How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund

**Ryan Hoover** (0:00)
I don't know how to articulate that feeling, but that flutter in your stomach that you wake up with in the morning of just anxiety and stress and worry.
Being a CEO or founder makes it slightly harder in some ways because you still have to put on this mask. You have to put on this face of confidence externally and internally as well, where people need to trust you. You also don't want to subject them to the same anxiety that you're feeling and be 100% transparent.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:29)
Ryan Hoover is the founder of Product Hunt, which you already know. He's also a former product manager, which I did not know.
Currently, he's a full-time investor with his fund, The Weekend Fund. He's also an author of a bunch of great blog posts and an actual book called Hooked. He's also really good on Twitter and in my opinion, a very special human being. Ryan Hoover, welcome to the podcast.

**Ryan Hoover** (0:52)
Hey Lenny, thanks for having me. I've been reading a lot of your blog posts over, I don't know, past two or three years now and I'm glad to see you do the podcast now.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:00)
It's cool.
Thank you, man. That compliment will go straight to my heart and I will think about it often. I appreciate that.

**Ryan Hoover** (1:07)
Cut that and put it on Twitter. There you go, yeah.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:09)
That's the clip, we're done.

**Ryan Hoover** (1:11)
Yeah, podcast over.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:14)
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Hey Ashley, Head of Marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?

**Ashley** (2:21)
At least 40%.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:22)
And how many of them screw that up? And what happens when they do?

**Ashley** (2:26)
Well, based on our data, about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common considering customer files are chock full of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:45)
I am 0% surprised to hear that. I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both sign up conversion and increasing long-term retention.
Getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important.

**Ashley** (3:00)
Totally. It's incredible to see how our customers like Square, Spotify and Zura are able to grow their businesses on top of Flatfile.
It's because flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:16)
If you'd like to learn more or get started, check out Flatfile at flatfile.com/lenny.
You're such a tech celebrity. Everybody knows Product Hunt. Everybody knows Ryan Hoover, at least in tech. And I'm curious, how often are you recognized walking around the street in life? And has there ever been like a super awkward or super hilarious moment of that?

**Ryan Hoover** (3:37)
Yeah, so Product Hunt started in late 2013 and quickly got a lot of traction in the tech sphere.
So yeah, people in tech might recognize me. I actually do wonder subconsciously if I grew my hair out to avoid being recognized. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but anyway, it's been a couple years or so growing my hair out and I'm like, I just kind of want to like disappear sometimes. But in San Francisco, where everybody's in tech, there's a lot of that. And probably the moment where I was like, oh, this is like a thing, it was probably early Product Hunt. I was at, do you remember, I don't know if you know this, do you know a club called DNA Lounge and they did something called Booty every Saturday? It was like a mashup dance party.