Product Hunting Product Hunt

Why We Invested

One of the first investments we made when I joined betaworks was in a company called Product Hunt. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a place where investors, entrepreneurs, and product enthusiasts go to discover and talk about the newest technology products.

How We Came Across Product Hunt

At betaworks, we try to use data as much as possible to inform decisions, and our investments are no exception. Prior to meeting Ryan, his name had popped up when Gilad Lotan and I mapped out the network of Twitter users who had mentioned Quibb (a recent investment) to try to understand who makes up that community. We recognized some of the larger nodes but one unfamiliar twitter user stood out: @rrhoover was a hub among people talking about Quibb. When we did this analysis for another company, Ryan’s twitter account showed up again.

Josh Miller, a betaworks Venture Partner, introduced us to Ryan and by the time we met, not only did it feel like Ryan was appearing everywhere, but network maps showed he actually was everywhere. He seems to be able to network at scale.

Why We Invested

The list of products on Product Hunt is great, but the conversation is just as powerful. There are founders, investors, even journalists, all asking questions of each product creator, with an easy way to try out and download the websites and apps. When you think about why you go to the tech press for your news, a large part is for new product releases and interviews with founders.

From the beginning, Product Hunt mashed together data and community to create a very similar experience. Todd Goldberg wrote a nice post here about the traction his product got when they launched on Product Hunt. This was over two months ago and they ended up with 2,700 visitors with 77 upvotes and without hitting #1 (for perspective, at the time it took 100 upvotes for users to get a YO from PRODUCTHUNTED and it now takes 150, which is starting to feel low, so 77 was enough to rank in the top 5, but not hit #1). However, he still ended up with visitors from 84 countries and over 700 new users.

In addition to being a great place for product developers to share what they’ve built, it turned out to be a great place to find interesting companies. In one conversation, I commented on a particular product that I thought displayed its commitment to simple design by making its icon nothing more than a single color. The product was called Yo and the conversation on Product Hunt led to a meeting and we ended up investing. Product Hunt was one of the first places Yo showed up — prior to the mainstream media and most (if not all) other tech news.

We invested in Product Hunt because we believe Ryan can continue to build an engaged community and build the right product to foster a high quality conversation among the members of that community.

Curating The Curators

At betaworks, we also invest to learn, and we have already learned so much for Product Hunt’s early traction. Part of the reason Ryan has been able to create such a high quality, engaging site is because he found a balance between limiting contributors and engaging everyone. Clearly the site is social, but it’s not a traditional social network with its own following model. It basically just uses twitter for identity and social sharing, but has no built-in social network of its own. The upside of social networks is that everyone gets a customized experience. The downside is that in order for something to penetrate the collective consciousness of the network, it has to truly go viral across many subnetworks.

Destination sites where everyone sees the same homepage work a bit differently than social sites. Not only does the absolute amount of high quality content need to be high, but the percentage of high quality content also needs to be high. This is different from Buzzfeed, where the main entry point into it is a social share, not its home page (so it doesn’t matter how much non-viral content is on there as long as some of it does go viral), and different from Twitter, where the quality of content you get is determined by who you follow.

There is something special about the shared experience of everyone consuming the same content. “Did you see Product Hunt yesterday?” sounds more like “Did you see Game of Thrones last night?” than it does “Did you see Instagram?” at least to me. The latter doesn’t usually get asked since not everyone sees the same things. The more content on the social network, the more widespread an individual piece of content needs to be for it to reach the collective consciousness.

One problem current media companies face is that for sites where all consumers see the same Homepage, the percentage of quality has to be very high or the entire perceived quality will drop. The traditional way to solve this is by having the article content being written by an editor and either having an editor or some kind of upvoting system alone determine what gets to the front page. Product Hunt utilizes the upvoting system, but the content is entirely user-generated, both in terms of which products get added and the content of the “article” (for Product Hunt, the back and forth in the comments are the “article”). However, democratizing all of this will almost always lead to a large percentage of very low quality content. Product Hunt showed us there is a third way: democratize the content creation, but curate who the members of the democracy are.

This creates a community that maintains a high level of quality while being more democratic than a top-down editorial site. This graph is obviously just conceptual, but the intent is to communicate that there’s probably more space for Product Hunt to look even more democratic. The subtle magic is that everyone (even those who can’t contribute), can still be part of the community by upvoting. This is hugely important.

Some Final Thoughts

Media is continuously reinvented alongside new technologies and platforms. Sites such as Huffington Post, Drudge Report, and Politico were among the inventors online-first editorial content. Buzzfeed found a way to maximize that model using social sharing. Alongside them, Reddit, Hacker News, Digg, and others, have each created their own “front page of the internet” for various target audiences, and have the advantage of being user-generated, and Branch was sort of a bridge, serving as a 1.0 version of curating the curators. As identity has matured in the form of Facebook and Twitter profiles, and social inputs such as upvoting and commenting are adopted by the mainstream, an opportunity again arises to the new old guard.

Please share your thoughts with me on twitter @matthartman. YO me at MattHartmanBlogged to get a YO whenever I write something new.