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.<p>Another disappointing move - I want the YCombinator that requested startups working in energy, robotics, healthcare and internet infrastructure back:<p><a href="http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/</a>
<i>Product Hunt started surfacing during the previous Y Combinator batch because founders told each other to upvote their products.</i><p>Er, on most link aggregator websites, that's supporting a breach in integrity, not a "we'll give you $120k seed money" event.<p>It's worth noting that this behavior is explicitly punished on Hacker News (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972941" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972941</a>) and will get you banned extremely quickly from Reddit.<p>This also leads to a <i>massive</i> conflict of interest for any YC products that are posted to Product Hunt in the future.
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:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ErikTorenberg/media" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ErikTorenberg/media</a><p>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).<p>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.
Let me tell you my raw impression of PH as an outsider.<p>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 <i>will</i> 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.
> <i>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><p>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).<p>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.
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.<p>The whole scheme that is Product Hunt may very well be the harbinger of the end of the good times.
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.<p>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.<p>Product Hunt is great and Ryan is great but I just don't see it.
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.<p>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.
For fun, check out our Show HN from January :) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7144815" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7144815</a>
People are thinking about this all wrong.<p>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.
Nice, congrats! I read Product Hunt pretty regularly.<p>What's the big picture plan for Product Hunt?<p>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.
Awesome! I never really thought Show HN would stop ProductHunt from growing. They're similar, but have key differences.<p>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!
... and just like that everyone all of a sudden hates product hunt on hacker news. I don't understand most of these comments.<p>Product Hunt is still very new and we're already talking about how the algorithm is no good and bad tweeting practices.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>Either way, I'm looking forward to seeing where YC takes Product Hunt.
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.
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.<p>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 :)<p>Product Hunt lets builders like us get a few "non-cynical" eyeballs. Look at the examples he mentions, what's not to love:<p><quoting Ryan><p>- Notifyr (<a href="http://www.producthunt.com/posts/notifyr" rel="nofollow">http://www.producthunt.com/posts/notifyr</a>) was made by a 17 year old in the Netherlands. It's the 5th most upvoted product right now<p>- Instanerd (<a href="http://www.producthunt.com/posts/instanerd" rel="nofollow">http://www.producthunt.com/posts/instanerd</a>) 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.<p></end quote>