Novak, the actor and producer from the TV show “The Office,” joined the service, Hoover granted him homepage posting power.Īnyone can vote products up but it’s this inner circle who decides what people will vote on. ![]() ![]() But on a few rare occasions, Hoover has let someone in. The list also includes celebrities, such as Snoop Dogg, who recently launched an album on the site, and Nas.įor the moment, no one can join this elite group - the list is essentially locked. But I’m not much of a product hound, so I’ve only submitted and up-voted a couple of items (blasphemy, I know). I wrote about Product Hunt when it launched, which is how I made the list. More specifically, the 1,800 include venture capital and seed investors, sought-after entrepreneurs like Marc Andreessen, developers and tech journalists - including me. Half of the group are “makers” - people who built a product that was featured on the homepage in the early days of the service. These so-called administrators are Hoover’s friends and professional contacts. It’s a small group that was assembled by invitation when Product Hunt launched in 2013. Hoover has granted only 1,800 people the power to post directly to the homepage. “It would turn into probably the worst site on the Internet.” “I would love to open it up to everyone, but we just can’t,” he told me last year, citing the potential for spam and self-promotional posts. Product Hunt is the brainchild of 28-year-old Ryan Hoover, an Oregon native who had previously worked at a gaming company. ![]() And it’s turning out to be a tricky mission to fulfill without ruining the site’s tight-knit community, which, unsurprisingly, is composed largely of men. It’s ironic, given the fact that Product Hunt’s goal from the beginning was to “ democratize attention” for startups. “The front page of Product Hunt is curated by all the same people upvoting each other’s shit which most of the time entails pandering e-books or how to make GIFs of cats,” a Reddit user agreed. “It seems like only the ‘elite’ members get a say,” someone commented on Hacker News. “Is Product Hunt rigged?” asked a Quora user. The application process is opaque and confusing, leading to threads of complaints online. Carmel DeAmicis for Re/codeįor every Subbly, there are people who’ve spent weeks or months preparing a product, only to post it to Product Hunt and never see it appear on the homepage. People mingle during Product Hunt’s last happy hour, which garnered 3,700 RSVPs. And for the little-known startups that make the homepage, it can mean thousands of dollars in sales, a multiplied user base, national media coverage or urgent queries from venture capitalists.īut there’s one big hole in the Product Hunt story: For a site designed to empower its users, it’s not exactly clear how the service works. ![]() Investors and reporters surf it daily for the latest stories and potential investments, making Product Hunt the Valley’s daily scorecard. What results is a daily list of tech products, ranked first to last by how much people like them. Compelling apps and hardware are listed on the site for others to discover, and, as on Reddit, readers can vote up their favorite submissions. It’s a well known startup fable among Silicon Valley insiders, with Product Hunt playing the role of kingmaker, but for those who may be unfamiliar, the two-year-old website has become a surprisingly powerful force in the industry, anointing startups with near royal status. “It really motivated us,” founder Stefan Pretty told Re/code. Its paying customer base grew five times. When subscription e-commerce tool Subbly made it to the Product Hunt homepage, it changed everything.
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