nicest guy I know in tech who's like around town. And I think that that's kind of, I want people to get to know that side. And so we're gonna talk about Product Hunt. I mean, most people know the journey. So like, here's my like short version of the story. So Product Hunt started as a project, not even a company. Is that like fair?

**Ryan Hoover** (2:04)
Actually, I call it an experiment. So not even a project. It was like pre-project.

**Shaan Patel** (2:08)
We're talking like weekend experiment or what were you thinking at the time?

**Ryan Hoover** (2:12)
I was, you know, tinkering. It was an experiment. That's what I call to 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 and that kind of thing. Right.

**Shaan Patel** (2:29)
And you reached out to me and you were like, the way I felt was like, I geek out about every kind of new product and wanna talk about it and see new things all the time. Are there other people like that? I think I know a hundred of them. And let's start with that hundred. How many people were on that initial outreach mailing list for Product Hunt when you started it?

**Ryan Hoover** (2:47)
Yeah, so it was an email list in the beginning. Anyone could subscribe in the very beginning. And a couple hundred people subscribe in the first 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.

**Shaan Patel** (3:10)
Right, okay, so that's the setup. It's basically, I'm Ryan Hoover. At the time, you had just left a job at Playhaven, is that right?

**Ryan Hoover** (3:18)
Part time, I half left.

**Shaan Patel** (3:19)
You half left, okay.

**Ryan Hoover** (3:20)
I was part time, actually.

**Shaan Patel** (3:21)
Okay, so side project, side experiment, almost. 20, 30 people on the list. You call the thing Product Hunt.
And what I liked was that it was A, a community of people, and B, these were not apps that we had already heard of. Because I would have pretty much immediately discounted it if it was like Facebook, you know, like obviously that would have been like ridiculous. But even just the stuff we all read about in TechCrunch that day, no point in posting it again on this little site. This was genuinely like sometimes just little useful things that I didn't even, I never heard of that people were using, you know, to do lists and whatever. And then sometimes it was really cool, you know, funky projects. And so it was a community of people posting products, apps that you had never heard of. So it became this like must check place for what's new in a city where everything's new. And so that was kind of cool.