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

and so you sell the company you got money now what happens at first day money hit the bank we said they're refreshing you know wells fargo some people they they love to go like celebrate it like a big thing actually me i flew to la that day with was a friday and they're actually just went to restaurant and i ordered of course like a roti chicken and like some brussels sprouts so let was start with this i wanted to have you on because a you're a 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 special yeah you're special you're a special stuff like yes 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 you know buy and sell this one arbitrage and you lever up and you do this crazy thing but you're very different you obviously you know 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 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 to get to know of that side so we're gonna talk about product i mean most people know the journey so like here's here's my like short version of the story so products hunt started as a project not even the company is that like actually i called an experiment so not even a project it was like pre projects we're talking like week weekend experiment or what were you thinking at the time i was you know tinkering it was an experiment that's what i called actually you look back on the tweet the the word i use 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 yeah and you you you reached out me in 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 mh are there other people like that i think i know a hundred of them and let's start with that one hundred i how many people were on that initial outreach mailing list for product hunt when you started it yeah so there's an email list in the beginning anyone could subscribe in in the very beginning and a couple hundred people subscribe in the first like couple days but from the beginning it wasn't me the products from the very beginning it was like okay i know a lot of people founders investors people were in technology who are always exploring new things like yourself and i think it was twenty or thirty people were sort of the curator the people that were just sharing new products they found right okay so this that's the setup it's basically and i'm ryan hoover at the time you had just left a job and play haven is that right part time i half left you have left part time actually okay so side projects side experiment almost mh twenty thirty people on the list you call the thing product hunt and what i like was that it was a a community of people and b these were not apps that we'd 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 tech crunch that day no point in posting it again on this little site mh 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 list and whatever and then sometimes it was really cool you know funky project and so yeah this community of people posting products apps that you had never heard of so it became this like must check place for what's new mh in a city where everything's new and so that was kinda cool mh and the summary is it becomes kinda of the water cooler the whole tech scene is on here if everybody in silicon valley either uses product hunt or just likes product hunt was too busy to use it but generally is like on board with it yeah one thing i'll note though even though it started with a lot of people in silicon valley like there's twenty thirty people or people i met friends of mine quickly it was global like the very beginning and and quickly we started seeing not only visitors but contributors around the world and there's been this even today like almost six years later of perception like oh it's about of silicon valley folks i checked the metrics either day and it was less than what was a one point four percent i think of of visitors in the past thirty days were from the bay area wow so that's expected when you get to a certain scale but it's a tiny micro kind of what what about the post what about the people who post was that the same thing because i thought you know for a lot of people they they didn't even mind so i knew people who were in florida or in india who were checking it and one of the reasons they liked it was hey i don't know anyone to silicon valley this is where they're posting and talking about stuff cool i get to like be part of it yeah even if they didn't even have the ability to post themselves at the time so what what about the curator were they mostly silicon valley people or or not in the beginning yeah frankly it wasn't super thought through is like a lot of experiments you just wanna quickly test something and throw it out there and in the beginning it was friends who happen to be geographically located around me so a lot of people in silicon valley and the thing is that those people would of course post products and things from just around the internet so it wasn't like they're only looking for founders in the bay area to post their products but it was really just apps and chrome extensions and physical products and things like that so but over time it's kind of extended we intentionally have tried to extend it to all kind of corners of the earth in terms of getting perspectives from berlin and like bangalore and toronto and everywhere else love it and so just if i finish the kind of summary it's basically you get the momentum you become a company at some point you go into yc you raise money from andrew and h you eventually sell the company i think publicly it was come out that is just sold a company twenty million bucks to angel list we're in an angel hat right now thank am and now you're there now you're both running products on at as well as you have something called the weekend funds so we'll go into all of that but i wanna start with in a way i was there at the start this is kind of like our personal relationship was in many ways i'm the the godfather of product would you would you agree with that kinda of you you i don't know i don't know godfather right title but almost like you could've have been the one that killed product on yeah i'm like the the evil stepped at or something that's something weird so the the backstory is i had seen you blogging because for many many years you were talking about product and you were blogging you're were and this is kinda like i'll call it before the blue check mark ryan hoover there's like there's like before the check mark and after the check this is before the check mark and i was like this guy is really interesting i wanted to hire you so i reached out and i was like hey let's get lunch let's talk we started talking mh turns out you were look thinking about moving on from where you were currently at and we both got really excited and we went through a process of like you know seeing are you a good fit for where i was which is mike inferno this ideal lab at the time and thought hey great product out for the ideal lab long story short we go through the interview process doesn't quite work out i let you know hey ma'am you know talk to the team so i can work out but love to stay in touch because and not just like lip service like genuinely really like you think you're really good mh so let's let's keep a touch i don't know ten days later a week later you started the experiment is that that's my memory am my i right i don't remember exactly how many days but yeah fairly shortly after that and i i remember the email i mean it's still in my my gmail somewhere that you sent to me that was really thoughtful in in telling me why you didn't feel i was a good fit for for the role and actually when i reflect on that i think you were right even in hindsight i think you were right in your assessment of especially at that time i've always been a very passive person someone who's not i don't like and i i didn't feel qualified to tell people what to do and i know that was one of the pieces of feedback as her and i forgot exact way you phrase it but it was something around like leadership in like a decisive and that was a very valid point which i think when prod started kinda fast forwarding now sort of forced to learn some of those things right and it's something i still work on to this day but i'm much better than i was six years ago at some of those very valid reasons for not hiring me right i think that you know in this situation i would say ninety percent of the credit goes to you because most people you know i know me if i didn't get hired somewhere or get you know rejected you know that feels bad there's no way around it and would've have been like f those guys and i i know that that's the initial reaction i would had even when i was typing that email i remember the phrasing i use i said i'm gonna go out of limb here you i hope this is not salt in the wound i'm gonna give you some detail on what the actual feedback was normally i i literally where i said normally the email ends here of like you know thank you for you know sorry not this time let's keep in touch mh i was like normally it ends here but i'm gonna actually give you the feedback because you seem like a dude who wants to learn and get better mh if i was in your shoes i'd wanna know the real reason here's the real reason hope that's not all moving and hope this is like productive and helpful and to your credit you took that and you were like like we stayed friends right away and and so like tell me about that like because i think that's unusual and there's gonna be a lot of people listening to this who are either have faced rejection or gonna face rejection are currently you know putting themselves out and maybe something's not gonna work out you clearly had a happy ending but even in that moment you took it well yeah you're right most employers don't do that they don't do it a few reasons usually one either they just wanna quickly move on to they're afraid of hurting someone's feelings and telling the honest truth or three there's sometimes legal reasons why you maybe don't wanna say certain thanks and so i appreciated that and i actually i i do some investing and when we we meet companies and the reality is we don't see yes to every company surprise surprise and we actually have to say no to a majority of companies that we do meet with and i'm trying to get good at this but we try to for every face to face or video to video kind of conversation we have with the founder we always reply with details of why we're not investing right now and i feel that's an important for a founder to here because it's really a bummer when you're you know pitching and you're going through that whole process getting a lot of noise everyone's saying like sorry no thanks but no details like there's no feedback loop there's no no way for me to learn from this experience and although it can be kinda painful sometimes you know i having received rejection myself but also you know being on the other side of it it's helpful i think it's valuable to our ecosystem i guess to get that kind of feedback right it's valuable on both sides because you gotta really think if you're gonna write down why you gotta be clear about why and being forced to kind of articulate your thinking it's good for the a give her anne for the receiver which is cool and most investors don't do that why don't most vcs tell you why they basically os say not right now they don't even say no yeah some of it's just time and and some laziness perhaps you know they didn't won't wanna move on deal some of it's say they never say no they just say let's stay in touch and part of that's because it's such a relationship driven market and when you say no some founders will immediately take that as okay i'm never gonna talk to that person again so i'm doing a seat now when i go to my series i'm gonna to bob because he said no right and i i don't think it's the right way of doing it i think if you deliver the know with authenticity and and being truthful they're actually more willing to trust you and keep you in the loop seen this happen where founders will follow up three or four months later and say hey just wanna give you an update here's where we're at they're not asking for money or anything it's just that they wanna keep me the loop to potentially convince me otherwise of of sort of prove me wrong but not in in like a a easy ego away it's more that they wanna share this information with me because they still want me involved right and i remember during the job interview wheel is set it up where the you do like a case so it was like hey here's a product that we are actually building and here's the challenge we're facing take a day think through how you would approach that and then basically we're gonna present that tomorrow so we'll talk through it mh and you did an amazing thing so we had this app that was a pretty bad idea but it was a side project that one two of our young guys were kinda hacking on at the time which was it's a site called boy and that basic idea was it was like you would say stuff about your life so you'd be like i'm sean i once won ten grand and a poker tournament or when i was young i was in two movies this real thing so i was i put those on my thing and then anybody can come and ask questions so it was like q and a site but you would give people a little bit of material mh to go off of like what the heck should i ask you because if i don't know anything about you and you're not already famous what the hell do i know to ask you and we gave you that case and i remember you did an amazing thing and anybody who's applying to a job i would recommend you do this even if they don't ask you for a case you took the product you not only had your own ideas of what you could do to make it better but you went and talk to a bunch of users of our product and you talked to more users of our product than the guys who were building it in our lab i had talked to at the time yeah and i remember being like that's a really good sign you're like here's jacob i had talked to him here's how he here's what he thinks about the site today mh and here's what you know here's some ideas based off of my conversations with the users mh that was pretty amazing and i recommend that to anybody who's applying for a job of like put your hands on the don't don't send your resume and hope that just stands out mh put your hands on the product go talk to the users show that initiative have you seen that and people who are applying to product ton or angel list have you seen anything that stands out yeah i think if you especially with any company that has a lot of demand people that wanna hire you gotta stand out somehow and if you can illustrate the value you can create then if almost in some cases it can be a no brainer to hire that person so one example of this actually is andreas so andreas was a cto product for about four ish years so we transitioned into angel actually after the acquisition and he and i initially connected through twitter and product hunt and he's was playing around with it he was at the time in vienna i'm in san francisco and one day he launches a chrome extension for product hunt and so this was also again experimental phase not even incorporated but he launched his chrome extension which he created by scraping the site we didn't have an api or anything back then scraping the site and every time you'd opened up a new new tab you'd see the day's most uploaded of products every day and that caught my eye and i was like whoa this guy clearly is like interested his has ability for us to build cool things and come up with new ideas because it's just him like doing design product engineering and clearly has interest in product in general and so we actually connected and then he was actually working on kind of a a hiring type play like he's exploring his own start idea too long story short he ends up joining you know super early on and became a cto and and his a large part of product i guess success to where we got today and he did so by just building stuff right sometimes you do the work before you get the job if you if you have no other way to sort of stand out in that that sense we had a crazy guy send in some people try to stand out in weird ways we had somebody send in a pinata and then it was like layered puzzles was like you break the pinata and then it's like look under your desk like a box under my desk i'm like where did this come from how did this guy do this it was a bit creepy so so don't don't be creepy yeah don't creepy it's a general rule get that tattooed on your forum just as a reminder so you weren't even you weren't just looking at us you were looking at medium at the time this is again pre product hunt and what were you thinking back then what was your mindset you're you're planned a couple companies what was going on yeah i was at play haven for about up until like three years so i joined is like number ten then we downsize to six people and then we grew to about a hundred people so learn a ton built some some cool things and after about three years i started getting a couple things happened one i started feeling like i was learning less and like we're were moving a little bit slower and is partly reality of just the stage that we were at in the company got goals you need reaching then you gotta collaborate our sponsor monday dot com is back give you that dose monday dot com motivation introvert type a alpha dog no matter who you are never forget that teams work better when they work together work more efficiently with monday dot com the easy to use all in one tool that teamwork visit monday dot com backslash pod million to get ten percent off and see how the customizable dashboards can help you collaborate increase your workflow manage your workloads and get you one step closer to achieving your goals and the other thing is i we are building tools for game developers and as much as i i you know at the time especially love gaming i i'm not a game designer i'm not a game developer and so i really wanted to one stretch myself challenge myself and two work on something and i'm a consumer of a user of and so you mentioned medium actually the sort of path was okay i'm gonna i'm gonna leave three years in i was fortunate to get into a kind of a part time role in transition out but meanwhile i was exploring different startups to join and so medium was a a site this is two thousand thirteen so pretty early days for that platform i was on it i was logging a bunch i love the space i believe you know more people if we can help more people share their ideas i think is it's generally a good thing for the world and i was just looking at my home screen in and medium was of course like that one of the things on my home screen that i was using and and so i just really wanted to explore working at companies of products that i used and i ended up interviewing with jason stu who was i think he was coo at the time and ed williams interviewed with him and they were i think they were like ten maybe fifteen people and what's that like you interview with williams this is the creator of twitter blog maybe that interview like it wasn't really an interview it's was more of a conversation which i really enjoyed and so we we talked a lot about you know the platform and just writing in general and i think we may have memories a little bit fuzzy but idea on on various things and actually before this i should take a step back before this i i was trying to illustrate really tap myself into the the team actually and so as i was using medium and and getting really involved i actually hosted a medium brunch in san francisco and invited a bunch of medium employees nice so i'm like alright if i wanna work with this company you know there's two things that i can happen her from that one they're gonna at least get to know me a little bit better and two i'll get to know them a little bit better too right so i did just employees or there was also like just other people who liked media there was also some other people that like media okay so it was like it was a combination and i think about fifteen twenty people showed up and it was a combination like bloggers and writers so like there was some commonality around okay here a bunch of people who are writing on medium about interesting things mostly around tech or other subjects so that was i think helpful in getting that meeting with jason and with e but ultimately you know they were early on they only hired designers and engineers like that was sort of they had a whole locker kind of like org structure and and we sort of ended in part of with you know i don't know what you do here ryan respectfully right and again it was kinda right kinda like you he ever was right i don't know exactly what i would have done like maybe maybe i would have been a good fit but the way they were structured there wasn't a clear like job rec there actually was no job rec for what i was trying to apply for right and so you you did product not as an experiment did you do any other experiments at the time that nobody's ever heard of it because product has the one that takes off and gets all the attention did a couple like small tiny things like as i was writing and blogging a bunch one thing that i wanted to experiment with was how do i get more people to share my writing how do i essentially get more readers and one thing i noticed is there some people on twitter who would like you know take a snippet and and quote you know a sentence or so from blog post and then share it on twitter and so i actually thought okay what if i could in my blog which is on tumblr but on tumblr you have access to like basically the you can add javascript and other things i hack my way together through like you know i'm not even an so i hack my way together to create a simple little javascript utility to be able to allow authors and bloggers to select and highlight specific text in their blog post right like this is my money line yeah go ahead i share go and go and click it and it opens up a tweet intent with the the quote filled and tag me or or hoover on twitter and it was like a little side project i had no admissions of like turning into anything also from a code base it was like it wasn't like real it was just like kinda for me so no one else really could use but i was like okay let me tinker her with this idea and see where i get right so you were a like a scratch your own niche kinda guy which is i've had somebody who came on who was like the first question i typically asked is so how'd you make your first million mh and he was like i made a a soap opera blog i've never seen a soap opera but i made a soap opera website that became the most popular soap opera website and i sold it for nine million dollars in cash and it's like so some people are like i go where the opportunity is and you're like i built things i'm curious about i want and i don't know if they're gonna be companies are not most likely not mh what do you think about that approach because i'm sure you see founders that are in both camps how do you think about that i i don't think there's there even wrote a blog twist about this a long time ago there's no right way to start a start up in in a sense that yes there are kind of best practices and guides and and everything but you can find counter examples to basically everything including the scratch your own itch sort of advice or my father for example my parents they've been entrepreneurs well my dad pretty much his entire life almost and they've been operating a business for a long time you know since i was i think sixteen seventeen years old they've operated this business in the waste management space my father is really doesn't have any particular interest in waste management and i i think a lot of people who are in the industry aren't passionate about waste necessarily but he's he's an entrepreneur that has had a lot of success just finding finding a problem or finding a need in filling it as a saying that he would tell me when i a kid is like finding an need and fill it right and he gets a lot of motivation excitement around the process of solving problems and building businesses less so scratching his own itch for example and did you think you know you if your parents are entrepreneurs did you think i'm gonna be an entrepreneur or you know you went and got a job at play hey haven were you're like i'm gonna do the like career thing i'm gonna be an employee i'm gonna become a manager and then an executive maybe someday like what were you thinking even when i was a kid like tinker with entrepreneurial things like buying and selling on ebay and mod boxes and doing stuff like that i love the idea of how do i avoid getting paid by the hour how do i find a way to make money for my impact or my output mh and i always kinda hated getting paid by the hour because it's always this thing where you could work really really well or terribly and you get paid the same amount and that was just never super motivating for me so i'd always tinker with entrepreneurial things but i didn't move to silicon valley in two and ten and say i'm gonna start a company and i must start a company it wasn't something that i required of myself and you know fast forward to product in two thousand thirteen that was very organic and how it formed it wasn't supposed to be a company so again i don't think there's a right way of approaching it but i've i don't know i'm happy starting companies and i i enjoy the autonomy and having the ability to get rewarded both monet momentarily or in other ways because you know there's there's more than just money in in startups for more than just my time yeah for sure and i know that you said there's no right way to do it there are some wrong ways to do it yeah and you know in general there's actually typically more wrong ways to do something than it's it's better to focus on on those and just eliminate those as possibilities and than try to say oh this is the right way to do it because x person did it that way because you'll find another person did it a different way success typically as many many flavors failure sort of boils down to the same five that's what i've seen so actually that's how that's how you build usually a lot of good products it's it's very unclear what the right product is like the right ux the right thing but there's some obvious pitfalls or some obvious things you should avoid and so in some ways like when we build new features we think a lot about we're not gonna do x y z because we mean we have high confidence that these are gonna be not the right solution but we don't know about these but they have potential so we're gonna explore them and figure out quickly do they actually work which is a lot of what you done it like you know with all of your entrepreneurial and projects you've worked on is quick iterations and like testing yeah sometimes too quick so okay so you launch product hunt you have let's let's take it from how'd you get from zero users to thirty you said that was people you knew in the bay area where you thought my like this thirty to kind of let's take it to three hundred and three thousand and tell us how you made those jumps because i think you know as an entrepreneur like i moved to silicon valley six years ago and i before that i was sort of reading and know digesting everything from a afar i was living in australia so the other side of the earth and i remember the part that i felt there was the least clarity on was like okay i know how you come up with ideas and make you know get it started find c founders and go do that and then i know what like growing looks like but what about that in between part when kinda hell do you just i get my first hundred people my first thousand people so how did you go about doing that for product set yeah so it's the things you do in the beginning are different things you do later on so in the beginning a lot of it's just like how do you get you know first hundred thousand ten thousand and so on and so certain strategies worked really well in the beginning and then they you know of course had diminishing returns we had to find new strategies so in the beginning it was friends okay twenty thirty people friends first few hundred subscribers were through twitter primarily twitter and qui qui was a community where people shared mostly articles that they found on the internet and so through those two channels i just tweeted it out put it on qui got a couple hundred people subscribe so that's sort of like you know one tiny milestone and then fast forward some weeks later there's some organic growth that they people sharing it and you know that two hundred subscribers turns into four or five six hundred and and then we got to the point where well the email list was was just the starting point so we we knew that we wanted to build a website where people could interact and collaborate and have more contributions building the website then enabled us to unlock other ways of kind of growing the audience themselves and so there's a bunch of things we did a lot of it was word mouth which i know is when you're building a new company when you ask like how you gonna get users word mouth right terrible answer but great when it is the answer it's great when it's the answer but don't rely on it because it's probably not gonna happen but we did certainly have a lot of word mouth because and what was the word yeah why why were people talking about this yeah they were talking about it because i think it filled a hole in the market in the sense that on the internet in the technology world you had twitter and you had like subreddit and you had blogs and publications but there wasn't a sort of community or a place for all the tech world to come together and kinda geek out about the new products in the new things that are happening in technology increasingly so as blogs and publications kinda killed their comment section like it's never been a core part of of their business and so i think part of it was a combination of there's a sort of hole in the market that we sort of filled and combined with the fact that also it was community based products so when people came on it's something that they wanted to talk about wanted to involve their friends and so on one of the things i remember was that i felt like you were building this company brick by brick and the reason i say that is i remember somebody would join or do something and you would personally reach out on twitter and personally give them a little public kind of love but it was it wasn't generic it was like you'd start a conversation with them or you would say something that does clearly you wrote it this is not a bot you would send emails to people who join you would ask them questions like had did you hear about it or what do you think of this here's here's what we're thinking of like i just pulled up this is november twenty second twenty thirteen this isn't in my i don't know what the first email you sent was but this is the second so you said hey sean my product hunt link dink mvp you're using link data at the time is showing signs of traction i haven't promoted it outside my own blog qui and a couple of tweets and i got about a hundred and seventy five subscribers and thirty kick ass contributors but what's even more encouraging is the unsolicited of emails and face to face conversations people telling me they love i think there's an opportunity to turn it into a real thing i'm working with my buddy nathan to build this out and i would love your opinion would you mind if i shot you you know the mock ups and a couple of questions and i think that this worked beautifully on me i mean i wrote back like a essay because you were the people who like product the beginning word that silicon valley know it all of the world we love products we love giving our opinion we love seeing mock ups so it's like i'd rather see a mock up than a live website mh because there's something about that early early that you are giving us and so and you kept that going for a long time i remember you had public mock ups up available for the whole community to look at before you would release a feature mh and so you were doing this stuff brick by brick and that's what i wanna highlight because most people just build it and sit and wait and i remember you were pounding emails out pounding tweets out like tell me about how you were doing that and why did you even think that was the right thing because that's mh rare i would say most people don't really do that yeah part of it was just fun actually to be honest like a lot of what i've experimenting with in different projects is just like this is just sounds fun and i woke up every morning and and sort of had this bug that i you know i just had to explore this further so part of it was just it was enjoyable two what i realized and knew quickly was with communities you need to feel it needs to feel live and it needs to feel like there's momentum and i knew that okay i should just continue to do what's working which is doing a lot of manual things like welcoming people directly and personally through email twitter and so on and just keep doing that and make sure that we can trickle in more users and get more activity going so that when you come here next week it actually is well there's more uploads there's more comments oh there's this person that i know you know a through the technology world is now commenting and so it starts to feel like there's is like this build up and that just attracts people is like people wanna be part of something new and cool especially in this demographic of like tech early adopters i think that sort of advice and and realization was once you find something just keep doing it and do it until it stops working right yeah and so you were just waking up five six am grab a coffee sit in a coffee shop and talk to people all day is that right a lot of it yeah a lot of that and using things like intercom to see who was signing up and there was even a moment when it i was cool and intercom has this feature where you can see in real time who's on your website and when you build something and people use it it's like a satisfying feeling it's like the most amazing feeling and it's even better when you can see you know this person i know is on it like ashton k signed up one day and kevin rose and i was like whoa these people that i've followed and admired for a long time they're like using this thing we built that's really cool right and i remember you were almost amplifying it because i remember you have a different email here where you're like hey ashton k signed up and he wants to do x or something like that and you were like thinking about sending him this what do you think and i felt like ashton and cut signed up for my goddamn app in that moment because i was like this is exciting yeah you should try this and i was like you would take us nugget of something good and like amplify it and i think that i've joked around with with friends that i feel like you were the first guy to build your business on twitter that had nothing to do with twitter and today in this other company we invested in lambda school the founder austin already he's doing the same thing yeah he shares every victory on twitter and people love it and he's basically building the he's you know there's this drum beat of good news and interesting stuff on twitter every day have you seen what he's been doing there yeah yeah i think he's done an amazing job of of telling the story and i think the best way to do so is to highlight other people's wins and so i think the other day he tweeted something like this is the first time more than lambda school students actually is making more money just gonna job making more money to anyone that's anyone the school recruiting awesome himself and i'm like wow and i joked him like austin should probably go through lambda school then right maybe you maybe you can make more money yeah it's pretty impressive what they done yeah that's it's amazing alright so you you take it to you know use that sort of manual building block strategy you get up into the few thousands of subscribers will it happens from there how does this become and and give us a sense for the scale i mean millions of visitors every month is where it got to correct so how did you go from there to there beginning it was friends then it's some word mouth and then it's a lot of like manual inviting and and part of that's to actually one thing i didn't mention is there were also moments where i see people who were engaged and i would actually email them and say hey you know two people two people that might be interested in contributing and being part of this which you know today if i do that two more people using product not gonna be meaningful but then actually it was like getting the couple more people and you know email twenty people you know it it actually is meaningful and so the other strategy that was useful in the beginning actually was was press and this is again something that most startups need to avoid presses usually not gonna drive a lot of users especially not sustainably but for us it was relevant because the tech press the people that read tech crunch or the next web or others those are the same people that wanna visit product and so we i did some guest blog posts like fast company and some others in fact there's post on fast company about how we got our first two thousand users that kinda goes through some of these details and then we also like built a really good relationship with press by basically trying to help them in their job so we'd find really cool interesting products and companies and every now and then i would email someone at let's say josh ko at tech say hey josh i know you're like really interested the consumer social here's a new app that we found through product hunt it's really cool and for me it was hopefully it was helpful in some cases they're like oh cool ryan you know whatever in other cases they're like oh that's really cool can you introduce me to the founder or oh yeah let me write about that and what that would do is they'd feel like an obligation to link back to product because that's sort of where they found it through me and and then they also just hopefully thought i was being helpful to them in their job and whenever you're helpful to someone you know it's just it keeps you top of mind ultimately and so how how do you know if wordpress is you know good for you or or not i think it depends on the goal press can be good sometimes for use acquisition sometimes it's it's like a fundraising strategy sometimes recruiting strategy like if you have a really good new york times piece that might add more legitimacy to future hires so it kinda depends on the goal that you're trying to achieve and again most companies getting tech presses is not actually gonna lead to to actual users but if it is like product hunt then why not pursue it and like double down on that strategy right okay and so you you grow the company were the moments along the way where things just totally weren't working where either you're like oh were f here yeah and this is company's gonna die or where you're just like i totally think this is gonna work and like loop nope doesn't work so so tell me about some of the kind of the downs that happened along the way yeah i think the definitely a lot of those are not gonna lie which is expected not everything you build is gonna work ultimately and that's why it's so important to to have really smart guesses but then figure out which ones actually work as fast as possible which usually means you gotta build it or or build some sort of mvp or something so we've gone through a lot of lot of failures around the product development and the features we build probably the biggest costly mistakes in which i take full responsibility for was this was about two thousand fifteen or so so this is after we raised our series a we had long runway lots to explore part of the vision and the direction was okay we had a really amazing community in technology cool places discover apps in tech products and so on we believe that this can expand into other categories that have similar dynamics for example gaming come previously from the video game world the gaming community has similar dynamics where game creators they also really want distribution they need users they want feedback from a community and there really wasn't a great like community like place to discover here the new games today and like a discussion with the creators of the games and and the people that love the games same with books they books is a similar dynamic where their books coming out every single day how do you find the coolest new books every single day how does an author communicate even with their readers right now that it really doesn't happen all that much it's mostly like authors going on podcasts even today and that's about it right and then the third piece was podcast podcasts too so podcast has a similar challenge like podcast creators want distribution want discovery one community so we we started building out these verticals and we changed the product design i kinda have these almost like our own version of subreddit to an extent except they were very minimal and that here's a place to discover the newest games today here's place discover the news books and then podcast podcasts and over several months we spent designing these experiences and building them out and and even hiring like people to kinda lead on the community side in each individual vertical and the problem is ultimately what we found is it didn't lead to growth and we just didn't build a good product actually is the main issue okay for for those categories so you got what happened did you get wrong so there are a few things one one it all starts with number one is the product experience so we didn't want to we don't wanna clutter the overall product tent dot com experience by you know drastically changing the experience to adapt to all these other verticals and so let's say gaming is one example we wanna keep a simple daily feed up vote comments etcetera so it's similar and it feels familiar to the rest of the community but the reality is in gaming you don't want xbox and pc and mobile like all these games mixed together in the same feed you probably play one maybe two different consoles or or pc that's what you play on you don't wanna see all that mix together and so the experience for someone who's like a really hardcore pc gamers is pretty awful because you have all these different types of platforms being surfaced and it just was a terrible experience you know and then podcast podcasts also it wasn't an ideal experience because this was a web base primarily desktop focused experience you're not gonna really go generally to a website to listen to podcast you want it on your phone where you're at the gym or you're commuting so that was the major issue it's just the the product experience was not great there's two big directions we could take we decided to incorporate all in the same domain but we also considered spinning it out into game hunt dot com and podcast podcasts hunt dot com we didn't do that because that would just also require a lot of effort however it would have allowed us to be more flexible in the ux and really create something authentic and native to that community so if we went that direction maybe things would be different but we ended up failing on that and then kind of like a backtracking chilling off those categories okay and so you you end up deciding to sell the company you sell it to angel you told me a little bit about how that came about because i was in the process of selling my company i said hey how hello hell do you do this and you told me about this this walk you took with naval tell me about the the walk with naval yeah so naval nevada invested in our our seed rounds so we raised two rounds one was a seed round basically going into yc and got a lot of great people involved and then towards the no y we raised a series a and so we had two rounds naval nevada is of both of those going back i always admired angel i i used to browse angel looking for cool products and companies and like literally on like a saturday morning i just do that and like command click on a bunch of urls olds and like oh that's cool that's cool i'm a weirdo but obviously that's my coachella yeah yeah that's one two tabs that's my yeah that guy but obviously angel is not built for product discovery and everything but so i've always kind of admired what they've done and what they built and so fast forward this is two thousand sixteen naval all had had been an investor so he's been in the loop in the whole process and everything and so we were in the process of exploring do series b or do we pursue acquisitions so kind of i think one important thing for founders to take to hard as optional optional everything doesn't mean you have to pursue all options but if you have you know an acquisition offer series be offer that's like ten times better than just having one offer right so we naval and i spoke and i'm trying to trying to remember exactly the the how the conversation proceeded but it was sort of a mutual thing i went to him and in the back of my head i'm like i wonder if there's an an opportunity to work together and then meanwhile he think he you strike me to somebody who's not gonna bring it up though it's like this would be great but i'm not gonna force it yeah too much respect almost to to bring it up kind of overt yeah it seems like almost he brought it up and you're like hell yes yeah he he he was the first one that explicitly brought it up but it's kinda like when you're you're it's kinda like in dating when you're like friends with someone and you you know maybe start flirt a little bit and then you're like you both kinda know okay i think he might be end into me she might be into me so i think it was sort of like that right and so you kissed yeah so we me and have all kissed is very affectionate he's got soft lips i hope he doesn't hear this and so from there you know we we had more serious conversations of figuring out okay what would this look like and how would this work and we have a distributed team your team is centralized what how are these culture gonna blend so it was maybe three or four months of sort of discussions and diligence to to come to a final like conclusion there right and so you sell the company you got money now what happens that first day money hits the bank you sitting there refreshing you know wells fargo over again or what some people they they love to go like celebrate it like a big thing actually me i flew la that day i think it was a friday and my girlfriend lives in la and we've been together four years now and actually just went to restaurant and i ordered of course like a roti chicken and like some brush sprouts and i think i had one the last one and that was it eric sparkling wine and that was it i don't know it was there's was a feeling of leading up that was just a lot of stress as with any acquisition or fun process it's super anxiety inducing and especially this situation because there's like when you're raising money you have this you're sort of in the middle as a founder and a ceo you have your your teammates you have your investors you have yourself you have the acquire and you're sort of stuck in the middle of how do you make everyone happy and inevitably and not everyone's gonna be perfectly happy there's gonna be trade offs and so that was the most stressful time of my life to date was the leading up to that because i was at any moment a deal could fall through and i'm sort of responsible for all these people's jobs and you know investors and everything else and so i think for that that day was like a sigh relief a little bit more than anything you told the way to bring out the sparkling wine give me one glass of sparkling wine a per psycho please i think was what the kids called molly yeah yeah no molly that night and then and then it was really just back to work i guess i mean back to work in in terms of like okay do we make sure everyone is comfortable everyone feels taking care of how do we work together in this new organization but you know now it's been two and a half years later and we're we're still just back to work i guess i love it and so you know my goal with this podcast is interesting people telling their true which happens to be really interesting stories and then the other part is a level of transparency around numbers of money so people can get educated because it's money's is this weird taboo thing where we like don't talk about you know how we got it how we spend it how we invest it how we earn more of it which is strange because the more open we are the more people can kinda better their own situations won't affect your situation and so give somebody who's listening to this and people who are listening to this the way i imagine it is you're commuting to work you're an employee at a job today you dream of startups so either working at a startup or you dream of starting one one day and they can relate to kinda your story by saying hey he was at play haven like what like what were you making when you're at play haven what was your like salary then yeah i think it was i got a one or two raises over the years but i think i ended at a hundred and twenty thousand right so you're making a hundred twenty thousand dollars a year great salary you're you got this job got the certainty mh you end up taking a leap of faith going and starting your own thing which is fantastic and now fast forward today how do you think like i guess what's your relationship with money today are you this is something you're really driven by do you not even look and don't even care are you trying to explore new ways to make money tell me about how you're thinking about money now yeah i think i so i was able to buy condo in san francisco which is huge milestone that is is hard to achieve here after that acquisition and that that was partly like an investment decision as well which so far according to red it's done well okay but let's see you gotta love that red estimate i know i know you know we need more housing here in san francisco that's for sure and so for me i've been fortunate i came from like a middle class family so never had challenges or worries about like food or shelter or anything like that i've also been able to go to to college without having to pay for it i did like work through college but you know it's a part time job but it wasn't like i i had to work to pay you know off eighty thousand dollars in debt or things like that so i'm super fortunate in that sense so in some ways money hasn't changed dramatically now today however way i think about it is i'm trying to i'm trying to think long term in my sort of professional career and so i have multiple things going right now one product is still primary focus and you know frankly a lot of my net worth is tied up in angel so i'm inc to make sure this is successful with product being part of angel so that's sort of one piece and then i have fun i started too which is another piece which i'm trying to and that's called the weekend mh love it and and that's partly to learn like i am always wanted to invest in partly to learn but also like we'll see in six seven eight years if i make any money on it but that's another opportunity for you make money and kinda gain leverage in a different way we've all actually about this in a lot of this podcast around i'm like how do you gain leverage and you should probably just stop listening to this podcast and go listen to paul's podcast that's what i would do if i was you that's my actual recommendation i would start with that and then somehow wander back here eventually yeah he's he's got a lot more insights i have that's for sure but i'm really trying to explore okay how can i have multiple parallel things going on that gain leverage and either create money in some way or impact other ways and that's not using my time so this is going back to what i said before i hate getting paid by my time with the fund of course i spend a lot of time on it but my time doesn't have a direct input in the outcome right it's really do i pick the right company take great companies and do they succeed over the long term and does that return capital to me in in the lps and fund and the same is kind of true for pro ton angel too is is if we're successful when we do really well the stake and equity that i have in angel will hopefully grow as well so i'm sort of my my like real data i kinda put that in quotes is still tb and it's like out there because a lot of it's kind of invested in the fund and angels itself but for me i don't know i don't have to worry we don't have to worry about food and shelter and unless something that happens but i i'm certainly can't retire far from that plus you basically just chicken any anyways every meal so yes yes i think you're safe no matter and i buy seven bucks at costco what are we what are we talking here getting your chickens the pro the pro tip actually is i i like i eat the same things all the time and then a lot of it's like spinach salads and stuff and so but on insta cart there's like a bulk it's not a costco but it's actually where all the restaurants go for bulk foods right you can buy a two and a half pound bag of spinach for four bucks there and so i just buy that and that lasts me in quite a while okay it nice the ryan hoover diet get fit ninety days while building your company this is new it's my next book that's my other lever i'm gonna write a book yeah rather if you ever written to fitness this book are you even trying is of the way i feel about it that's the name of it actually in my book so alright so what of your twenty one today you let's say let's take product underway you have your time back you have your youthful energy back your twenty one you wanna make a million bucks what sort of thing would you do today where would you where would you spend your time i mean my path has always been spending my time on the things that i find fun and interesting and i find that motivating because one is just if if you're having fun then you're not gonna stop it's gonna be the thing that you wanna wake up and do or the thing you wanna do on a saturday you know afternoon and so i would prioritize those types of things so what's fun for you nowadays i mean there there's the non work stuff like going to live music is fun but when it comes to more professional fun i i really enjoy investing and speaking with founders and researching spaces and and that's really enjoyable product kinda is still fun for me of course partly because we're building new things we have like a new we're building entirely new site and branch they'll i'll tell tell you about offline actually yeah leverages twitter we're gonna go grab some chinese food and talk crazy ideas after this but i do wanna wrap it up on one note so you have the weekend fund tell us a little bit about that how should entrepreneurs reach you what type of entrepreneurs are you looking for tell tell us how you're gonna turn my ten g's from the weekend for into ten million dollars so that's what we really want it that's what the people wanna hear i don't know if i can do that i'm not gonna not gonna lie ten k to ten million yeah so it's investing in early stage usually it's the first round of funding so i say that because different definitions of what pre preceding even means or seed stage and it is broadly focused so invest across everything from like an audio voice company to b b saas to shipping logistics so all over the board now there are some spaces i'm really excited the about you i could go deep into why i'm excited the about but like audio voice is really interesting remote distributed working is a super interesting category lots of problems to be solved there and then another one i'm personally interested in is low and no code tools you know things like re tool or air table or glide and others that just allow people to build things faster and and more efficiently that maybe aren't engineers maybe they are maybe they're not which actually if that space does really well product will also just see more activity and more engagement and more there'll be a bigger need for product to exist if that double leverage double leverage yeah so invest in the company that then leads to more products being built then leads to more launches on product hunt and so on and so forth and so so yeah i'm just investing early stage fifty to a hundred k size typically and and yeah it's been fun i brought on an awesome teammate to work with me part time as well v she's in london and she's just helping a lot and and it's been a cool partner to kinda work with on this as well and so what's the right way for an entrepreneur to get your attention nowadays it's a good question launching product time maybe so for the past almost six years i wake up every morning and see new products at launch so i see so many things and a lot of what did i tried to understand if it's super early and there's not much traction or or data to even prove out that this thing is working is to understand like what is what's unique or different about their approach or they're thinking around the space and you know some might call it like what's the insight or the non obvious thing that this founder or this team is is discovered because oftentimes i'll i'll meet in entrepreneur and not that i'm i certainly not the smartest person in the world but if i can almost foresee all the answers to their questions that's something wrong meaning they should know way more than me about a space they should almost be educating me and surprising me with something that they've seen that the market doesn't see and so sometimes it's requires kinda weird out their ideas this can make really great investment sometimes sometimes they're just weird out there and like no one wants that thing they're building i like to just discover sort of the the things that are non obvious that haven't been proven and that or might just seem weird so we have ryan hunt ryan hoover ryan hunt i've gotten that before people have called me ryan they're like famous ryan hunt i feel like they're maybe maybe a baseball player but nobody watches baseball anymore so alright so we have ryan hoover found product hunt investor in the weekend fund you can find them on twitter you can find them i believe in la nowadays so if you agree if you're trying to go bump him on the street that's the place to find them but thank you so much for coming on the podcast really appreciate it yeah thanks sean sweet