6 ms·

Product Hunt Gets $6.1M Series A Funding from A16Z and Alexis Ohanian

52 points by lalwanivikas 12y ago

giarc 12y ago
I browse PH everyday, however it seems like I only need to do it once. The list seems stagnant; it looks the same at 9am as it does at 5pm. So unlike HN, reddit, FB I spend maybe 3-4 minutes on PH. I would like to see their metrics on site visitation to see if perhaps others share this issue.
brianbreslin 12y ago
Key questions I have: Does product hunt generate any revenue currently ? (I know it isn't directly related to valuation, just curious) How big is the current team?
- vishalzone2002 12y ago
  not sure about any revenue. But I guess they are 9 right now. Ryan sent out a blog article about his journey in his newsletter today : https://medium.com/on-startups/the-artifacts-of-product-hunt-11682e9e01dd https://medium.com/on-startups/the-artifacts-of-product-hunt...
- jitnut 12y ago
  I guess they do via sponsored hunt in a newsletter!
Alex3917 12y ago
So just as a data point, I actually co-founded a YC startup a few years ago that was working on a similar problem. On paper it seems like a promising space because there are 300 - 500k new consumer products launched each year in the US, not including media titles. What we found though was that probably 98% of these products were completely commodified, as in a new brand of 2% milk or a new kind of paperclips. We would go to industry events with, say, 20,000 CPG food products, but of those there were maybe only 5 - 10 per year that were interesting enough to actually be worth talking about. And even reaching out to contract manufacturers directly to get new products at the very beginning of the pipeline yielded limited results. We were actually offered funding, but ended up shutting down the startup instead because we found that while we could make money doing bespoke projects for companies with large budgets, the market just wasn't there to build the products that we initially wanted to build. If Product Hunt can innovate on the lead gen though then it's definitely cool space, and I'm excited to see what they can come up with.
wastedhours 12y ago
Congrats to Ryan. Am assuming there's a biz dev play here, what do we think? Affiliate revenue, "featured" products, native advertising curated lists (e.g. Samsung sponsors a list of cool Android apps...)?
- AznHisoka 12y ago
  featured products make the most sense. In the end, they're all a form of native advertising.
minimaxir 12y ago
I am really not a fan of PH because I don't trust it at all (previous longer rant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8362759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8362759). Votes are gamed when everyone is spamming for upvotes on Twitter (https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=product%20hunt%20upvote&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=product%20hunt%20upv...) although Ryan mentioned in replies to previous rant that he would "write a bullet point in the FAQ about asking for upvotes," which won't stop it at all. Addiitonally, there's an unusual amount of pandering, to use an apt word, to Product Hunt / Ryan Hoover in submissions to PH ("We have special Product Hunt functionality/branding in our product and Ryan took a quirky selfie while using it! That means we're awesome!") The problem with that this distracts from actually objectively good products, a counterpoint to PH's mission to "find the best products," and it shouldn't be a surprise that many top PH submissions end up fading into obscurity, which is a disservice to everyone.
- opendais 12y ago
  Ya, I avoid it as well as since its pretty clear they don't mind it being gamed since it lets them tap people's social networks [e.g. twitter followers] for traffic. Its a useful growth hack for most things but for this its kinda the opposite.
  - crazypyro 12y ago
    Well when the founder was the initial twitter spammer, its kind of hard to turn around and tell everyone not to do it without drawing criticism.
    - opendais 12y ago
      Reddit had sock puppets initially too. That doesn't mean you don't stop it once you get to a certain size to avoid losing credibility. ;) I'd saying raising 5+ million qualifies as a "certain size".
  - andreasklinger 12y ago
    We do a lot to filter those kind of votes. We are just not so open about it and it's not so much common knowledge. Bit longer comment from above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8427499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8427499
lolwutf 12y ago
My frustration with Product Hunt is that it gives underperforming biz folks a whole new shiny label to add to their resume: Product Nerd! 'Product Nerd' = professional opinion giver = get back to work!
gfodor 12y ago
Something tells me they try to avoid saying the name aloud
bluker 12y ago
How is Product Hunt any different from HN? HN has already created a culture of upvoting the best tech products from people who know their shit. I may be naive but how can the PH experience improve upon the already exceptional HN experience?
- kristofferR 12y ago
  Product Hunt is about Products, Hacker News is about News.
  - minimaxir 12y ago
    That's a false dichotomy. There's a reason "Show HN" exists and has existed for years.
    - kristofferR 12y ago
      "Show HN" is for showing your own work. It's not for submitting cool products you find, like PH is. People would hate it if "Show HN" turned into Product Hunt, and the submitters weren't always behind what was being shown there.
      - minimaxir 12y ago
        Given the amount of terrible Medium posts which try to compare traffic from Product Hunt and Hacker News, I wouldn't argue that difference: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=product+hunt+hacker+news#!/story/sort_by_date/0/product%20hunt%20hacker%20news https://hn.algolia.com/?q=product+hunt+hacker+news#!/story/s...
- benologist 12y ago
  To me Product Hunt complements HN in a really fantastic way - it's made HN a much smaller target for every startup that wishes success was as simple as hitting HN's front page once or twice a week with some contrived content. Those guys have a better outlet, and we have better content.
higherpurpose 12y ago
Am I having a deja-vu or did this already happen a month ago?
- minimaxir 12y ago
  The raise was leaked a month ago: today is the confirmation.
- petercooper 12y ago
  They raised $1m about a month ago: http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/21/product-hunt-announces-seed-funding-round-launches-ios-app/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/21/product-hunt-announces-seed... .. so I'm guessing total is now $7.1m with the newly announced $6.1m? (Unless they were separately announced parts of the same round.)
ilghiro 12y ago
I love ProductHunt. A lot. Many lots. I take a look at it most days. At the end of the day though it's just a good list. There's no barrier to entry and as soon as they add in any revenue streams that justify a huge valuation (which I certainly can't figure out anyway) then what's to stop "Product Hunt - No Ads" from stealing the "market"?
xpose2000 12y ago
I have two things to say. 1. I agree with what minimaxir said. It seems like friends of friends of friends control the entire place. HN seems less "controlled" than PH. Even Ryan himself went above and beyond to make sure that Alexis' friends were able to comment right off the bat. (https://twitter.com/rrhoover/status/489931085048860672 https://twitter.com/rrhoover/status/489931085048860672) In hindsight, this paid off since he got funding and I don't blame him. But to the average user who has been waiting to comment - it's incredibly frustrating. And why the heck is commenting disabled by default anyway? Why does it sound like a good idea to only allow friends of friends a voice to comment? Provide some type of "participant threshold", and then allow everyone to comment and block those who abuse it. 2. They got 6.1M in funding. I am not from the startup "funding" ilk, but that sounds like a ridiculously high number to me. What could they possibly be building that requires that much capital? The site and premise of it now is fairly simple to implement and code. Perhaps they have grand plans that are way above my head?
- opendais 12y ago
  > 2. They got 6.1M in funding. I am not from the startup "funding" ilk, but that sounds like a ridiculously high number to me. What could they possibly be building that requires that much capital? The site and premise of it now is fairly simple to implement and code. Perhaps they have grand plans that are way above my head? The only thing I can think of is competing with AngelList as it operates in a neighboring market with alot of customer overlap. People interested in VC, Startups, Jobs @ Startups.
  - brentm 12y ago
    They have to be rolling out Product Hunt for X. There are a lot of verticals where it will be way bigger than this one. They'll need a lot of capital to roll these verticals out before everyone else does. Look at Stack Overflow and their large network of somewhat independent niche sites.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- 12y ago
NicoJuicy 12y ago
Lol, 6.1M for a HN-alternative for products (and the HN original has been created by one guy solely). That's pretty sick :s
- NicoJuicy 12y ago
  PS. I made a HN with Tags and custom input fields (it's not completely finished yet)... I thought about selling it for 8 K. (already have a client) But if anyone want's to give a million, i can get arround the NDA. Fyi, it's made with Asp.Net MVC, a JS View Engine and i'm not kidding either. Lower bids are also welcome.
ljk 12y ago
the third highest voted product on the page right now is a $125 monitor stand....
- ilghiro 12y ago
  the second highest voted product is a newsletter
korzun 12y ago
This is the same play as PandoDaily. Free channel of press for VC's and their connections.
Jemaclus 12y ago
One thing I don't like about PH is that I can't sort by new or recent submissions. If there are new submissions, they may be mixed up in that list of the ones I checked at 9am, and I have to remember if I looked at them this morning or not. And frankly, for most of these, they're eminently forgettable, so I wind up looking at them twice because I can't remember if I looked at them already. The other thing that rankles me about PH is that I can't comment. I have to be a "community contributor" or whatever it says, whatever that means, and however you do that without commenting. It's so circle-jerky. Nothing negative ever gets said about the products. It's always friends of friends saying "I use X, and I love it". For instance, there was one a week or so ago that allowed you to send anonymous texts -- something that seems super ripe for cyber-bullying, which isn't a criticism but rather something I wonder how they'll handle -- but I couldn't comment to make that observation, because apparently I'm not good enough to have commenting privileges. And finally, what's the business model here? How do a16z, et al, plan on recouping their money? I understand profit isn't necessarily what you want right out of the gate, but I wouldn't invest $100 in a company, much less $1,000,000, unless I thought I'd get something (hopefully more money!) out of it later on. What's the value proposition for PH?

52 points by lalwanivikas 12y ago

giarc 12y ago

I browse PH everyday, however it seems like I only need to do it once. The list seems stagnant; it looks the same at 9am as it does at 5pm. So unlike HN, reddit, FB I spend maybe 3-4 minutes on PH. I would like to see their metrics on site visitation to see if perhaps others share this issue.

brianbreslin 12y ago

Key questions I have: Does product hunt generate any revenue currently ? (I know it isn't directly related to valuation, just curious) How big is the current team?

vishalzone2002 12y ago
not sure about any revenue. But I guess they are 9 right now. Ryan sent out a blog article about his journey in his newsletter today : https://medium.com/on-startups/the-artifacts-of-product-hunt-11682e9e01dd https://medium.com/on-startups/the-artifacts-of-product-hunt...
jitnut 12y ago
I guess they do via sponsored hunt in a newsletter!

Alex3917 12y ago

So just as a data point, I actually co-founded a YC startup a few years ago that was working on a similar problem. On paper it seems like a promising space because there are 300 - 500k new consumer products launched each year in the US, not including media titles. What we found though was that probably 98% of these products were completely commodified, as in a new brand of 2% milk or a new kind of paperclips. We would go to industry events with, say, 20,000 CPG food products, but of those there were maybe only 5 - 10 per year that were interesting enough to actually be worth talking about. And even reaching out to contract manufacturers directly to get new products at the very beginning of the pipeline yielded limited results. We were actually offered funding, but ended up shutting down the startup instead because we found that while we could make money doing bespoke projects for companies with large budgets, the market just wasn't there to build the products that we initially wanted to build. If Product Hunt can innovate on the lead gen though then it's definitely cool space, and I'm excited to see what they can come up with.

wastedhours 12y ago

Congrats to Ryan. Am assuming there's a biz dev play here, what do we think? Affiliate revenue, "featured" products, native advertising curated lists (e.g. Samsung sponsors a list of cool Android apps...)?

AznHisoka 12y ago
featured products make the most sense. In the end, they're all a form of native advertising.

minimaxir 12y ago

I am really not a fan of PH because I don't trust it at all (previous longer rant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8362759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8362759). Votes are gamed when everyone is spamming for upvotes on Twitter (https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=product%20hunt%20upvote&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=product%20hunt%20upv...) although Ryan mentioned in replies to previous rant that he would "write a bullet point in the FAQ about asking for upvotes," which won't stop it at all. Addiitonally, there's an unusual amount of pandering, to use an apt word, to Product Hunt / Ryan Hoover in submissions to PH ("We have special Product Hunt functionality/branding in our product and Ryan took a quirky selfie while using it! That means we're awesome!") The problem with that this distracts from actually objectively good products, a counterpoint to PH's mission to "find the best products," and it shouldn't be a surprise that many top PH submissions end up fading into obscurity, which is a disservice to everyone.

opendais 12y ago
Ya, I avoid it as well as since its pretty clear they don't mind it being gamed since it lets them tap people's social networks [e.g. twitter followers] for traffic. Its a useful growth hack for most things but for this its kinda the opposite.
- crazypyro 12y ago
  Well when the founder was the initial twitter spammer, its kind of hard to turn around and tell everyone not to do it without drawing criticism.
  - opendais 12y ago
    Reddit had sock puppets initially too. That doesn't mean you don't stop it once you get to a certain size to avoid losing credibility. ;) I'd saying raising 5+ million qualifies as a "certain size".
- andreasklinger 12y ago
  We do a lot to filter those kind of votes. We are just not so open about it and it's not so much common knowledge. Bit longer comment from above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8427499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8427499

lolwutf 12y ago

My frustration with Product Hunt is that it gives underperforming biz folks a whole new shiny label to add to their resume: Product Nerd! 'Product Nerd' = professional opinion giver = get back to work!

gfodor 12y ago

Something tells me they try to avoid saying the name aloud

bluker 12y ago

How is Product Hunt any different from HN? HN has already created a culture of upvoting the best tech products from people who know their shit. I may be naive but how can the PH experience improve upon the already exceptional HN experience?

kristofferR 12y ago
Product Hunt is about Products, Hacker News is about News.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  That's a false dichotomy. There's a reason "Show HN" exists and has existed for years.
  - kristofferR 12y ago
    "Show HN" is for showing your own work. It's not for submitting cool products you find, like PH is. People would hate it if "Show HN" turned into Product Hunt, and the submitters weren't always behind what was being shown there.
    - minimaxir 12y ago
      Given the amount of terrible Medium posts which try to compare traffic from Product Hunt and Hacker News, I wouldn't argue that difference: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=product+hunt+hacker+news#!/story/sort_by_date/0/product%20hunt%20hacker%20news https://hn.algolia.com/?q=product+hunt+hacker+news#!/story/s...
benologist 12y ago
To me Product Hunt complements HN in a really fantastic way - it's made HN a much smaller target for every startup that wishes success was as simple as hitting HN's front page once or twice a week with some contrived content. Those guys have a better outlet, and we have better content.

higherpurpose 12y ago

Am I having a deja-vu or did this already happen a month ago?

minimaxir 12y ago
The raise was leaked a month ago: today is the confirmation.
petercooper 12y ago
They raised $1m about a month ago: http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/21/product-hunt-announces-seed-funding-round-launches-ios-app/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/21/product-hunt-announces-seed... .. so I'm guessing total is now $7.1m with the newly announced $6.1m? (Unless they were separately announced parts of the same round.)

ilghiro 12y ago

I love ProductHunt. A lot. Many lots. I take a look at it most days. At the end of the day though it's just a good list. There's no barrier to entry and as soon as they add in any revenue streams that justify a huge valuation (which I certainly can't figure out anyway) then what's to stop "Product Hunt - No Ads" from stealing the "market"?

xpose2000 12y ago

I have two things to say. 1. I agree with what minimaxir said. It seems like friends of friends of friends control the entire place. HN seems less "controlled" than PH. Even Ryan himself went above and beyond to make sure that Alexis' friends were able to comment right off the bat. (https://twitter.com/rrhoover/status/489931085048860672 https://twitter.com/rrhoover/status/489931085048860672) In hindsight, this paid off since he got funding and I don't blame him. But to the average user who has been waiting to comment - it's incredibly frustrating. And why the heck is commenting disabled by default anyway? Why does it sound like a good idea to only allow friends of friends a voice to comment? Provide some type of "participant threshold", and then allow everyone to comment and block those who abuse it. 2. They got 6.1M in funding. I am not from the startup "funding" ilk, but that sounds like a ridiculously high number to me. What could they possibly be building that requires that much capital? The site and premise of it now is fairly simple to implement and code. Perhaps they have grand plans that are way above my head?

opendais 12y ago
> 2. They got 6.1M in funding. I am not from the startup "funding" ilk, but that sounds like a ridiculously high number to me. What could they possibly be building that requires that much capital? The site and premise of it now is fairly simple to implement and code. Perhaps they have grand plans that are way above my head? The only thing I can think of is competing with AngelList as it operates in a neighboring market with alot of customer overlap. People interested in VC, Startups, Jobs @ Startups.
- brentm 12y ago
  They have to be rolling out Product Hunt for X. There are a lot of verticals where it will be way bigger than this one. They'll need a lot of capital to roll these verticals out before everyone else does. Look at Stack Overflow and their large network of somewhat independent niche sites.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
12y ago

NicoJuicy 12y ago

Lol, 6.1M for a HN-alternative for products (and the HN original has been created by one guy solely). That's pretty sick :s

NicoJuicy 12y ago
PS. I made a HN with Tags and custom input fields (it's not completely finished yet)... I thought about selling it for 8 K. (already have a client) But if anyone want's to give a million, i can get arround the NDA. Fyi, it's made with Asp.Net MVC, a JS View Engine and i'm not kidding either. Lower bids are also welcome.

ljk 12y ago

the third highest voted product on the page right now is a $125 monitor stand....

ilghiro 12y ago
the second highest voted product is a newsletter

korzun 12y ago

This is the same play as PandoDaily. Free channel of press for VC's and their connections.

Jemaclus 12y ago

One thing I don't like about PH is that I can't sort by new or recent submissions. If there are new submissions, they may be mixed up in that list of the ones I checked at 9am, and I have to remember if I looked at them this morning or not. And frankly, for most of these, they're eminently forgettable, so I wind up looking at them twice because I can't remember if I looked at them already. The other thing that rankles me about PH is that I can't comment. I have to be a "community contributor" or whatever it says, whatever that means, and however you do that without commenting. It's so circle-jerky. Nothing negative ever gets said about the products. It's always friends of friends saying "I use X, and I love it". For instance, there was one a week or so ago that allowed you to send anonymous texts -- something that seems super ripe for cyber-bullying, which isn't a criticism but rather something I wonder how they'll handle -- but I couldn't comment to make that observation, because apparently I'm not good enough to have commenting privileges. And finally, what's the business model here? How do a16z, et al, plan on recouping their money? I understand profit isn't necessarily what you want right out of the gate, but I wouldn't invest $100 in a company, much less $1,000,000, unless I thought I'd get something (hopefully more money!) out of it later on. What's the value proposition for PH?