MFM x Trends - Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt Breaks Down the Biggest Opportunities He Sees

hello everyone this is sam par from the hustle and my first million if you're hearing this i hope you've already heard an episode in know who i am so i'm gonna get past that so today we have a special episode this one's for trends members only but we do these things a bunch and we don't always announce them but for this one i wanted to share it with you all and give a little bit of it for free so you can listen to the first twenty thirty minutes of it and then after that you'll have to sign up for trends to hear the rest i know we are such a tease but there's a ton of value early on and that's what we're trying to get to you for free so if you wanna hear the rest go to trends dot c and you could hear it but today we have ryan hoover on the podcast and ryan hoover is a friend of mine because we used to live near each other in san francisco and rhine hoover started those great company called product hunt product hunt dot com it started as a project i was actually with the day before it launched and it was a little side project he had where people would post products on their website and i thought it was a horrible idea and it completely worked and was a huge hit and people love it and the reason why i had him come on the podcast is because ryan has seen probably that products hunt is probably four years old now he's seen a ton of products launch off a product time and now he has a venture venture capital firm that he runs and so he's got really really really good insight and intel into what he thinks is gonna be popular what he thinks is gonna blow up before most people even know that the particular company exists and he's got a good eye for things and so in this podcast we break down four different categories that he thinks are going to explode and he gives examples of each company and explains why he thinks it's gonna be big so listen up here it is let's get to it so right now i'm talking to ryan hoover it's three o'clock on february fourth the leak of our deal went out yesterday about four o'clock and so yeah it was a little nutty we're gonna do it a monday they always get leaked we had a leak of our series a product hunt back in the day and i was so scared because it was like the term sheet was signed but it wasn't done and it sounds like yours has been done done though it closes monday but everything's signed alright so similar boat in on everything's fine but who do you think did it leaked to your leaked george oh leak mine no yours that's a good question i never found out alex at tech crunch when she was there she's was the one that wrote about it and we now become good friends and even the day before she published she texted him asking for like a comment and then of course i was like i don't know what to say i don't know though i don't know who leaked it if you're out there if you're listening to this podcast and you leaked it just let me know i'm not gonna be mad i'm just curious wait so you would be mad if i when i find out i think i'm not a little bit i get angry i would've been angry back then but now i'm it's that was like what six and a half years ago time has passed so i'm okay so let me do like a short introduction but basically ryan hoover started this company called product hunt which was a big deal it still is a big deal you since sold at the angel list now he has a fun wait do you call it the weekends what's your funds in weekend fund yeah weekend fund how big is that do you say yeah yeah or we're in the second fund ten million dollar fund pretty great ryan's been in the space for a while and i have a funny story about it you i think i've never set this to a person but maybe you've heard me talk about it about you but basically so before i started my business and before ryan started his business i used to have this book club and ryan came and spoke and i frankly i don't even know how we connected but you came and spoke about something just with ten of us you were like leading the book club think it was when i was doing start up edition maybe and maybe it was like through that that we got connected or maybe it was when i was writing the book hooked with near i think that's what guy it was hooked it was hooked because we were talking about habits the thing was supposed to go an hour long but we served beer and like some people just hang out and you were antsy your legs were shaking and i was like what's that going run yeah you're like i was like what's going on he's like sorry i gotta run i'm i'm watching this thing tomorrow and you said was it called product on at first it was yeah product hunt i o you're like i'm watching this thing tomorrow and you're you it does this thing and this thing in my head and this is an insult i'm sorry but if head i was like this is not gonna work what does he doing this is so silly and from the beginning it took off and i was wrong about everything because i came became a huge user and so i was with you like twelve hours of already he launched it and i remember you're all antsy and stuff was pretty funny i'm being there but i forgot to sequence of events i totally forgot about that that it was around time that was a fun shot chat i remember being in like a really weird weird i even know we called it really weird space so it was called me time nba it was my book club and i knew a guy who ran a scavenger hunt business i've done that i did the scavenger hunt the same one yeah mh so the companies pay them like a couple thousand dollars to like do a a city scavenger hunt so somehow i became friends with them and he had this like office that was kinda like a bar pretty much it's kinda dirty and anyway would let me use it for book club so there was like ski all machines and there was a ding room and that's how we all met and i've met a lot of people that way so the reason i wanted to have you on is because one i've been talked to in a in a while that we exchanged text or twitter stuff i hear your voice a lot though in my ears i listen to your podcast all the time so so i that's awesome that's so cool i makes feel great but we wanted to have you on because with my job doing trends in the hustle i see a lot of really cool stuff that i think is i see it before it gets popular you do the same thing but probably times like a hundred because on productive you see what's gonna get popular you probably have an idea of like what's gonna hit from not gonna hit your own investor so you kinda do what i do but times a hundred and so that's why i wanted to have you on to talk about cool stuff that you're seeing and why you think it's cool and cool right has a list of like twenty different stuff that he wants to talk about well we don't even talk about all of it leading up to this i was actually thinking like what topics are interesting to talk about so i felt like this was actually a good opportunity for me like reflect on certain themes anyway so but yeah excited the chat with your fund what has been some of the most or not even your phone you personally but of all your investments into private companies what are some of the most successful ones if i was to choose like a category fintech has been the most successful from a both a revenue generation but also from like a markup up perspective we're investors in in a few companies deals one of them which is like remote payroll the insight was that there's this compliance issue and challenge a lot of people have when hiring remotely across different countries and deal is basically just it's like gust before international contractors so that's one we're investors in pipe harry hears company i've known pipes since the skirt days when he working that company which is doing some really interesting things around kind of debt finance they won't call it that exactly but it's in that space because they're kinda reinventing the category in some respect and then we're also investors in main street which is like the value prop is free money which is great for starbucks ups and they're doing great they advertise with us i think it it went really well because the basically what main street does it goes through your quickbooks i think it goes through something and finds out where you've over paid in taxes so you can get tax rebate some of that it's a lot of it's what's crazy is a lot of startups ups and companies including like myself up until till now don't realize that you can actually get government grants and incentives per engineer hire and and other things like that and one people don't know about it two it's a pain the ass to actually apply for and three you then have to wait for the government to send you money like several months in the future so they basically you plugging in your quickbooks or or your payroll and it just like automate that entire process for you they take like a small sliver of that money and so it's it's like literally free money which is like a crazy sell but yeah they're growing really fast so one thing on the podcast that i've talked about a lot and i think i've overs simplified it a bit but job boards and on your list of things that you wanna talk about you have this thing called vertical job marketplaces so i'll read off actually the right at that ryan sent to me so we saw a massive shift and how millions of people millions of work people us sorry actually wanna you is i think you you jot it down there's some typos i why don't you actually just read what you have yeah i i i didn't even re reread my underwriting saw the over the overarching theme here even from taking step back i'm personally too many people hate their job and do something that they don't like maybe they they make a little bit of money maybe they make very little money and ultimately i would love to see more people find a job that they that maximizes like in both their skill set but also like that's something that they enjoy and and so we've seen this huge shift with with regards like the gig economy and that's enabled a lot of people to have a lot more flexibility whether you like uber or not like uber has you know essentially deployed millions of millions of people and give them a lot more freedom and flexibility than they have before with you know typical nine five and so i think this next big shift in some respect is is you know vertical job marketplaces in different forms there are general purpose job boards and those have exist and those will continue to be valuable in many ways but if you really build a company around like a very specific vertical you can ultimately serve both the supply and the man the talent and the people looking to hire that talent much better than you would typically with like a horizontal board i include a few examples but i just find that category really interesting because i think it's really impactful for people but also potentially very lucrative so a great example of this one that i know a fair bit about because i research it it's not inside information is tactile you know talk mh so a lot of people know him because they got in trouble for the founder kinda maybe lying to people but besides that i know about that yeah if he he didn't like something involving people's shares he like he lied about gaining shares and so it it was all over the news but that's not important for what we're talking about which is the business they claimed to have scaled to like a hundred million dollars in revenue for their job and i think they are the perfect example right yeah and they're for those that no no correct me if wrong you probably know more about them they're they're basically outsourced engineering cali is that they're primarily focused on right now yes but it's very similar as marketer or higher which you have listed here so basically they have pre vetted it was just pre vetted particular types of engineer now they have pre vetted finance people pre vetted marketing people and you pay let's say two hundred dollars an hour and they give half of that to the vetted person who you've interviewed and approved so it's a little bit different but similar mechanics and they scale take a hundred million dollars in revenue close to no funding it's a pretty lucrative business when i hear about some of these like freelance marketplaces particularly like marketer or higher mh i think maybe that can work they seem like really hard businesses to get right yeah i do agree i i agree i mean marketer hire in particular i've i met chris toy the ceo while back and and we've been chatting and then advisable is also a very similar company in the same space thing based out of europe they're really difficult i think the harder thing with these businesses oftentimes is how do you avoid people going off platform and then how do you also keep companies you know retained so one of the challenges is let's say you work with a marketer and you like them and either you work on them with them on a product basis and so there's ultimately going to be churn in three to six months like no matter what or they try to like take them off platform and just work with them full time so that is a challenge i am attracted to the the opportunity to like overcome those challenges though because i think marketer higher in particular or marketing let's say in general i think it's actually a really good role to be hiring for like on a contract or project basis for early stage companies because because of a few reasons one is there's are so many different channels that you could be acquiring users through and it's really as a small team you really don't have experts who really understand like tiktok and understand like maybe seo and understand facebook advertising instagram advertising in many ways i think it's actually advantageous to hire like an expert who really understands us space to come in not only do it but then teach you as a company and so i think from if i was building a new company i need marketing help i would certainly look to those platforms to like make progress rather than trying to hire like a generalist who's probably not gonna be as good and might not be the right person for like where we act actually figure out like what channel we wanna focus on down the road i think that the first example you have pattern i think that and it looks like you're invested in it i would put my money on pattern above marker or hire or any other white collar job i would put pattern over it yeah then a white collar jet what's pattern yeah know i have so as mentioned an investor in pattern met wilson back when he was he's actually asking for for feedback on his yc after application and i was like damn this company is like really compelling and and software to a good start and and now i don't know if i can share numbers but like they've grown significantly in revenue over the past year or so and basically what pattern is it's a a marketplace for hourly workers they started off initially with like hospitality and an example here is let's say you're doing an event and you need two bounce you need some waits staff you need a few cooks you need all these people to assemble at this particular time that have the right skills and you need them to be reliable because like you don't want you know one of the cooks not to show up on your event day and so if you think about like the logistics challenges of like bringing all those people together is really challenging and so obviously software is a great way to to do that and so they built really smart ways to like assemble people bring them here on the same at at the same time to qualify and ultimate like have a single of quality for these people versus like just hiring people of craigslist you know is one kind of extreme so yeah they're doing great and it's also an industry that the tech world doesn't look at as much because it's it's for like hourly workers and like warehousing hospitality cleaning things that i think are less top of mind for a lot of entrepreneurs so yeah they're they're great what when the founder pattern is talking to you or maybe just your own opinion how big could the business get on a best case middle case worst case scale well so pattern isn't necessarily the only one like building in this space so sometimes when we look at investments we i mean we obviously look at like who else is doing this or has tried this that's helpful in getting some sort of comps to understand okay well if another company has reached this kind of scale we have some sort of like indication of is there a market for this sometimes often often like early first to market players the ones who create markets at least prove out markets exist and so sometimes we look at that so just look at like a an old school staffing firm for nurses yeah and that's another way doing it like look at different industries how many people are employed in the spaces do some math around like the value of those contracts so there's a few different are ways doing it it was a while ago when we made the enough so don't remember exactly like our thought process then these markets are just massive i mean people are always looking to hire especially in that this industry there's a lot of turnover typically we've actually spoken to some truck driving marketplace kinda of staffing companies as well which are also massive you know that's my thing right no oh my know my my next company is gonna be in the truck industry because i to my family in that industry and i know how high the turnover is for truckers it's like crazy yeah so with pattern or could this be a multi billion dollar company yeah absolutely i mean it's early in that like i can't say like they're gonna be there that tomorrow or or next year but know the market size is massive for these type of things and this is also what we try to look at is it's hard sometimes to see like how big is this market how big could this get sometimes especially when it's like really early and it's like potentially creating a new market like club house let's say club in my mind it's it's like talk radio and podcasting and a little bit of twitter and one and that market is massive but in some ways they're also kind of defining a market so it's not that clear like how big it is really i can consider myself not to me that smart and when i'm trying to like favor something out i'm like what's like the lin pin what's like the one thing that matters to getting this right with the hustle it was if i write good content it'll be easier to get users for cheap so basically my secret sauce is writing good content and then my secret secret sauce is acquiring users for product hunt maybe i'm guessing maybe it was i've gotta convince lots of people to post their stuff on here every day i don't know if that's a truth for us it was something i think about too is like what is the big risk in this company and and i also make an assumption that everyone has tried everything and so either something has to change whether like a consumer behavior shift or technology shift and that founder of that team also has to have some sort of like unique ability to like solve for the biggest problem or risk so with product on pro is the community piece it's not hard to build product hunt from a technical perspective the product design is important but fundamentally it's all on how you build the community in the beginning and then once you build that and establish that brand and that that that flywheel with the community then finn can work and grow but that was the big risk ultimately with these vertical job marketplaces what's the big risk there like what's the thing that you have to solve and then all the other things you have to solve are much easier is it convincing employers to hire these people is it being able to properly vet them is it like what's the hard part i think they're nuances is depending on which industry but the i mean in those marketplaces you basically have usually two different parties you have people who are hiring and people who want to be hired i tend to to try to think about which is the harder side of the market and try to solve for that first and so without getting information about like how pattern accomplish they were able to do it to find that balance and get both talent that seem to be paid of quality and also demand at the same time and then like balance that and scale that as they grew but that's how we tend to think about it because marketplace models the risk of these is when people focus on the easy side of the market and ultimately you need both to work but if you focus on the easy side you never get the hard side and you like delay the hard side in the sense then you're almost like delaying failure it's kinda how i see it with like saying marketer or higher or advisable or others like that my assumption is actually that it's the talent is the harder thing to get because i think if you get high quality talent companies will come especially when they're looking for people gonna help the distribution which is like such a harder thing right now so i try to think through those dynamics and like which side is harder and how is the company either how are they doing it now or how are how are they positioned to like take advantage of that i'll use one example angel which i have obviously close connection with is unique in its job marketplace and that it doesn't pay for talent unlike a lot of other platforms it just has essentially free talent they people sign up they create profiles and it's very unique in these these markets and when you have to pay for talent you start to run into really hard challenges with c versus lt tvs and like all these other like variables which can like get thrown out of whack if facebook changes their algorithm or another competitor comes in and throws much money in the space so i tend try to invest in companies that are not reliant on paid advertising or paid acquisition in those types of places that's exactly why i'm asking this i forget the framework or something that he uses where he he's like is this a technical challenge or a marketing challenge like which one is this gonna be and a lot of times it's like a marketing challenge so for example if i'm wanting to be pattern and i wanna appeal to the nursing industry and create like a vertical job marketplace for nursing should i partner with a facebook community that has a ton of nurses there and i should i start building audience all around nurse and then once i and then i could easily go and get hospitals to say well if you're if they're qualified we would take sure like boom all i gotta do is get the nurses said or is it like oh no nurses are desperate they're gonna go anywhere that's worked and so i have to work my ass off and get make sure that the hot i gotta go hospital first hospital first it's almost like where am my when i'm the reason i'm asking this is i'm like where do i have to focus on assuming this is a marketing problem where do i have to focus on building an audience in order to sell this so i can have a really cheap cat or is this something like marketing hire which is a white collar job do i have to come up with some type of really good tests or some type of really good pattern recognition that i can spot the winners from the losers and then i can put my brain on them in higher than that you know what mean yeah i mean and then a lot of this comes down to like optimizing funnels when we get some sort of scale too where it's like okay how do i find good people qualify good people keep them around i'm a big fan big proponent of community driven like community and strategies where maybe you don't even know the process exactly but starting off with the community and building something for them or building an audience of some sort is super valuable because it'll give you two things like one it'll give you an audience for when you launch the thing and two it'll know hopefully give you lot of insight into so like how you can build a great product for those people people probably ask you all the time can you explain to me how to build community i don't think i'm as good as you at it but we do good job when people ask me i'm like i don't know how to teach you how to do i i really don't know do you think you could teach someone to do this may i think you teach anyone to do anything it's just some people might pick it up more naturally or or just be more organic i don't know i think i've never taught anyone and i think a lot of community building wasn't never wrote like read anything about community building so it's sort of intuitive for me probably for yourself as well that's maybe why it's hard to like teach yeah but i think there's some like things that you can understand i think to get get your well first i think it's important like define what community is because a lot of people think like oh my audience my twitter followers or my community and that's community i'm like i hate when people say that yeah it's and no disrespect them some times people just don't understand actually what community is and part of the reason is because community is such a cool thing right now so everybody throws that label on i mean for me community is is a few things it's it's one i think by definition a community requires people in that community to interact with each other it really isn't a community in unless they're interacting in some form or another two communities is really about a sense of belonging of some sort and so if you go like an example like church and religion is is like the ultimate community you go to you know sunday service and you have this fellowship and you have this belonging and you have you know symbols in your home that represent your faith and all those things and so like a sense of belonging it might be represented maybe in a startup as like swag if someone's wearing the hustle swag or trend swag like that clearly means they're like into you they're into the community they're they're in some ways putting their identity associating their identity with your brand and your your community the third piece it technically actually isn't required to be like i would say part of the community definition but i think it's really important to think it was like what utility are these people getting out of this so if they're just kind of like intuit it to be part of these people and interact with these people they're ultimately has to be some sort of utility or value that they're getting and so with trends it's like you would be able to define this better than i but like in my estimation it's people who are really curious people who wanna start companies people who are already building companies people who wanna know what's like next like that's utility that's super valuable for them my definition of community is not nearly as thorough what i always tell people i'm like you probably have an audience and if you don't know if it's an audience or community stop creating content for about three weeks and tell me does it grow or does it die if it goes down and there's less interaction then you have an audience if it keeps on going as if you're not even there that's a community yeah that's how you know the thing yeah i think that like don't make content but it also touches on like why communities are so powerful so an audience is great too i an audience just pure audience business is fantastic however that requires you to keep building stuff keep creating content and once you stop you know go on vacation and it stops but a community like with product on i don't post a product really at all like in terms of like posting your products i don't have to intent i actually intentionally don't do it all that often you don't even work there anymore either yeah technically me i'm not a ceo anymore there so not my problem anymore but yeah i mean the communities are powerful because they scale and they allow you to reach in people and i like to like create i put air quotes for those and aren't watching or or looking at me but effectively like scale to other communities and other people that e personally wouldn't be able to create content time for to wrap up this vertical job marketplace bit which other industries do you think are interesting to you like where should the next pattern or marketing higher where should the next industry be you said trucking a lot of people listening to the podcast make fun of me because i always say that so i agree with you is there anything else what's the call about oil rig up rig up is doing something like this for oil for oil workers yeah and is there any other no i'll be honest i haven't thought deeply enough to to have a good answer for that but one thing that i think is interesting if we were to like say i wanna build a you know a vertical job marketplace but i'm not sure where i think one thing to do is just like which industry is going through the biggest shifts and which industry will benefit the most from technology and software and there's a bunch still that that or haven't been really reshaped through software today so yeah i don't know specifically what market did go after but that's kinda what i would think of i was thinking about this a lot about this topic and i think about it all time and i'm like what is the value equal like what are the variables that combined equal value and it's like hourly pay of the worker times number of workers times quantity like how how often they get a new job and so i'm like alright oil workers like there's a fair bit of them they make fifty dollars an hour and they're always get new jobs oh that's a big one like truck drivers they're pay low but there's like millions of them and they get new jobs all the time so that's interesting and you know what i mean like i've been doing like that a or like marketers like not that many of them but you pay them like a hundred thousand dollars a year and they do probably two jobs a year okay the math works out like that's all i've been thinking about like the is this interesting or not you do you agree with that i think to so i think another variable is which market has really low trust so meaning right now if you're were to hire someone and there really isn't a great way to trust or or have some sort of verification of this person's like abilities i think that's also a really interesting place because theoretically you could start building trust essentially through a marketplace and and that also lends itself to potentially higher retention if this person this talent is relying on your this marketplace where they've built an identity and this maybe reputation of some sort they to that that also helps them like you know get more jobs or get more money i think that's another variable that's that's worth exploring let's talk about this snow code thing and no code at this point is it's almost like a joke right like everyone says code it's like it's like calling it was like you know saying cloud like a few years ago like you know it's a very buzz word but i actually remember you were talking about this for a long time kind of lines actually with product journey because the theory of product was well this is sort of in retrospect at the time it was just like i love products i wanna share products with friends and that was the only thought in my head but after the first three or four months i realized holy shit like alright that's the end of the episodes sorry to cut it short sorry to be a tease i know hopefully you got a lot of value so if you wanna hear the rest go to trends dot c if you don't wanna sign up that's cool too we're gonna keep you in this podcast and that's free but check it out trends dot c and you can click podcasts and you can hear the rest of the episode as well as a whole archive of more episodes just like this most of which we haven't announced but there's a lot on there see