The Start

Ryan Hoover, the founder of Product Hunt, has a background deeply rooted in the tech and startup ecosystem.

Before starting Product Hunt, Ryan studied at the University of Oregon, where he earned a degree in Business Administration. After graduating, he worked at a startup called PlayHaven, which provided him with firsthand experience in the tech industry.

This experience, combined with his passion for discovering new products and sharing them with others, sparked the idea for Product Hunt.

In 2013, Ryan started Product Hunt as a simple email list to share cool new products with his friends, which quickly evolved into a full-fledged platform dedicated to discovering and showcasing the latest in tech and startups.

The Problem

Ryan Hoover recognized a significant gap in how new tech products were discovered and shared within the community.

Traditional media outlets and existing platforms didn't provide a dedicated space for tech enthusiasts, makers, and early adopters to discuss and discover new products in real-time.

This lack of a focused community meant that many innovative products went unnoticed or struggled to gain traction.

Ryan aimed to solve this problem by creating a centralized hub where users could share, discover, and discuss the latest tech products, fostering a community of passionate early adopters and makers.

This vision led to the creation of Product Hunt, a platform that quickly became the go-to place for discovering new and interesting tech products and startups.

Getting their first customers:

To test the idea from the get-go, especially as a non-technical founder, Ryan settled on a daily Email list and a Linkydink group.

Each day, the collection of posts were sent to the subscribers to Product Hunt daily emails. The list started off with a couple of dozen influential people in the startup industry that Ryan personally knew.

Seeding the email list with the right people, it soon grew to 170 subscribers and people started interacting with Ryan expressing how much they enjoyed the daily digests.

Teaming up with his friend Nathan they built the Product Hunt website on top of an open-source framework for a Reddit/HN like community and published the website in just 8 days.

After creating the website, Ryan invited around 100 early supporters to test the "real" MVP. Those people were hand-picked influential people in the tech community and were asked NOT TO SHARE PRODUCT HUNT PUBLICLY.

Ryan again reached out to early contributors and asked them to share the story on their social media. He got to the first 400 users that way

The next 400 users came from another PR move. This time with Fast Company where Ryan talked about "the 20 minute MVP".

Hundreds of emails later they got their first 2000 users, from there Product Hunt ended up going to YC S14 and two years later were acquired by Angellist for $20m.

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