AngelList acquires Product Hunt

As an early fan of ProductHunt I became saddened to watch their community get diluted and become more of a place for &quot;growth hackers&quot; to hang out than people who actually make things.<p>But I also realize this was because they raised tons of money and was under heavy pressure to get traction at any cost.<p>So I think this can be a good news, now that they can just let go and focus on the startup community instead of artificially trying to grow

Echoing another sentiment in this thread. I was a huge fan of PH during launch and desperately wanted a way into the community to share and discuss things.<p>Then I ended up building a React Native app that pulled their API, which was featured and gave me access. I had so much fun doing that and thought it was great that I was accepted into the community due to building something.<p>I can&#x27;t stress enough how selective I was with the invites I received. I still have one, since I never found the right person to share it with.<p>Unfortunately, it looks like it doesn&#x27;t matter. In the past few months, I&#x27;ve noticed a steady decline in the quality of discussion. Lots of comments based on misguided interpretations that could have been avoided if the commenter had bothered to click on the product&#x27;s link and thoroughly read the landing page. There&#x27;s way too much noise and it&#x27;s a shame.

For me, personally Product Hunt was cool until they changed their design and created many categories. It was same as with Steam Greenlight - when it allowed only best games to pass, it was cool. Now due to some changes and adjustments - not so much.<p>From one of my sites to visit daily they dropped to a group of sites I visit once every 2-3 weeks.<p>The decisions made few months ago were terrible. Take a product that works, adjust it to widen the public but make the experience more shallow - typical for so many startups lately. Chase for the money and trying to rush things and bump metrics is terrible lately in startups&#x2F;products I liked.

The impression I got from AngelList was that the lights were on, but nobody&#x27;s home.<p>Every time I tried to use their web site, I would encounter a comedy of errors, and trying to work around each problem would reveal yet another. I wrote several detailed bug reports to their support email address, and nobody ever bothered to reply, let alone fix the bugs. Do they even have any full time web developers working there any more? If they do, they must be asleep at the wheel. All I ever got from the experience was a bunch of parasitic spam email. Not one person who ever contacted me through AngelList had anything to offer that they weren&#x27;t trying to shill by spamming every other random AngelList user.<p>When AngelList had their email privacy scandal [1], other people also complained that their support was non-existent [2].<p>So I described my earlier bad experience and lack of support from AngelList on that HN thread [3] [4], and although dave@angel.co responded to a few other messages and solicited people contact him with further questions and concerns, he has never replied to any of my messages [5].<p>Dave&#x27;s lack of interest in replying to both the detailed bug report emails I sent to his support address and also the messages I posted to HN, not to mention the facts of AngelList&#x27;s privacy violation email scandal itself, just reinforces my impression that the lights are on, but nobody&#x27;s home.<p>My point still stands: Old unmaintained web sites running on auto-pilot that collect sensitive private information from their users (and automatically forge first-person email pretending to be from their users in order to virally promote themselves) are a dangerous security threat, which should be shut down for the safety of the internet.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11326011" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11326011</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11330160" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11330160</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11326557" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11326557</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11350697" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11350697</a><p>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11350504" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11350504</a>

It&#x27;s common knowledge that Product Hunt is rigged, and they will not heavily punish startups for soliciting upvotes (blatant example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;minimaxir&#x2F;status&#x2F;763156319058616321" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;minimaxir&#x2F;status&#x2F;763156319058616321</a> ), or even paying for promoted Tweets for their PH submission (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;minimaxir&#x2F;status&#x2F;786286705263251456" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;minimaxir&#x2F;status&#x2F;786286705263251456</a> ) Relatedly, there is no disclosure when an investor is closely affiliated with a submitted startup (and often people upvote just because of the submitter; the followers system promotes this)<p>A year ago, I wrote a rant asking about this, among other claims that that Product Hunt is elitist (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@minimaxir&#x2F;the-questions-on-transparency-that-product-hunt-is-intentionally-ignoring-b579fba14048" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@minimaxir&#x2F;the-questions-on-transparency-...</a> ) To my knowledge, there were no significant improvements in response since then in PH rules.<p>I bring this up now because the AngelList vertical integration now makes perfect sense: since AL is now promoting investment syndicates, there is now <i>even more benefit</i> from investor collusion and lack of disclosure!

Don&#x27;t understand the negativity.<p>What Ryan and Product Hunt did was incredible. So many people wanted to create an alternative to Hacker News and Reddit for product people. Everyone else failed but they figured it out. That&#x27;s awesome.<p>Product Hunt personally helped me in my goal of becoming a independent app maker by showcasing my app <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.producthunt.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;focus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.producthunt.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;focus</a>. As of tomorrow I&#x27;m full-time indie (YES!) and I proudly display my Product Hunt badge on my app&#x27;s page <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;heyfocus.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;heyfocus.com&#x2F;</a>. I didn&#x27;t have any connections there—I just made a product people liked.<p>And AngelList seems like a great fit. It looks like they&#x27;re building a crowd-funding platform, and Product Hunt as a marketing&#x2F;discovery engine makes perfect sense. In that context, Product Hunt is worth a bit of money.<p>This seems like a great outcome. Congrats!

This acquisition seems to make a lot of sense. Product Hunt is awesome, but it definitely doesn&#x27;t feel like it&#x27;s been able to monetize in any meaningful way. The question, of course, is how will Angellist get their $20 mil back?

So PH was acquired for half the price of Pebble? This doesn&#x27;t make any sense... Wow...

This smells fishy to me.<p>ProductHunt had no hope of ever becoming an actual business with realized monetization, it was a glorified marketing tool built by SV insiders to sell the ventures of their friends, colleagues, and investors. Slimy, but I guess not illegal.<p>I start to draw the line though, when PH raises millions of dollars on XX million valuations (that anyone could easily see they had no chance of ever meeting), seemingly funnels most of that money into things that simply make promoting <i>other startups</i> more effective, but don&#x27;t create value or revenue, and then gets bought by another startup <i>who shares multiple investors</i> for (supposedly) something around their ridiculous valuation.<p>I guess it&#x27;s probably not outright fraud, but somehow we ended up in a scenario where we have investors shelling out (in some cases paying themselves!!) a (rumored) total of ~28 million dollars for a community website with no real revenue, no actual product, not even any technology that they could theoretically pivot on... it&#x27;s just a glorified phpBB theme with a relatively small community of fans who just happen to all be in on the take as well. And I&#x27;m sure all investors involved get to mark it as a &quot;win&quot; on the books and pad their stats.<p>Next time Silicon Valley tries to portray itself as a meritocracy I guess we can just point to this...

It looks like Product Hunt raised about $8 million. Can someone explain how this type of acquisition pays out?

People keep saying directories don&#x27;t work anymore, yet we are now seeing one directory buying another directory. Make your own directory and grow it.

Finally some light at the end of the tunnel as Product Hunt badly needs to optimize their front-end - it&#x27;s the slowest popular site today!

This makes perfect sense. Now Angelist will have a perfectly curated list of upcoming startups and resources. Hopefully Angelist doesn&#x27;t do too much to change the current site.

It reminds me of the time when Sun Microsystems bought StorageTek.

good for producthunt. it&#x27;s cool to see something like that get acquired for anything. it&#x27;s just a lil aggregator.<p>i hear the system is totally gamed though.

Is the combined platform going to be called AngelHunt or Product List? :)<p>One has a decidedly more edgy sound, while the other could not be more bland and boring.

This is pretty exciting. Both parties are pretty awesome folk. Not too bad of an exit for an &#x27;experiment.&#x27;

Why are we applauding Ryan again?<p>This is a saving face bailout from one of their own investors and a particularly embarrassing one at that given his statements of &quot;I wouldn&#x27;t consider anything under $100mm&quot; and the pedigree of his investors.<p>They raised a shit ton of money and built nothing. No real technology, no significant additions to their platform, no development of community. And now the result is an all-stock acquihire from AL, which will amount of a purchase of their users and a one year rental of the same engineers and team that failed to build anything worthwhile.<p>Raising money at a $22m val from A16Z and selling for less than that - all stock no less - is a failure, and we need to stop lauding it as if it&#x27;s somehow notable or impressive to take money and waste it.

Congrats Ryan!

&gt; He gets asked where he &quot;summers&quot; and then walks out confused.<p>Anyone cares to explain that one?

&#x27;Experiment&#x27; with no conceivable way of monetization gets &#x27;investment&#x27; for some behind-the-scenes, non-investment reasons.<p>Bros funding Bros, and then bro acquiring bro when the first-bro has blown through 7.1M. Its the Silicon Valley version of nepotism. Its all play money, but is only available if you are in the circle.<p>Now that you have an exit to your name, next stop, VC partner. And then ask all the startups pitching, what&#x27;s unique about you?<p>Yo!

svskeptic 1 hour ago [-]<p>&#x27;Experiment&#x27; with no conceivable way of monetization gets &#x27;investment&#x27; for some behind-the-scenes, non-investment reasons. Bros funding Bros, and then bro acquiring bro when the first-bro has blown through 7.1M. Its the Silicon Valley version of nepotism. Its all play money, but is only available if you are in the circle. Now that you have an exit to your name, next stop, VC partner. And then ask all the startups pitching, what&#x27;s unique about you? Yo! reply<p>dang 40 minutes ago [-]<p>Much of this (&quot;for some behind-the-scenes, non-investment reasons&quot;) you&#x27;ve simply made up for rhetorical reasons. But even if you were right on the facts, this kind of rant makes for a bad HN comment. A good HN comment is one that contributes to thoughtful, curious discussion. Stimulating rage among those who already agree with you is the opposite of that. Since such comments routinely get upvoted, they&#x27;re a particularly bad risk to this site. We detached this comment from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13080432" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13080432</a> and marked it off-topic.<p>Dang, this is a post full of brevity - yes - nevertheless very right. He could have tried to paraphrase it - but this would make it even more exclusive to somebody never involved in the industry before.

Lol ok, yes you seem to love marketing, you would like it.

“On the plus side we’ll no longer be homeless and we’l [sic] be able to focus on building what we’re building.”<p>Does anyone else feel uncomfortable when SF tech workers, in this case a CEO of an acquired startup, talk about homelessness in this way? Trivializing a very real problem to nothing more than a &#x27;headache&#x27; or &#x27;distraction&#x27; from the greater goal of, I guess, funding more startups?

that haterade tho <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alexa.com&#x2F;siteinfo&#x2F;minimaxir.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alexa.com&#x2F;siteinfo&#x2F;minimaxir.com</a>

Why AngelList? Not sure if this is right alignment It doesn&#x27;t make sense at all. I use Product Hunt to find what is new and awesome product coming up?