The Indie Hackers Podcast #67: Creating a Massive Community and Making It Profitable with Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt
The original product hunt started as a place to discover cool, new products. It was inspired by AngelList. I’d browse companies on AngelList to look at companies and see what people were building.
Indie Hackers is a similar community as product hunt but more towards people who are building businesses. Indie Hackers want to build a business and make money. It skews towards bootstrappers and nomad technologists.
Indie Hackers was inspired by Nomad List which was inspired by Product Hunt. The reality is we are all riffing off each other.... it’s actually not a good idea to invent an entirely new, foreign, hard to use interface.
An interesting exercise for starting a project or company. Which product do you use that aren’t designed for your use case? I was using Angel List to discover products. It’s not designed for that. That’s not the intention- that’s a moment to build something that is designed for that activity.
Product Hunt started as an email list. I just wanted a simple cool list of new products every day. Email was the simplest way to get started.
As a founder, you should listen to some people or you should listen to no people. But you should never try to listen to all of the people. –John O’ Nolan
The newer growth channel that is helping Product Hunt grow is SEO. The site has been up for 5 years and has over 100,000 products posted.
Why sell Product Hunt to AngelList? Naval was an investor in our seed round. AngelList and Product Hunt are building for the same community. They both are trying to help startups succeed.
One of the biggest drivers of revenue for Product Hunt is promoted products. We also have a SAAS product called Ship: A toolkit for makers to ship awesome products.