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Product Hunt Is in Current Y Combinator Batch

196 points by spountzy 12y ago

rrhoover 12y ago
For fun, check out our Show HN from January :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7144815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7144815
minimaxir 12y ago
Product Hunt started surfacing during the previous Y Combinator batch because founders told each other to upvote their products. Er, on most link aggregator websites, that's supporting a breach in integrity, not a "we'll give you $120k seed money" event. It's worth noting that this behavior is explicitly punished on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972941) and will get you banned extremely quickly from Reddit. This also leads to a massive conflict of interest for any YC products that are posted to Product Hunt in the future.
- riaface 12y ago
  I think trying to promote your YC startup amongst your fellow batch members is different to asking the tech community as a whole to vote for your product. Perhaps "founders told each other to upvote their products" wasn't the best way of phrasing it, but I imagine it was more like how you'd ask those closest to you to give you a bit of support. With regards to the conflict of interest, I don't see this being too much of an issue. Whilst PH itself is part of a YC batch, the majority of the PH community won't be, and it's them who collectively vote.
  - minimaxir 12y ago
    The issue is momentum: with HN/Reddit's time-based ranking algorithms, the first few upvotes are extremely critical. On Hacker News for example, getting ~5 upvotes in the first hour for a otherwise-unexciting product will usually have it touch the front page, and that could be hit with just little collusion. Getting the rest of the upvotes and the traction to hit the top of the front page, in fairness, is dependent on non-collusive votes. The issue is that subtle collusion may get products exposure when they otherwise wouldn't in a fair system. (although, that's the startup world in a nutshell. I'm not fond of it.)
    - riaface 12y ago
      I think a lot of this won't be dependent on whether or not the submission is for a YC company, especially since the submitter is often not associated with the product being submitted anyway. I do agree with you about the practice being part and parcel of the startup world though!
  - Permit 12y ago
    It's kind of frustrating for those of us without the 5 friends necessary to get on the home page is all. It doesn't feel like we're on even footing.
- antr 12y ago
  I tried using PH this week. I actually submitted a hardware product (NAS) that had launched that same day, but this never surfaced on the site. On the other hand, some startups that had already launched months ago were trending. From this experience I'm guessing that most, if not all, links are hand picked, rather than community voted. It doesn't feel right.
  - riaface 12y ago
    I don't know why your submission wasn't visible (you might want to contact the PH team directly about that), but with regards to your point about the startups trending that have existed for months: it doesn't matter when you launched, it matters when you were discovered by someone who uses PH and then decides to submit you. All links are hand picked, but they're hand picked by members of the community, then voted on by the community.
    - antr 12y ago
      > hand picked by members of the community, then voted on by the community I'm looking over the submitters' profiles and I see many of the same people submitting different items... so I'm deducing that 'members of the community' != 'the community'.
      - riaface 12y ago
        That's because, like Hacker News, there are a relatively small amount of people who actually submit when compared to the number of people in the community as a whole. I personally subscribe to quite a lot of startup newsletters and follow people on Twitter who post product-related news, so I tend to have things to post most days. I assume it's the same for other people who also post on a regular basis. People will use it for different things. Some will submit products, some will upvote, some will comment and get involved with the discussion, and some will do all three.
        singer 12y ago
        I don't know that this is true for Show HN posts (since it's a comparable product). It seems most Show HN's are posted by the creators. And Product Hunt is the other way around because most creators are not allowed to post there.
- rrhoover 12y ago
  I want to be clear that YC has no preferential treatment on Product Hunt and you'll find TechStars, 500 Startups, and other accelerator backed startups featured with as much adoration as YC startups. Earlier this week we also helped promote 500 Startups' WMD conference in the email newsletter. You're right that voting rings, if not dealt with, can hurt the authenticity of the rankings. We have mechanisms to curb that and thankfully guidance from YC/HN on how to deal with this as the community grows. In fact I met with Daniel Gackle a month ago to chat about this.
- bri3d 12y ago
  The product started out as an invite-only platform for "product people" who Ryan Hoover "knows and admires" so it was a voting ring for a valley in-group since day one. That it's managed to get so much traffic and now seed funding says a lot about how the Valley works, and probably not in a good way. It's literally a platform for someone's friends to upvote each other - "conflict of interest for YC" doesn't even scratch the surface. I do think the platform has value, but only insofar as that it helps those who are playing the VC game by showing them what a certain "in crowd" thinks is cool.
  - rrhoover 12y ago
    You're correct, we did seed the community with people I knew in startups that I thought would (1) be interested in this type of community and (2) have interesting discoveries/thoughts on tech products. I won't pretend there aren't voting rings but they're not limited to the "valley in group" at all. We see people across the world trying to game the site, as people do on Hacker News, reddit, and other crowd-curation sites. As I mentioned earlier on this HN thread, we have systems that help combat these rings and in part thank to YC/HN's guidance, we'll improve this. I also want to point out just a few examples of products that reached the top of the day's board from non-valley, "famous" startup people. E.g. - Notifyr (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/notifyr http://www.producthunt.com/posts/notifyr) was made by a 17 year old in the Netherlands. It's the 5th most upvoted product right now - Instanerd (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/instanerd http://www.producthunt.com/posts/instanerd) was made by Alex in Skopje, Macedonia as a small side project. It received over 160 upvotes and ~5x the number of comments than the average submission. - Pie (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/pie http://www.producthunt.com/posts/pie) is a team collaboration app by startup in Sigapore. It too hit the top of the board. Of course, not everyone will agree with what's most upvoted and an upvote really is just a measure of interest, not a review.
    - julespitt 12y ago
      That people outside of the "voting ring" or "in-crowd" get voted up by a "voting ring" or "in-crowd" sometimes does not obviate the central criticism - insiders exclusively decide which outsiders are selected.
cmalpeli 12y ago
Echo chamber anyone?
austenallred 12y ago
I'm not sure I understand how ProductHunt is better than ShowHN. Maybe I just like having everything I read in one place, but after having our product listed on ProductHunt I haven't really gone back. Ryan: I would be interested to hear your take on why ProductHunt is better/different than ShowHN. I don't mean this to be a jab, I just want to hear your perspective.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  Probably in the same way a Chromebook is "better" than a Windows PC - it focuses on one thing, perhaps the most important thing for some.
- rrhoover 12y ago
  Valid question, Austen! Kevin Hale and I shared our thoughts on this in this Gigaom article: http://gigaom.com/2014/07/17/as-product-hunt-joins-y-combinator-hacker-news-starts-to-look-more-like-product-hunt http://gigaom.com/2014/07/17/as-product-hunt-joins-y-combina... I won't say PH is better than Show HN. It's just different. HN has a very engineering-focused culture and you see that in the conversation and products surfaced. Furthermore, you see fewer big startup product launches on Show HN and more side projects. On PH you get a combination of both but often we have well-known founders from prominent startups jump into the conversation. Again, this isn't necessarily better -- it's a different type of content and experience. Personally, I like to see a variety of submission from VC-backed startups to weekend hacks.
  - austenallred 12y ago
    That's very fair. Looking at the ShowHN stuff it's >50% stuff the general public wouldn't understand. Congrats, and best of luck!
sgdesign 12y ago
Congratulations! I hope you guys will be able to share some of the advice you get, could be helpful for Sidebar :)
riaface 12y ago
I'm really pleased for Ryan and the PH team - well done!
- rrhoover 12y ago
  Thanks, Ria. I like your hunts and comments. :)
aashaykumar92 12y ago
Awesome! I never really thought Show HN would stop ProductHunt from growing. They're similar, but have key differences. It's also cool that they let you know when your product is on PH and validate posts. Only thing I wish is that they had a little better/more responsive customer service but I guess they are still in their initial stages. One of their moderators posted my product but used a very unfitting title. I tweeted and wrote to them but didn't receive a response until the next day and, if you're familiar with PH, that is simply too late because my product was already buried in the previous days posts...and then I was told they couldn't do anything more to help me. Hope this serves as feedback for the future!
drp4929 12y ago
Congrats! PH is a very good growth hacking case study for entrepreneurs.
btipling 12y ago
It’s an interesting product but Erik Torenburg (self-described "Product Hunt Hustler" according to his Twitter profile) is not just a little bit of a Twitter spammer: https://twitter.com/ErikTorenberg/media https://twitter.com/ErikTorenberg/media He has posted hundreds of reply spam promoting Product Hunt on Twitter. He must be running some kind of script because he has posted so many replies many with product specific screenshots, I can’t imagine someone doing this manually so quickly (every few minutes). I understand “growth hacking” and sometimes promoting yourself can seem like spam to some, but this really is just spam, and it’s not the good kind. This is probably in violation of Twitter's TOS and not what people should have to be exposed to, especially if you're trying to build a brand. This makes me just want to never use the product, and I really like supporting YC companies and prefer to give the benefit of the doubt and assume good faith in the face of self-promotion. But this is just a little bit too much.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  Being in YC does not guarantee that the companies will use ethical marketing strategies, unfortunately. Remember the InstallMonetizer incident while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711
  - cnaut 12y ago
    Or the rapgenius fiasco
  - 27182818284 12y ago
    It does a better job than most, though. InstallMonetizer incident involved YC staff contacting the founders and looking into it. They also implemented this: http://blog.ycombinator.com/founder-ethics http://blog.ycombinator.com/founder-ethics http://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/ http://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/
  - MCRed 12y ago
    AirBnB spammed craigslist, etc. I actually think it's something they teach them to do.
nickgrosvenor 12y ago
Awesome
xylophonics 12y ago
Nice, congrats! I read Product Hunt pretty regularly. What's the big picture plan for Product Hunt? Are there going to be features like a directory of products, in addition to new launches? I agree with others that it's a lot like Show HN still, and have always hoped you'd build more specific product-focused features too.
bebbs 12y ago
Congrats Ryan and co. Really enjoyed the live chat several weeks ago and good to see things are still going well.
- rrhoover 12y ago
  Thanks, bebbs! Which chat was that?
huhtenberg 12y ago
Let me tell you my raw impression of PH as an outsider. It's a cool kids club for cool SV startups as selected by founders and employes of equally cool SV startups, where it's specifically "cool" rather than "notable" or "innovative". Secondly, while you can't join their ranks at will, you will be given a membership to comment on your own product should some cool kid submit it to the PH. Essentially they exchange memberships for adding content to PH and helping build PH's credibility. It's a reasonable approach, but they are just being ... too blunt and obnoxious about it.
- rrhoover 12y ago
  I appreciate the feedback, huhtenberg. Can you describe what you mean by "blunt and obnoxious"? Maybe we can improve our /about page copy or something else? On a related note: we just started handing out recommendations to give people in the community the ability to invite others to join the discussion. This way we can enable the community to help grow itself without opening the floodgate entirely. The site and team simply aren't prepared for it.
  - huhtenberg 12y ago
    Blunt and obnoxious means that you don't bother with a basic reply when contacted for a feature, but then become suddenly one's biggest fans and friends, all forthcoming and excited once the product somehow ends up on the site. This comes across an exceptionally cynical, disingenuous and high-brown attitude. And, tangibly, the only benefit of joining in is the exclusivity of becoming one of the cool kids. But that's of a little value if one doesn't have any SV peeps to impress.
    - richardburton 12y ago
      This seems a little blunt and obnoxious. Ryan is trying to help people get their products out there. I'm sure he has a lot of inbound email and may struggle to reply to everyone.
  - chancefeick 12y ago
    The site and team simply aren't prepared for it. I'm a fan of PH, but I don't think it's okay to change course on your answer here. Originally, it was closed to build a community with quality content. Now, it's closed due to scalability? Seems like your angle is changing due to pressure.
finkin1 12y ago
Congrats! I've never been able to get my startup featured on PH, but I visit often and love reading about the other startups. Excited to see where PH goes.
fred_durst 12y ago
Product Hunt is for the generation who grew up in the real estate collapse. I feel like those same people will all leave for real estate once the market fully recovers. They don't seem to have any real enjoyment or interest in tech outside of getting rich. The whole scheme that is Product Hunt may very well be the harbinger of the end of the good times.
untog 12y ago
How is Product Hunt even a business? It's a fine site, but this feels like a development similar to VC firms investing in PandoDaily - control the overall message, ensure Silicon Valley becomes more and more of an insider's club. Another disappointing move - I want the YCombinator that requested startups working in energy, robotics, healthcare and internet infrastructure back: http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/ http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/
- _sentient 12y ago
  Per Sam's recent blog post, there are two nuclear energy companies in this batch. They stand alongside biotech, on demand security, traditional saas companies and media enterprises like Product Hunt, to name a few. Contrarily, YC investments appear to be more diverse than ever.
- opendais 12y ago
  Its a media play that backdoors its way into related things [e.g. job ads via jobs link, etc]. I doubt its going to scale to huge proportions but there is a place even for a business that employs 5 people.
- domiono 12y ago
  Seems like YC is now more looking to build an ecosystem around them with the startups they invest in.
- applecore 12y ago
  > How did Hacker News evolve from the discussion board for YC, to the discussion board where the first comment on any post involving a YC company is reliably someone crapping on it? What an amazing shift. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8024239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8024239
  - jmduke 12y ago
    The idea that discussion of a company is mutually exclusive with criticism of a company is strange. The comment which prompted that reply by pmarca was > Every time I read about this company I get a feeling everyone involved is completely insane This is a bad comment in my opinion, but it's not a bad comment because it's particularly mean-spirited or because it's false. (I don't think that comment is either of those things.) It's a bad comment because it's not particularly germane to the discussion, any more so than the so common variation of "I knew [Employee related to YC Company] way back when [personal anecdote]! [Generic congratulation]!" That's a roundabout way of saying the following: optimizing for signal vs. noise is not incompatible with optimizing for 'nice' vs. 'mean', but I'd prefer a forum filled with substantive criticism to one filled with hollow praise.
robbiea 12y ago
... and just like that everyone all of a sudden hates product hunt on hacker news. I don't understand most of these comments. Product Hunt is still very new and we're already talking about how the algorithm is no good and bad tweeting practices. Of course other users are going to ask their friends to upvote their submissions. Of course the founders are going to make sure that quality products are shown near the top. Of course the founders are going to make sure that engagement is higher even if that means notifying users via twitter. Why can't we just say congratulations!? Why do we have to hate so quickly? Everyone acts like they have been doing this for 10 years and they should have all this stuff fixed by now.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  Why can't we just say congratulations!? Because not everything should get a gold star just by existing.
- thomasfromcdnjs 12y ago
  I'm actually pretty confused too. Weird comments, best of luck PH!
pshin45 12y ago
> Second, there is a lack of diversity on Product Hunt. It’s mostly white men talking to white men. “The reason for that is that Product Hunt started out with people in my network, which is still largely guys,” Hoover said. “But we’ve been actively reaching out to women in the community to ask ‘what women do you feel we should give access to comment.’ It takes a lot of time and it’s hard to show progress.” I feel like this will probably be Product Hunt's biggest challenge going forward. Product Hunt seems like a really well-designed and well-thought-out site, but I can't get myself to use it (for now) because it seems like a direct manifestation of one of the most criticized aspects of Silicon Valley, namely its huge monoculture in which people are only building and promoting products that solve First World Problems (i.e. their own). With all that said, I hope Product Hunt becomes the type of diverse and open community that I'm sure its founder also wants it to be.
nostromo 12y ago
People are thinking about this all wrong. The YC network benefits greatly from having these types of startups in the network. Even if Product Hunt doesn't raise a single dollar in funding or make a single dollar in revenue, they have shown they are able to deliver customers to early stage startups. And by bringing them into the fold, other YC companies get preferential access to a new way to find customers. It's clearly a win/win.
ghobs91 12y ago
Congrats Ryan!
jordanbrown 12y ago
Congrats Ryan and Co!
pintobean 12y ago
This goes completely against yc's overall message and is confusing for an entrepreneur like me who aspires to get into yc. YC has always said they only invest in startups that have a shot at becoming billion dollar companies, however small that probability might be. So a company that has a 100% probability of a $10mil/yr business would stand no chance against a company that has a 1% probability of generating $1billion/yr. Product Hunt is great and Ryan is great but I just don't see it.
- rrhoover 12y ago
  It's really hard to predict what will become a billion dollar company, especially with something as early as Product Hunt. We have several bets to place but what you see today may look a lot different 1, 2, 3 years from now. Julez Maltz has a good post about the importance of non-consensus opinion in startups: http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/20/don%E2%80%99t-follow-the-crowd/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/20/don%E2%80%99t-follow-the-cr...
  - pintobean 12y ago
    Sorry but that kind of logic is a cop out. I can point to tons of other startups attacking small markets that could also become big. The founders are super talented too. I've met many of them personally. If the market you were attacking was expanding at a fast pace then your argument would make sense. I would love to see a yc partner shed some light here.
mrmch 12y ago
What a pleasant surprise :) PH is a great community.
krrishd 12y ago
I love PH, and admittedly use it more than HN (check it every morning, etc), but I'm curious to see how it can be turned into a business. To me it seems very similar to the idea of something like HN being turned into a business, which I don't see as a very logical idea. Either way, I'm looking forward to seeing where YC takes Product Hunt.
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dylanlacom 12y ago
Congrats Ryan! Very excited to see where you take PH!
architgupta 12y ago
I don't understand why the top comments are so negative. Product Hunt is an exceptional startup which has a great fresh perspective for discovering new products and a community of people around this. Its early days for Product Hunt and while specific criticism is great (X should be improved because a, b and c. I think you guys could try m, n or o), the general whining is in poor form. Almost peanut gallery level. We are better than this in HN :) Product Hunt lets builders like us get a few "non-cynical" eyeballs. Look at the examples he mentions, what's not to love: <quoting Ryan> - Notifyr (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/notifyr http://www.producthunt.com/posts/notifyr) was made by a 17 year old in the Netherlands. It's the 5th most upvoted product right now - Instanerd (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/instanerd http://www.producthunt.com/posts/instanerd) was made by Alex in Skopje, Macedonia as a small side project. It received over 160 upvotes and ~5x the number of comments than the average submission. </end quote>
- jp1989 12y ago
  I won't lie - I'm not 100% certain that this can be a massive business - BUT no one can deny that it brings value to early stage products/co's and will definitely bring value to the YC portfolio. In addition, you're right - it really can help shed light on products/teams that generally wouldn't get the time of day. Our product was submitted to producthunt (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/sparta http://www.producthunt.com/posts/sparta) , we sat at the #1 position for a day - and it delivered a bunch of great prospects. We definitely wouldn't have been able to connect with so many Silicon Valley people so early, had it not been for PH. Congrats to Ryan and team!
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196 points by spountzy 12y ago

For fun, check out our Show HN from January :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7144815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7144815

minimaxir 12y ago

Product Hunt started surfacing during the previous Y Combinator batch because founders told each other to upvote their products. Er, on most link aggregator websites, that's supporting a breach in integrity, not a "we'll give you $120k seed money" event. It's worth noting that this behavior is explicitly punished on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972941) and will get you banned extremely quickly from Reddit. This also leads to a massive conflict of interest for any YC products that are posted to Product Hunt in the future.

riaface 12y ago
I think trying to promote your YC startup amongst your fellow batch members is different to asking the tech community as a whole to vote for your product. Perhaps "founders told each other to upvote their products" wasn't the best way of phrasing it, but I imagine it was more like how you'd ask those closest to you to give you a bit of support. With regards to the conflict of interest, I don't see this being too much of an issue. Whilst PH itself is part of a YC batch, the majority of the PH community won't be, and it's them who collectively vote.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  The issue is momentum: with HN/Reddit's time-based ranking algorithms, the first few upvotes are extremely critical. On Hacker News for example, getting ~5 upvotes in the first hour for a otherwise-unexciting product will usually have it touch the front page, and that could be hit with just little collusion. Getting the rest of the upvotes and the traction to hit the top of the front page, in fairness, is dependent on non-collusive votes. The issue is that subtle collusion may get products exposure when they otherwise wouldn't in a fair system. (although, that's the startup world in a nutshell. I'm not fond of it.)
  - riaface 12y ago
    I think a lot of this won't be dependent on whether or not the submission is for a YC company, especially since the submitter is often not associated with the product being submitted anyway. I do agree with you about the practice being part and parcel of the startup world though!
- Permit 12y ago
  It's kind of frustrating for those of us without the 5 friends necessary to get on the home page is all. It doesn't feel like we're on even footing.
antr 12y ago
I tried using PH this week. I actually submitted a hardware product (NAS) that had launched that same day, but this never surfaced on the site. On the other hand, some startups that had already launched months ago were trending. From this experience I'm guessing that most, if not all, links are hand picked, rather than community voted. It doesn't feel right.
- riaface 12y ago
  I don't know why your submission wasn't visible (you might want to contact the PH team directly about that), but with regards to your point about the startups trending that have existed for months: it doesn't matter when you launched, it matters when you were discovered by someone who uses PH and then decides to submit you. All links are hand picked, but they're hand picked by members of the community, then voted on by the community.
  - antr 12y ago
    > hand picked by members of the community, then voted on by the community I'm looking over the submitters' profiles and I see many of the same people submitting different items... so I'm deducing that 'members of the community' != 'the community'.
    - riaface 12y ago
      That's because, like Hacker News, there are a relatively small amount of people who actually submit when compared to the number of people in the community as a whole. I personally subscribe to quite a lot of startup newsletters and follow people on Twitter who post product-related news, so I tend to have things to post most days. I assume it's the same for other people who also post on a regular basis. People will use it for different things. Some will submit products, some will upvote, some will comment and get involved with the discussion, and some will do all three.
      - singer 12y ago
        I don't know that this is true for Show HN posts (since it's a comparable product). It seems most Show HN's are posted by the creators. And Product Hunt is the other way around because most creators are not allowed to post there.
rrhoover 12y ago
I want to be clear that YC has no preferential treatment on Product Hunt and you'll find TechStars, 500 Startups, and other accelerator backed startups featured with as much adoration as YC startups. Earlier this week we also helped promote 500 Startups' WMD conference in the email newsletter. You're right that voting rings, if not dealt with, can hurt the authenticity of the rankings. We have mechanisms to curb that and thankfully guidance from YC/HN on how to deal with this as the community grows. In fact I met with Daniel Gackle a month ago to chat about this.
bri3d 12y ago
The product started out as an invite-only platform for "product people" who Ryan Hoover "knows and admires" so it was a voting ring for a valley in-group since day one. That it's managed to get so much traffic and now seed funding says a lot about how the Valley works, and probably not in a good way. It's literally a platform for someone's friends to upvote each other - "conflict of interest for YC" doesn't even scratch the surface. I do think the platform has value, but only insofar as that it helps those who are playing the VC game by showing them what a certain "in crowd" thinks is cool.
- rrhoover 12y ago
  You're correct, we did seed the community with people I knew in startups that I thought would (1) be interested in this type of community and (2) have interesting discoveries/thoughts on tech products. I won't pretend there aren't voting rings but they're not limited to the "valley in group" at all. We see people across the world trying to game the site, as people do on Hacker News, reddit, and other crowd-curation sites. As I mentioned earlier on this HN thread, we have systems that help combat these rings and in part thank to YC/HN's guidance, we'll improve this. I also want to point out just a few examples of products that reached the top of the day's board from non-valley, "famous" startup people. E.g. - Notifyr (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/notifyr http://www.producthunt.com/posts/notifyr) was made by a 17 year old in the Netherlands. It's the 5th most upvoted product right now - Instanerd (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/instanerd http://www.producthunt.com/posts/instanerd) was made by Alex in Skopje, Macedonia as a small side project. It received over 160 upvotes and ~5x the number of comments than the average submission. - Pie (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/pie http://www.producthunt.com/posts/pie) is a team collaboration app by startup in Sigapore. It too hit the top of the board. Of course, not everyone will agree with what's most upvoted and an upvote really is just a measure of interest, not a review.
  - julespitt 12y ago
    That people outside of the "voting ring" or "in-crowd" get voted up by a "voting ring" or "in-crowd" sometimes does not obviate the central criticism - insiders exclusively decide which outsiders are selected.

cmalpeli 12y ago

Echo chamber anyone?

austenallred 12y ago

I'm not sure I understand how ProductHunt is better than ShowHN. Maybe I just like having everything I read in one place, but after having our product listed on ProductHunt I haven't really gone back. Ryan: I would be interested to hear your take on why ProductHunt is better/different than ShowHN. I don't mean this to be a jab, I just want to hear your perspective.

higherpurpose 12y ago
Probably in the same way a Chromebook is "better" than a Windows PC - it focuses on one thing, perhaps the most important thing for some.
rrhoover 12y ago
Valid question, Austen! Kevin Hale and I shared our thoughts on this in this Gigaom article: http://gigaom.com/2014/07/17/as-product-hunt-joins-y-combinator-hacker-news-starts-to-look-more-like-product-hunt http://gigaom.com/2014/07/17/as-product-hunt-joins-y-combina... I won't say PH is better than Show HN. It's just different. HN has a very engineering-focused culture and you see that in the conversation and products surfaced. Furthermore, you see fewer big startup product launches on Show HN and more side projects. On PH you get a combination of both but often we have well-known founders from prominent startups jump into the conversation. Again, this isn't necessarily better -- it's a different type of content and experience. Personally, I like to see a variety of submission from VC-backed startups to weekend hacks.
- austenallred 12y ago
  That's very fair. Looking at the ShowHN stuff it's >50% stuff the general public wouldn't understand. Congrats, and best of luck!

sgdesign 12y ago

Congratulations! I hope you guys will be able to share some of the advice you get, could be helpful for Sidebar :)

riaface 12y ago

I'm really pleased for Ryan and the PH team - well done!

rrhoover 12y ago
Thanks, Ria. I like your hunts and comments. :)

aashaykumar92 12y ago

Awesome! I never really thought Show HN would stop ProductHunt from growing. They're similar, but have key differences. It's also cool that they let you know when your product is on PH and validate posts. Only thing I wish is that they had a little better/more responsive customer service but I guess they are still in their initial stages. One of their moderators posted my product but used a very unfitting title. I tweeted and wrote to them but didn't receive a response until the next day and, if you're familiar with PH, that is simply too late because my product was already buried in the previous days posts...and then I was told they couldn't do anything more to help me. Hope this serves as feedback for the future!

drp4929 12y ago

Congrats! PH is a very good growth hacking case study for entrepreneurs.

btipling 12y ago

It’s an interesting product but Erik Torenburg (self-described "Product Hunt Hustler" according to his Twitter profile) is not just a little bit of a Twitter spammer: https://twitter.com/ErikTorenberg/media https://twitter.com/ErikTorenberg/media He has posted hundreds of reply spam promoting Product Hunt on Twitter. He must be running some kind of script because he has posted so many replies many with product specific screenshots, I can’t imagine someone doing this manually so quickly (every few minutes). I understand “growth hacking” and sometimes promoting yourself can seem like spam to some, but this really is just spam, and it’s not the good kind. This is probably in violation of Twitter's TOS and not what people should have to be exposed to, especially if you're trying to build a brand. This makes me just want to never use the product, and I really like supporting YC companies and prefer to give the benefit of the doubt and assume good faith in the face of self-promotion. But this is just a little bit too much.

minimaxir 12y ago
Being in YC does not guarantee that the companies will use ethical marketing strategies, unfortunately. Remember the InstallMonetizer incident while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711
- cnaut 12y ago
  Or the rapgenius fiasco
- 27182818284 12y ago
  It does a better job than most, though. InstallMonetizer incident involved YC staff contacting the founders and looking into it. They also implemented this: http://blog.ycombinator.com/founder-ethics http://blog.ycombinator.com/founder-ethics http://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/ http://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/
- MCRed 12y ago
  AirBnB spammed craigslist, etc. I actually think it's something they teach them to do.

nickgrosvenor 12y ago

Awesome

xylophonics 12y ago

Nice, congrats! I read Product Hunt pretty regularly. What's the big picture plan for Product Hunt? Are there going to be features like a directory of products, in addition to new launches? I agree with others that it's a lot like Show HN still, and have always hoped you'd build more specific product-focused features too.

bebbs 12y ago

Congrats Ryan and co. Really enjoyed the live chat several weeks ago and good to see things are still going well.

rrhoover 12y ago
Thanks, bebbs! Which chat was that?

huhtenberg 12y ago

Let me tell you my raw impression of PH as an outsider. It's a cool kids club for cool SV startups as selected by founders and employes of equally cool SV startups, where it's specifically "cool" rather than "notable" or "innovative". Secondly, while you can't join their ranks at will, you will be given a membership to comment on your own product should some cool kid submit it to the PH. Essentially they exchange memberships for adding content to PH and helping build PH's credibility. It's a reasonable approach, but they are just being ... too blunt and obnoxious about it.

rrhoover 12y ago
I appreciate the feedback, huhtenberg. Can you describe what you mean by "blunt and obnoxious"? Maybe we can improve our /about page copy or something else? On a related note: we just started handing out recommendations to give people in the community the ability to invite others to join the discussion. This way we can enable the community to help grow itself without opening the floodgate entirely. The site and team simply aren't prepared for it.
- huhtenberg 12y ago
  Blunt and obnoxious means that you don't bother with a basic reply when contacted for a feature, but then become suddenly one's biggest fans and friends, all forthcoming and excited once the product somehow ends up on the site. This comes across an exceptionally cynical, disingenuous and high-brown attitude. And, tangibly, the only benefit of joining in is the exclusivity of becoming one of the cool kids. But that's of a little value if one doesn't have any SV peeps to impress.
  - richardburton 12y ago
    This seems a little blunt and obnoxious. Ryan is trying to help people get their products out there. I'm sure he has a lot of inbound email and may struggle to reply to everyone.
- chancefeick 12y ago
  The site and team simply aren't prepared for it. I'm a fan of PH, but I don't think it's okay to change course on your answer here. Originally, it was closed to build a community with quality content. Now, it's closed due to scalability? Seems like your angle is changing due to pressure.

finkin1 12y ago

Congrats! I've never been able to get my startup featured on PH, but I visit often and love reading about the other startups. Excited to see where PH goes.

fred_durst 12y ago

Product Hunt is for the generation who grew up in the real estate collapse. I feel like those same people will all leave for real estate once the market fully recovers. They don't seem to have any real enjoyment or interest in tech outside of getting rich. The whole scheme that is Product Hunt may very well be the harbinger of the end of the good times.

untog 12y ago

How is Product Hunt even a business? It's a fine site, but this feels like a development similar to VC firms investing in PandoDaily - control the overall message, ensure Silicon Valley becomes more and more of an insider's club. Another disappointing move - I want the YCombinator that requested startups working in energy, robotics, healthcare and internet infrastructure back: http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/ http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/

_sentient 12y ago
Per Sam's recent blog post, there are two nuclear energy companies in this batch. They stand alongside biotech, on demand security, traditional saas companies and media enterprises like Product Hunt, to name a few. Contrarily, YC investments appear to be more diverse than ever.
opendais 12y ago
Its a media play that backdoors its way into related things [e.g. job ads via jobs link, etc]. I doubt its going to scale to huge proportions but there is a place even for a business that employs 5 people.
domiono 12y ago
Seems like YC is now more looking to build an ecosystem around them with the startups they invest in.
applecore 12y ago
> How did Hacker News evolve from the discussion board for YC, to the discussion board where the first comment on any post involving a YC company is reliably someone crapping on it? What an amazing shift. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8024239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8024239
- jmduke 12y ago
  The idea that discussion of a company is mutually exclusive with criticism of a company is strange. The comment which prompted that reply by pmarca was > Every time I read about this company I get a feeling everyone involved is completely insane This is a bad comment in my opinion, but it's not a bad comment because it's particularly mean-spirited or because it's false. (I don't think that comment is either of those things.) It's a bad comment because it's not particularly germane to the discussion, any more so than the so common variation of "I knew [Employee related to YC Company] way back when [personal anecdote]! [Generic congratulation]!" That's a roundabout way of saying the following: optimizing for signal vs. noise is not incompatible with optimizing for 'nice' vs. 'mean', but I'd prefer a forum filled with substantive criticism to one filled with hollow praise.

robbiea 12y ago

... and just like that everyone all of a sudden hates product hunt on hacker news. I don't understand most of these comments. Product Hunt is still very new and we're already talking about how the algorithm is no good and bad tweeting practices. Of course other users are going to ask their friends to upvote their submissions. Of course the founders are going to make sure that quality products are shown near the top. Of course the founders are going to make sure that engagement is higher even if that means notifying users via twitter. Why can't we just say congratulations!? Why do we have to hate so quickly? Everyone acts like they have been doing this for 10 years and they should have all this stuff fixed by now.

minimaxir 12y ago
Why can't we just say congratulations!? Because not everything should get a gold star just by existing.
thomasfromcdnjs 12y ago
I'm actually pretty confused too. Weird comments, best of luck PH!

pshin45 12y ago

> Second, there is a lack of diversity on Product Hunt. It’s mostly white men talking to white men. “The reason for that is that Product Hunt started out with people in my network, which is still largely guys,” Hoover said. “But we’ve been actively reaching out to women in the community to ask ‘what women do you feel we should give access to comment.’ It takes a lot of time and it’s hard to show progress.” I feel like this will probably be Product Hunt's biggest challenge going forward. Product Hunt seems like a really well-designed and well-thought-out site, but I can't get myself to use it (for now) because it seems like a direct manifestation of one of the most criticized aspects of Silicon Valley, namely its huge monoculture in which people are only building and promoting products that solve First World Problems (i.e. their own). With all that said, I hope Product Hunt becomes the type of diverse and open community that I'm sure its founder also wants it to be.

nostromo 12y ago

People are thinking about this all wrong. The YC network benefits greatly from having these types of startups in the network. Even if Product Hunt doesn't raise a single dollar in funding or make a single dollar in revenue, they have shown they are able to deliver customers to early stage startups. And by bringing them into the fold, other YC companies get preferential access to a new way to find customers. It's clearly a win/win.

ghobs91 12y ago

Congrats Ryan!

jordanbrown 12y ago

Congrats Ryan and Co!

pintobean 12y ago

This goes completely against yc's overall message and is confusing for an entrepreneur like me who aspires to get into yc. YC has always said they only invest in startups that have a shot at becoming billion dollar companies, however small that probability might be. So a company that has a 100% probability of a $10mil/yr business would stand no chance against a company that has a 1% probability of generating $1billion/yr. Product Hunt is great and Ryan is great but I just don't see it.

rrhoover 12y ago
It's really hard to predict what will become a billion dollar company, especially with something as early as Product Hunt. We have several bets to place but what you see today may look a lot different 1, 2, 3 years from now. Julez Maltz has a good post about the importance of non-consensus opinion in startups: http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/20/don%E2%80%99t-follow-the-crowd/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/20/don%E2%80%99t-follow-the-cr...
- pintobean 12y ago
  Sorry but that kind of logic is a cop out. I can point to tons of other startups attacking small markets that could also become big. The founders are super talented too. I've met many of them personally. If the market you were attacking was expanding at a fast pace then your argument would make sense. I would love to see a yc partner shed some light here.

mrmch 12y ago

What a pleasant surprise :) PH is a great community.

krrishd 12y ago

I love PH, and admittedly use it more than HN (check it every morning, etc), but I'm curious to see how it can be turned into a business. To me it seems very similar to the idea of something like HN being turned into a business, which I don't see as a very logical idea. Either way, I'm looking forward to seeing where YC takes Product Hunt.

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dylanlacom 12y ago

Congrats Ryan! Very excited to see where you take PH!

architgupta 12y ago

I don't understand why the top comments are so negative. Product Hunt is an exceptional startup which has a great fresh perspective for discovering new products and a community of people around this. Its early days for Product Hunt and while specific criticism is great (X should be improved because a, b and c. I think you guys could try m, n or o), the general whining is in poor form. Almost peanut gallery level. We are better than this in HN :) Product Hunt lets builders like us get a few "non-cynical" eyeballs. Look at the examples he mentions, what's not to love: <quoting Ryan> - Notifyr (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/notifyr http://www.producthunt.com/posts/notifyr) was made by a 17 year old in the Netherlands. It's the 5th most upvoted product right now - Instanerd (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/instanerd http://www.producthunt.com/posts/instanerd) was made by Alex in Skopje, Macedonia as a small side project. It received over 160 upvotes and ~5x the number of comments than the average submission. </end quote>

jp1989 12y ago
I won't lie - I'm not 100% certain that this can be a massive business - BUT no one can deny that it brings value to early stage products/co's and will definitely bring value to the YC portfolio. In addition, you're right - it really can help shed light on products/teams that generally wouldn't get the time of day. Our product was submitted to producthunt (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/sparta http://www.producthunt.com/posts/sparta) , we sat at the #1 position for a day - and it delivered a bunch of great prospects. We definitely wouldn't have been able to connect with so many Silicon Valley people so early, had it not been for PH. Congrats to Ryan and team!

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