#4 - How Product Hunt's Ryan Hoover Built A $20M Community From Scratch

Who knew a product about other products could be worth tens of millions... Ryan Hoover (@rrhoover) tells us the struggle of trying to find a place in the startup world and how to tackle job rejection the right way - becoming his own boss! Truly starting from scratch, he runs us through the scrappy early days of e-mailing people one by one just to gain an extra dozen users... now that's some hustle! Tune into this episode and he'll teach you ways to push that little bit further to making your first million. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  And so you sell the company, you've got money now. What happens that first day money hits the bank?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Um.

• 0:05Shaan Puri?

  Were you sitting there refreshing, you know, Wells Fargo?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Some people, they, they love to go like celebrate like a big thing. Actually, me, I flew to LA that day. It was a Friday and we actually just went to a restaurant and I ordered, of course, like a rotisserie chicken and like some Brussels sprouts.

• 0:42Shaan Puri?

  All right, so let me start with this. I wanted to have you on because A, you're my friend. We haven't caught up in a little while because you've been traveling and doing all kinds of interesting stuff. B, you're probably unique. So like most of the people I have on this show.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  I'm special.

• 0:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you're special. You're a special snuff like.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:58Shaan Puri?

  Most of the people I'm trying to have on the show are like the greedy capitalist pigs. Like, I like that. I'm like, oh, you found out that you can, you know, buy and sell this one arbitrage and you levered up and you did this crazy thing. But you're very different. You, obviously, you know, you've done well in business, but I think that's a byproduct. To me, you're a really thoughtful dude who has built a really cool business yourself, plus invested in a bunch of other interesting companies. And you're different. You're like the nicest guy I know in tech who's like around town. And I think that that's kind of, I want people to, to get to know that side. And so we're going to talk about Product Hunt. I mean, most people know the journey. So like, here's, here's my like short version of the story. So Product Hunt started as a project, not even a company. Is that like?

• 1:39Speaker 01

  Actually, I called it an experiment. So not even a project. It was like pre-project.

• 1:43Shaan Puri?

  We're talking like weekend experiment? Or what were you thinking at the time?

• 1:46Speaker 01

  I was, you know, tinkering. It was experiment. That's what I called it actually. If you look back on the tweet, the, the word I used was an experiment. And there wasn't really an intention or a goal other than just exploring, like, do people find new products really interesting? And do they subscribe to this email list I created and that kind of thing?

• 2:03Shaan Puri?

  Right. And you, you reached out to me and you were like, the way I felt was like, I geek out about every kind of new product and want to talk about it and see new things all the time. Are there other people like that? I think I know a hundred of them. And let's start with that hundred. Like, how many people were on that initial outreach mailing list for Product Hunt when you started it?

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it was an email list in the beginning. Anyone could subscribe in the very beginning and a couple hundred people subscribed in the first like couple of days. But from the beginning, it wasn't me curating the products. From the very beginning, it was like, okay, I know a lot of people, founders, investors, people who are in technology, who are always exploring new things, like yourself. And I think it was 20 or 30 people were sort of the curators, the people that were just sharing new products they found.

• 2:44Shaan Puri?

  Right, okay, so that's the setup. It's basically, I'm Ryan Hoover. At the time, you had just left a job at PlayHaven, is that right?

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Part-time, I half-left.

• 2:54Shaan Puri?

  You half-left, okay.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  I was part-time, actually.

• 2:55Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so side project, side experiment, almost. 20, 30 people on the list. You call the thing Product Hunt. And what I liked was that it was, A, a community of people, and B, these were not apps that we had all already heard of. Because I would have pretty much immediately discounted it if it was like Facebook. You know, like, obviously, that would have been like ridiculous. But even just the stuff we all read about in TechCrunch that day, no point in posting it again on this little site. This was genuinely like, sometimes just little useful things that I didn't even, I'd never heard of, that people were using, you know, to-do lists and whatever. And then sometimes it was really cool, you know, funky projects. And so, it was a community of people posting products, apps, that you had never heard of.

• 3:36Shaan Puri?

  So it became this like, must-check place for what's new, in a city where everything's new. And so, that was kind of cool. And the summary is, it becomes kind of the watercooler, the whole tech scene is on here. Everybody in Silicon Valley either uses Product Hunt, or just likes Product Hunt, but is too busy to use it, but generally is like on board with it.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. One thing I'll note, though, even though it started with a lot of people in Silicon Valley, like, there's 20, 30 people, or people I'd met, friends of mine. Quickly, it was global, like the very beginning, and quickly, we started seeing not only visitors, but contributors around the world. And there's been this, even today, like almost six years later, a perception like, oh, it's a bunch of Silicon Valley folks. I checked the metrics the other day, and it was less than, what was it, 1.4%, I think, of visitors in the past 30 days were from the Bay Area.

• 4:21Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  So, that's expected when you get to a certain scale, but it's a tiny micro kind of subset.

• 4:27Shaan Puri?

  What about the people who post? Was that the same thing? Because I thought, you know, for a lot of people, they didn't even mind. So, I knew people who were in Florida or in India who were checking it, and one of the reasons they liked it was, hey, I don't know anyone in Silicon Valley. This is where they're posting and talking about stuff? Cool, I get to like be a part of it.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:44Shaan Puri?

  Even if they didn't even have the ability to post themselves at the time. So, what about the curators? Were they mostly Silicon Valley people or not?

• 4:50Speaker 01

  In the beginning, yeah. Frankly, it wasn't super thought through. It was like a lot of experiments, you just want to quickly test something and throw it out there. And in the beginning, it was friends who happened to be geographically located around me, so a lot of people in Silicon Valley. And the thing is that those people would, of course, post products and things from just around the internet. So, it wasn't like they're only looking for founders in the Bay Area to post their product. But it was really just apps and Chrome extensions and physical products and things like that. So, but over time, it's kind of extended, and we intentionally have tried to extend it to all kind of corners of the earth in terms of getting perspectives from Berlin tech scene and like Bangalore and Toronto and everywhere else.

• 5:28Shaan Puri?

  Love it. And so, just if I finish the kind of summary, it's basically, you get the momentum, you become a company at some point, you go into YC, you raise money from Andreessen Horowitz, you eventually sell the company, I think publicly, it's come out that you sold a company, 20 million bucks to Angel List, you're wearing an Angel List hat right now.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  I am.

• 5:44Shaan Puri?

  And now you're there, and now you're both running product at Angel List as well as you have something called the Weekend Fund. So, we'll go into all of that, but I want to start with, in a way, I was there at the start, this is kind of like our personal relationship was, in many ways, I'm the godfather of product. Would you, would you agree with that?

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Kind of. You, I don't know, I don't know if Godfather is the right title, but almost like you could have been the one that killed Product Hunt.

• 6:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'm like the evil stepdad or something, something weird. So the backstory is, I had seen you blogging, because for many, many years you were talking about products and you were blogging, and this is kind of like, I'll call it before the blue checkmark, Ryan Hoover. There's like before the checkmark and after the checkmark. This is before the checkmark. And I was like, this guy's really interesting. I wanted to hire you. So I reached out and I was like, hey, let's get lunch, let's talk. We started talking. Turns out you were thinking about moving on from where you were currently at. And we both got really excited. And we went through a process of like, you know, seeing are you a good fit for where I was, which was Monkey Inferno, this idea lab at the time. And I thought, hey, this great product guy for the idea lab. Long story short, we go through the interview process, doesn't quite work out.

• 6:48Shaan Puri?

  I let you know, hey, man, you know, talk to the team, it's not gonna work out, but love to stay in touch, because, and not just like lip service, like genuinely really like you, think you're really good. So let's, let's keep in touch. I don't know, 10 days later, a week later, you started the experiment. Is that, that's my memory. Am I right?

• 7:05Speaker 01

  I don't remember exactly how many days, but yeah, fairly shortly after that. And I remember the email, I mean, it's still in my Gmail somewhere, that you sent to me that was really thoughtful in telling me why you didn't feel I was a good fit for the role. And actually, when I reflect on that, I think you were right. Even in hindsight, I think you were right in your assessment of, especially at that time, I've always been a very passive person, someone who's not, I don't like confrontation and I didn't feel qualified to tell people what to do. And I know that was one of the pieces of feedback is your, and I forgot the exact way you phrased it, but it was something around like leadership and like decisiveness. And that was a very valid point, which I think when Product Hunt started, kind of fast forwarding, I'm now sort of forced to learn some of those things.

• 7:45Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  And it's something I still work on to this day, but I'm much better than I was six years ago at some of those very valid reasons for not hiring me.

• 7:51Shaan Puri?

  Right. And I think that- You know, in this situation, I would say 90% of the credit goes to you because most people, I know me, if I didn't get hired somewhere or got, you know, rejected, you know, that feels bad. There's no way around it and I would have been like, F those guys. And I know that's the initial reaction I would have had. Even when I was typing that email, I remember the phrasing I used, I said, "I'm gonna go out on a limb here, you know, I hope this is not salt in the wound. I'm gonna give you some detail on what the actual feedback was." Normally, I literally wrote, I said, "Normally, the email ends here." Of like, you know, "Thank you, you know, sorry, not this time, let's keep in touch." I was like, "Normally, it ends here, but I'm gonna actually give you the feedback because you seem like a dude who wants to learn and get better. If I was in your shoes, I'd wanna know the real reason.

• 8:35Shaan Puri?

  Here's the real reason, hope that's not salt in the wound, hope this is like productive and helpful." And to your credit, you took that and you were like, like, we stayed friends right away. And, and so like, tell me about that, like, because I think that's unusual. And there's gonna be a lot of people listening to this who are either have faced rejection, are gonna face rejection, are currently, you know, putting themselves out there and maybe something's not gonna work out. You clearly had a happy ending, but even in that moment, you took it well.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're right. Most employers don't do that. They don't do it for a few reasons usually. One, either they just wanna quickly move on. Two, they're afraid of hurting someone's feelings and telling them the honest truth. Or three, there's sometimes legal reasons why you maybe don't wanna say certain things. And so I appreciated that and I actually, I do some investing and when we, we meet companies and the reality is, we don't say yes to every company, surprise, surprise. And we actually have to say no to a majority of companies that we do meet with. And I'm trying to get good at this, but we try to for every face-to-face or video-to-video kinda conversation we have with the founder, we always reply with details of why we're not investing right now. And I feel that's important for a founder to hear because it's really a bummer when you're, you know, pitching and you're going through that whole process, getting a lot of no's and everyone's saying like, "Sorry, no thanks, but no details."

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Like, there's no feedback loop, there's no, no way for me to learn from this experience. And- Although it can be kind of painful sometimes, you know, having received rejection myself, but also, you know, being on the other side of it, it's helpful. I think it's valuable to our ecosystem, I guess, to give that kind of feedback.

• 10:00Shaan Puri?

  Right. It's valuable on both sides because you've got to really think. If you're going to write down why, you've got to be clear about why. And being forced to kind of articulate your thinking, it's good for the kind of giver and for the receiver, which is cool. And most investors don't do that. Why don't most VCs tell you why? They basically always say, "Not right now." They don't even say, "No."

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Some of it's just time and some laziness perhaps, you know, they want to move on to the next deal. Some of it's they never say no. They just say, "Let's stay in touch." And part of that's because it's such a relationship-driven market. And when you say no, some founders will immediately take that as, "Okay, I'm never going to talk to that person again." So, "I'm doing a seed now. When I go to my Series A, I'm never going to talk to Bob because he said no."

• 10:41Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  And I don't think that's the right way of doing it. I think if you deliver the no with authenticity and being truthful, they're actually more willing to trust you and keep you in the loop. Seen this happen where founders will follow up three or four months later and say, "Hey, just want to give you an update. Here's where we're at." They're not asking for money or anything. It's just that they want to keep me in the loop to potentially convince me otherwise of sort of prove me wrong, but not in like an egotistical way. It's more that they want to share this information with me because they still want me involved.

• 11:09Shaan Puri?

  Right. And I remember during the job interview, we always set it up where you do like a case. So, it was like, "Hey, here's a product that we're actually building, and here's the challenge we're facing. Take a day, think through how you would approach that, and then basically, we're going to present that tomorrow, so we'll talk through it." And you did an amazing thing. So, we had this app that was a pretty bad idea, but it was a side project that one of our, two of our young guys were kind of hacking on at the time, which was a site called Boya. And that basic idea was it was like, you would say stuff about your life. So, you'd be like, "I'm Sean. I once won 10 grand at a poker tournament." Or, "When I was young, I was in two movies." These are real things. So, I was, I put those on my thing, and then anybody can come and ask questions. So, it was like a Q&A site, but you would give people a little bit of material to go off of, of like, "What the heck should I ask you?

• 11:54Shaan Puri?

  Because if I don't know anything about you and you're not already famous, what the hell do I know to ask you?" And we gave you that case and I remember you did the amazing thing and anybody who's applying to a job, I would recommend you do this, even if they don't ask you for a case. You took the product, you not only had your own ideas of what you could do to make it better, but you went and talked to a bunch of users of our product. And you talked to more users of our product than the guys who were building it in our lab had talked to at the time.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:20Shaan Puri?

  And I remember being like, that's a really good sign. You're like, here's Jacob, I had talked to him, here's how he, here's what he thinks about the site today. And here's what, you know, here's some ideas based off of my conversations with the users. That was pretty amazing and I recommend that to anybody who's applying for a job of like, put your hands on the, don't send your resume and hope that just stands out. Put your hands on the product, go talk to the users, show that initiative. Have you seen that in people who are applying to Product Hunt or Angel List? Have you seen anything that stands out?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think if you, especially with any company that has a lot of demand, people that want to hire, you gotta stand out somehow. And if you can illustrate the value you can create, then it's almost, in some cases, it can be a no brainer to hire that person. So, one example of this actually is Andreas. So Andreas was a CTO of Product Hunt for about four-ish years. So he transitioned into Angel List actually after the acquisition. And he and I initially connected through Twitter and Product Hunt and he was playing around with it. He was at the time in Vienna, I'm in San Francisco. And one day he launches a Chrome extension for Product Hunt. And so, this was also, again, experimental phase, not even incorporated, but he launched this Chrome extension which he created by scraping the site, we didn't have an API or anything back then.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Scraping the site and every time you'd open up a new tab, you'd see the day's most uploaded products every day. And that caught my eye and I was like, whoa, this guy clearly is like interested, he has ability for us to build cool things and come up with new ideas, because it's just him like doing design, product, engineering. And clearly he has interest in Product Hunt in general. And so, we actually connected and then, he was actually working on kind of a hiring type play, like he was exploring his own startup idea too. Long story short, he ends up joining, you know, super early on and became the CTO and is a large part of Product Hunt's, I guess, success to where we got today. And he did so by just building stuff.

• 14:07Shaan Puri?

  Right, sometimes you do the work before you get the job. If you have no other way to sort of stand out.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:13Shaan Puri?

  We had a crazy guy send in, some people try to stand out in weird ways. We had somebody send in a pinata and then it was like a layered puzzle. It was like you break the pinata, then it's like, look under your desk. And there's like a box under my desk. I'm like, where did this come from? How did this guy do this? It was a bit creepy.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Don't be creepy.

• 14:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, don't be creepy is a general rule. Get that tattooed on your forearm, just as a reminder. And so you weren't even, you weren't just looking at us. You were looking at Medium at the time. This is again, pre-product hunt. And what were you thinking back then? What was your mindset? You're applying to a couple of companies. What was going on?

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was at PlayHaven for about, up until like three years. So I joined as like number 10, then we downsized to six people. And then we grew to about 100 people. So learned a ton, built some, some cool things. And after about three years, I started getting, a couple of things happened. One, I started feeling like I was learning less and like we were moving a little bit slower. And it's partly reality of just the stage that we were at in the company.

• 15:09Shaan Puri?

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• 15:45Speaker 01

  And the other thing is I, we were building tools for game developers. And as much as I, you know, at the time especially loved gaming, I'm not a game designer. I'm not a game developer. And so I really wanted to, one, stretch myself, challenge myself. And two, work on something that I'm a consumer of, a user of. And so you mentioned Medium, actually, the sort of path was, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna leave three years in. I was fortunate to get into kind of a part-time role and transition out, but meanwhile, I was exploring different startups to join. And so Medium was a site, this is 2013, so pretty early days for that platform. I was on it, I was blogging a bunch, I love the space, I believe, you know, more people, if we can help more people share their ideas, I think it's generally a good thing for the world. And I was just looking at my

• 16:29Speaker 01

  home screen and Medium was, of course, like that, one of the things on my home screen that I was using. And, and so I just really wanted to explore working at companies of products that I used. And I ended up interviewing with Jason Sturman, who was, I think he was COO at the time, and Ev Williams interviewed with him. And they were, I think they were like 10, maybe 15 people.

• 16:48Shaan Puri?

  And what's that like? You interviewed with Ev Williams, this is the creator of Twitter, blogger, Medium. What's that interview like?

• 16:54Speaker 01

  It wasn't really an interview, it was more of a conversation, which I really enjoyed. So we, we talked a lot about, you know, the platform and just writing in general. And I think we may have, memories a little bit fuzzy, but ideated on, on various things. And actually, before this, I should take a step back. Before this, I, I was trying to illustrate, really tap myself into the, the team, actually. And so, as I was using Medium and getting really involved, I actually hosted a Medium brunch in San Francisco, and invited a bunch of Medium employees.

• 17:25Shaan Puri?

  Nice.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Cause I'm like, alright, if I wanna work at this company, you know, there's two things that can happen from that. One, they're gonna at least get to know me a little bit better. And two, I'll get to know them a little bit better, too.

• 17:34Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  So, I did that-

• 17:35Shaan Puri?

  It was just employees, or there was also like, just other people who liked Medium?

• 17:38Speaker 01

  There was also some other people that liked Medium.

• 17:40Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  So it was like, it was a combination. And I think about 15, 20 people showed up, and it was a combination of like bloggers and writers. So like, there was some commonality around, okay, here are a bunch of people who are writing on Medium about interesting things, mostly around tech or other subjects. So that was, I think, helpful in getting that meeting with Jason and with Ev. But ultimately, you know, they were early on, they only hired designers and engineers. Like, that was sort of, they had a whole bureaucracy, kind of like org structure and- And we sort of ended in part with, you know, I don't know what you do here, Ryan, respectfully.

• 18:08Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  And again, he was kind of right, kind of like you, whoever was right, I don't know exactly what I would have done. Like, maybe, maybe I would have been a good fit. But the way they were structured, there wasn't a clear, like, job rec. There actually was no job rec for what I was trying to apply for.

• 18:21Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so you, you did Product Hunt as an experiment. Did you do any other experiments at the time that nobody's ever heard of, because Product Hunt's the one that takes off and gets all the attention?

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Did a couple, like, small, tiny things, like, as I was writing and blogging a bunch. One thing that I wanted to experiment with was, how do I get more people to share my writing? How do I essentially get more readers? And one thing I noticed is there are some people on Twitter who would, like, you know, take a snippet and, and quote, you know, a sentence or so from blog post and then share it on Twitter. And so I actually thought, okay, what if I could, in my blog, which was on Tumblr, but on Tumblr you have access to, like, basically, you can add JavaScript and other things. I hacked my way together through, like, you know, I'm not even an engineer, so I hacked my way together to create a simple little JavaScript utility to be able to allow authors and bloggers to select and highlight specific text in their blog posts.

• 19:09Shaan Puri?

  Right. It's like, this is my money line.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:11Shaan Puri?

  Go ahead and share.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Go and, go and click it, and it opens up a tweet intent with the, the quote filled and tags me, RR Hoover on Twitter. And it was like a little side project. I had no ambitions of, like, turning into anything. Also, from a codebase, it was like, it wasn't like, real. It was just, like, kind of for me, so no one else really could use it, but I was like, okay, let me tinker with this idea and see where I get.

• 19:29Shaan Puri?

  Right. So you were, like, a scratch-your-own-itch kind of guy, which is, I've had somebody who came on who was like, the first question I typically ask is, so how'd you make your first million? And he was like, I made a soap opera blog. I've never seen a soap opera, but I made a soap opera website that became the most popular soap opera website, and I sold it for nine million dollars in cash. And it's like, so some people are like, I go where the opportunity is, and you're like, I build things I'm curious about, I want, and I don't know if they're going to be companies or not, most likely not. What do you think about that approach? Because I'm sure you see founders that are in both camps. How do you think about that?

• 20:05Speaker 01

  I, I don't think there's, there, I even wrote a blog post about this a long time ago, there's no right way to start a startup, in, in the sense that... Yes, there are kind of best practices and guides and everything, but you can find counterexamples to basically everything, including the scratch your own itch sort of advice. Or my father, for example, my parents, they've been entrepreneurs, well, my dad pretty much his entire life almost. And they've been operating a business for a long time, you know, since I was, I think, 16, 17 years old. They've operated this business in the waste management space. My father is, really doesn't have any particular interest in waste management, and I think a lot of people who are in the industry aren't passionate about waste necessarily. But he's, he's an entrepreneur that has had a lot of success just finding, finding a problem or finding a need and filling it.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  That's a saying that he would tell me when I was a kid is like, find a need and fill it.

• 20:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  And he gets a lot of motivation, excitement around the process of solving problems and building businesses, less so scratching his own itch, for example.

• 21:02Shaan Puri?

  And did you think, you know, if your parents are entrepreneurs, did you think, I'm going to be an entrepreneur? Or, you know, you went and got a job at Playhaven, were you like, I'm going to do the like career thing, I'm going to be an employee, then I'm going to become a manager, and then an executive maybe someday? Like, what were you thinking?

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Even when I was a kid, like tinkered with entrepreneurial things, like buying and selling on eBay and modding Xboxes and doing stuff like that. I love the idea of, how do I avoid getting paid by the hour? How do I find a way to make money for my impact or my output? And I always kind of hated getting paid by the hour because it's always this thing where you could work really, really well or terribly and you get paid the same amount. And that was just never super motivating for me. So I'd always tinkered with entrepreneurial things, but I didn't move to Silicon Valley in 2010 and say, I'm going to start a company and I must start a company. It wasn't something that I required of myself. And, you know, fast forward to Product Hunt in 2013, that was very organic in how it formed. It wasn't supposed to be a company.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  So, again, I don't think there's a right way of approaching it, but I've, I don't know, I'm happy starting companies. I enjoy the autonomy and having the ability to get rewarded, both monetarily or in other ways, because, you know, there's, there's more than just money and startups for more than just my time.

• 22:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, for sure. And I know that you said, there's no right way to do it. There are some wrong ways to do it. You know, in general, there's actually typically more wrong ways to do something than it's better to focus on those and just eliminate those as possibilities than try to say, oh, this is the right way to do it because X person did it that way. Because you'll find another person did it a different way. Success typically has many, many flavors. Failure sort of boils down to the same five. That's what I've seen so far.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Actually, that's how you build usually a lot of good products. It's very unclear what the right product is, like the right UX, the right thing. But there's some obvious pitfalls or some obvious things you should avoid. And so in some ways, like when we build new features, we think a lot about, okay, we're not going to do X, Y, Z because we have high confidence that these are going to be not the right solution. But we don't know about these, but they have potential. So we're going to explore them and figure out quickly, do they actually work? Which is a lot of what you've done, like, you know, with all of your entrepreneurial and products you've worked on is like quick iterations and like testing.

• 23:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, sometimes too quick. So, okay, so you launched Product Hunt. You have, let's take it from, how'd you get from zero users to 30? You said that was people you knew in the Bay Area who you thought might like this. 30 to kind of, let's take it to 300 and 3,000 and tell us how you made those jumps. Because I think, you know, as an entrepreneur, like I moved to Silicon Valley six years ago and before that I was sort of reading and digesting everything from afar. I was living in Australia, so the other side of the earth. And I remember the part that I felt there was the least clarity on was like, okay, I know how you come up with ideas and make, you know, get it started, find co-founders and go do that. And then I know what like growing looks like. But what about that in-between part when, how the hell do you just, how do I get my first 100 people, my first 1,000 people?

• 23:56Shaan Puri?

  So how did you go about doing that for Product Hunt?

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's, the things you do in the beginning are different than things you do later on. So in the beginning, a lot of it's just like, how do you get, you know, first 100, 1,000, 10,000 and so on. And so certain strategies worked really well in the beginning and then they, you know, of course, had diminishing returns. We had to find new strategies. So in the beginning, it was friends, okay, 20, 30 people, friends. First few hundred subscribers were through Twitter primarily. Twitter and Quib, actually. Quib was an entrepreneurial community where people shared mostly articles that they found on the internet. And so through those two channels, I just tweeted it out, put it on Quib, got a couple hundred people subscribe. So that's sort of like, you know, one tiny milestone. And then, fast forward some weeks later, there's some organic growth of like, people sharing it and, you know, that 200 subscribers turns into four, five, 600.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  And, and then we got to the point where, well, the email list was, was just the starting point. So, we, we knew that we wanted to build a website where people could interact and collaborate and have more contributions. Building the website then enabled us to unlock other ways of kind of growing the audience themselves. And so, there's a bunch of things we did. A lot of it was word of mouth, which I know is, when you're building a new company, when you ask like, "How are you gonna get users?" Word of mouth.

• 25:05Shaan Puri?

  Right. Terrible answer, but great when it is the answer.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  It's great when it's the answer, but don't rely on it, because it's probably not gonna happen. But, we did certainly have a lot of word of mouth, because...

• 25:14Shaan Puri?

  What was the word of mouth? Yeah, why, why were people talking about this?

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were talking about it because, I think it filled a hole in the market, in the sense that, on the internet, in the technology world, you had Twitter, and you had like, subreddits, and you had blogs and publications. But, there wasn't a sort of community or a place for all the tech world to come together and kind of geek out about the new products and the new things that are happening in technology. Increasingly so, as blogs and publications kind of killed their comment section. Like, it's never been a core part of, of their business. And so, I think part of it was a combination of, there's a sort of hole in the market, that we sort of filled, and combined with the fact that also, it was a community-based product. So, when people came on, it's something that they wanted to talk about, wanted to involve their friends, and so on.

• 25:54Shaan Puri?

  Right. And one of the things I remember was that, I felt like you were building this company, brick by brick. And, the reason I say that is, I remember, somebody would join or do something, and you would personally reach out on Twitter, and personally give them a little public kind of love, but it was, it wasn't generic. It was like, you'd start a conversation with them, or you would say something that does clearly, "You wrote it, this is not a bot." You would send emails to people who'd join, and you would ask them questions, like, "How'd you hear about it?" Or, "What do you think of this?" "Here's what we're thinking of it." Like, I just pulled up, this is November 22nd, 2013, this is in my email. I don't know what the first email you sent was, but this is the second. So, you said, "Hey Sean, my product hunt, Linky Dink MVP," you were using Linky Dink at the time, "is showing signs of traction. I haven't promoted it outside of my own blog,

• 26:37Shaan Puri?

  Quib, and a couple of tweets, and I got about 175 subscribers and 30 kick-ass contributors. But, what's even more encouraging is the unsolicited emails and face-to-face conversations, people telling me they love it. I think there's an opportunity to turn it into a real thing. I'm working with my buddy, Nathan, to build this out, and I would love your opinion." Would you mind if I shot you, you know, the mockups and a couple of questions? And I think that this worked beautifully on me. I mean, I wrote back like a essay because you were, the people who liked Product Hunt in the beginning were the Silicon Valley know-it-alls of the world. We love products, we love giving our opinion, we love seeing mockups. It's like, I'd rather see a mockup than a live website. Because there's something about that early, early that you were giving us. And so, and you kept that going for a long time. I remember you had public mockups available for the whole community to look at before you would release a feature.

• 27:23Shaan Puri?

  And so, you were doing this stuff brick by brick, and that's what I want to highlight because most people just build it and sit and wait. And I remember you were pounding emails out, pounding tweets out. Like, tell me about how you were doing that and why did you even think that was the right thing? Because that's rare, I would say. Most people don't really do that.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, part of it was just fun, actually, to be honest. A lot of what I've experimented with in different projects is just like, this just sounds fun. And I woke up every morning and sort of had this bug that I, you know, I just had to explore this further. So, part of it was just, it was enjoyable. Two, what I realized and knew quickly was with communities, you need to feel, it needs to feel live and it needs to feel like there's momentum. And I knew that, okay, I should just continue to do what's working, which is doing a lot of manual things, like welcoming people directly and personally through email, Twitter and so on, and just keep doing that and make sure that we can trickle in more users and get more activity going so that when you come here next week, it actually is, whoa, there's more uploads, there's more comments. Oh, there's this person that I know, you know, through the technology world is now

• 28:24Speaker 01

  commenting. And so, it starts to feel like there's, there's like this buildup. And that just attracts people. There's like, people want to be part of something new and cool, especially in this demographic of like tech early adopters. I think that sort of advice and realization was, once you find something, just keep doing it and do it until it stops working.

• 28:42Shaan Puri?

  And so, you were just waking up 5, 6 a.m., grab a coffee, sit in a coffee shop and talk to people all day, is that right?

• 28:49Speaker 01

  A lot of it, yeah, a lot of that. And using things like intercom to see who was signing up. And there was even a moment when it was kind of cool when intercom has this feature where you can see in real time who's on your website. And when you build something and people use it, it's like a satisfying feeling. It's like the most amazing feeling. And it's even better when you can see, you know, oh, this person I know is on it. Like Ashton Kutcher signed up one day and Kevin Rose and I was like, whoa, these people that I've followed and admired for a long time. They're like using this thing we built. That's really cool.

• 29:15Shaan Puri?

  Right. And I remember you were almost amplifying it because I remember you have a different email here where you're like, hey, Ashton Kutcher signed up and he wants to do X or something like that. And you were like, I'm thinking about sending him this. What do you think? And I felt like Ashton Kutcher signed up for my goddamn app in that moment because I was like, this is exciting. Yeah, we should try this. And I was like, you would take a nugget of something good and like amplify it. And I think that I've joked around with with friends that I feel like you were the first guy to build your business on Twitter. That had nothing to do with Twitter. And today in this other company, we invested in Lambda School, the founder, Austin Allred, he's doing the same thing. Uh, he shares every victory on Twitter and people love it. And he's basically building the, he's, you know, there's this drumbeat of good news and interesting stuff on Twitter every day.

• 30:00Shaan Puri?

  Uh, have you seen what he's been doing there?

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I think he's done an amazing job of of telling the story. And I think the best way to do so is to highlight other people's wins. And so I think the other day he tweeted something like, this is the first time one of Lambda School students actually is making more money. Just got a job making more money than anyone that's

• 30:16Shaan Puri?

  Anyone at Lambda School, right.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Including Austin himself. And I'm like, wow. And I joked and I'm like, Austin, you should probably go through Lambda School then.

• 30:22Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe you can make more money. Um, yeah, it's pretty impressive what they've done.

• 30:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's, that's amazing. All right. So you, you take it to, you know, you use that sort of manual building block strategy. You get up into the few thousands of subscribers. What happens from there? How does this become? And, and give us a sense for the scale. I mean, millions of visitors every month is where it got to, correct? So how did you go from there to there?

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Beginning it was friends, then it's some word of mouth, and then it's a lot of like manual inviting. And, and part of that's to, actually, one thing I didn't mention is there were also moments where I see people who were engaged. And I would actually email them and say, hey, do you know two people, two people that might be interested in contributing and being part of this, which You know, today, if I do that, two more people using Product Hunt is not going to be meaningful, but then, actually, it was.

• 31:06Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Like getting a couple more people and, you know, email 20 people, you know, it actually is meaningful. And so the other strategy that was useful in the beginning actually was press. And this is, again, something that most startups need to avoid. Press is usually not going to drive a lot of users, especially not sustainably. But for us, it was relevant because the tech press, the people that read TechCrunch or The Next Web or others, those are the same people that want to visit Product Hunt. And so we, I did some guest blog posts and like Fast Company and some others. In fact, there's posts on Fast Company about how we got our first 2,000 users that kind of goes through some of these details. And then we also like built a really good relationship with press by basically trying to help them in their job. So we'd find really cool, interesting products and companies.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  And every now and then, I would email someone at, let's say, Josh Constein at TechCrunch and say, "Hey, Josh, I know you're like really interested in consumer social. Here's this new app that we found through Product Hunt. It's really cool." And for me, it was, hopefully, it was helpful. In some cases, they're like, "Oh, cool, Ryan," you know, whatever. In other cases, they're like, "Oh, that's really cool. Can you introduce me to the founder?" Or, "Oh, yeah, let me write about that." And what that would do is they'd feel like an obligation to link back to Product Hunt because that's sort of where they found it through me. And then they also just hopefully thought, well, I was being helpful to them in their job. And whenever you're helpful to someone, you know, it just, it keeps you top of mind ultimately.

• 32:22Shaan Puri?

  And so how do you know if press is, you know, good for you or not?

• 32:25Speaker 01

  I think it depends on the goal. So press can be good sometimes for user acquisition. Sometimes it's like a fundraising strategy. Sometimes it's a recruiting strategy. Like if you have a really good New York Times piece, that might add more legitimacy to your future hires. So it kind of depends on the goal that you're trying to achieve. And again, most companies, getting tech press is not actually going to lead to actual users. But if it is like Product Hunt, then why not pursue it and like double down on that strategy?

• 32:51Shaan Puri?

  Right. Okay. And so you grow the company. Were there moments along the way where things just totally weren't working? Where either you were like, "Oh, we're effed here."

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:03Shaan Puri?

  This company's going to die. Or where you're just like, "I totally think this is going to work." And like, bloop, nope, doesn't work. So tell me about some of the kind of the downs that happened along the way.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the definitely a lot of those, not gonna lie, which is expected. Not everything you build is gonna work ultimately, and that's why it's so important to to have really smart guesses, but then figure out which ones actually work as fast as possible, which usually means you gotta build it or or build some sort of MVP or something. So we've gone through a lot of lot of failures around the product development and the features we build. Probably the biggest costly mistakes, which I take full responsibility for, was this was about two thousand fifteen or so. So this was after we raised our Series A. We had long runway, lots to explore. Part of the vision and the direction was, okay, we have a really amazing community in technology, cool place to discover new apps and tech products and so on.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  We believe that this can expand into other categories that have similar dynamics. For example, gaming, I come previously from the video game world. The gaming community has similar dynamics where game creators, they also really want distribution, they need users, they want feedback from a community. And there really wasn't a great like community like place to discover here the new games today and like a discussion with the creators of the games and and the people that love the games. Same with books. Books has a similar dynamic where there are books coming out every single day. How do you find the coolest new books every single day? How does an author communicate even with their readers? Right now, that really doesn't happen all that much. It's mostly like authors going on podcasts even today, and that's about it.

• 34:36Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  And then the third piece was podcasts, too. So podcasts has a similar challenge, like podcast creators want distribution, want discovery, want community. So we we started building out these verticals and we changed the product design to kind of have these, almost like our own version of subreddits to an extent, except they were very minimal in that here's a place to discover the newest games today, here's a place to discover the newest books, and then podcasts. And over several months, we spent designing these experiences and building them out and and even hiring like people to kind of lead on the community side in each individual vertical. And the problem is ultimately what we found is it didn't lead to growth and we just didn't build a good product, actually, is the main issue.

• 35:19Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  For for those categories.

• 35:22Shaan Puri?

  So you got, what happened? What'd you get wrong?

• 35:24Speaker 01

  So there are a few things. Uh, one, one, it all starts with, number one is the product experience. So. We didn't want to, we didn't want to clutter the overall product tent.com experience by, you know, drastically changing the experience to adapt to all these other verticals. And so let's take gaming as one example. We want to keep it simple, daily feed, upvote, comments, et cetera. So it's similar and it feels familiar to the rest of the community. But the reality is in gaming, you don't want Xbox and PC and mobile, like all these games mixed together in the same feed. You probably play one, maybe two different consoles or PC, that's what you play on. You don't want to see all that mixed together. And so the experience for someone who's like a really hardcore PC gamer is pretty awful,

• 36:08Speaker 01

  because you have all these different types of platforms being surfaced and it just was a terrible experience. You know, and then podcasts also, it wasn't an ideal experience because this was a web-based, primarily desktop-focused experience. You're not going to really go generally to a website to listen to podcasts. You want it on your phone where you're at the gym or you're commuting. So that was the major issue. It was just the, the product experience was not great. There was two big directions we could take. We decided to incorporate it all in the same domain, but we also considered spinning it out into gamehunt.com and podcasthunt.com. We didn't do that because that would just also require a lot of effort. However, it would have allowed us to be more flexible in the UX and really create something authentic and native to that community.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  So if we went that direction, maybe things would be different, but we ended up failing on that and then kind of like backtracking and killing off those categories.

• 36:59Shaan Puri?

  Okay, and so you, you end up deciding to sell the company. You sell it to Angel List. You told me a little bit about how that came about because I was in the process of selling my company. I said, hey, how the hell do you do this? And you told me about this, this walk you took with Naval. Tell me about the, the walk with Naval.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Naval invested in our, our seed round. So we raised two rounds. One was a seed round, basically going into YC. And got a lot of great people involved and then towards the end of YC, we raised a Series A. And so we had two rounds and Naval was part of both of those. Going back, I always admired Angel List. I used to browse Angel List looking for cool products and companies. And like literally on like a Saturday morning, I would just do that and like command click on a bunch of URLs and like say, oh, that's cool. It's cool because I'm a weirdo, but obviously.

• 37:41Shaan Puri?

  That's my Coachella.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's.

• 37:43Shaan Puri?

  Twenty two's Angel List tabs, that's my Coachella.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm that guy. But obviously Angel List was not built for product discovery and everything. But so I've always kind of admired what they've done and what they've built. And so fast forward, this is 2016. Naval had been an investor, so he's been in the loop and the whole process and everything. And so we were in the process of exploring, do we raise Series B or do we pursue acquisitions? So kind of, I think one important thing for founders to take to heart is optionality. Optionality is everything. Doesn't mean you have to pursue all options, but if you have, you know, an acquisition offer and a Series B offer, that's like 10 times better than just having one offer.

• 38:18Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  So we, Naval and I spoke and I'm trying to, trying to remember exactly the, how the conversation proceeded, but it was sort of a mutual thing. I went to him and in the back of my head, I'm like, I wonder if there's an opportunity to work together. And then meanwhile, he, I think he.

• 38:32Shaan Puri?

  You strike me as somebody who's not going to bring it up though. It's like, this would be great, but I'm not going to force it. I have too much respect almost to bring it up kind of overtly.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:41Shaan Puri?

  It seems like almost he brought it up and you're like, hell yes.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, he, he was the first one that explicitly brought it up. But it's kind of like when you're, it's kind of like in dating when you're like friends with someone and you, you know, maybe start to flirt a little bit. And then you're like, you both kind of know, okay, I think he might be into me, she might be into me. So I think it was sort of like that.

• 38:58Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  And.

• 38:59Shaan Puri?

  So you kissed.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we, me and Naval kissed. It was very affectionate. He's got soft lips. I hope he doesn't hear this. And so from there, you know, we, we had more serious conversations of figuring out, okay, what would this look like? And how would this work? And we have a distributed team, your team is centralized, how are these cultures going to blend? So it was maybe three or four months of sort of discussions and diligence to, to come to a final like conclusion there.

• 39:26Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so you sell the company, you've got money now. What happens that first day money hits the bank? Were you sitting there refreshing Wells Fargo over again or what?

• 39:37Speaker 01

  Some people, they love to go like celebrate like a big thing. Actually, me, I flew to LA that day. I think it was a Friday and my girlfriend lives in LA and we've been together four years now. And we actually just went to a restaurant and I ordered, of course, like a rotisserie chicken and like some Brussels sprouts. And I think I had one glass of wine and that was it, sparkling wine. And that was it. And I don't know, it was, it was a feeling of leading up to that was just a lot of stress. As with any acquisition or fundraise process, it's super anxiety inducing. And especially this situation because there's like, when you're raising money, you have this, you're sort of in the middle as a founder and a CEO. You have your teammates, you have your investors, you have yourself, you have the acquire. And you're sort of stuck in the middle of how do you make everyone happy?

• 40:22Speaker 01

  And inevitably, not everyone's going to be perfectly happy. There's going to be trade offs. And so that was the most stressful time of my life to date was the leading up to that. Because it was, at any moment, a deal could fall through and I'm sort of responsible for all these people's jobs and, you know, investors and everything else. And so I think for that, that day was like a sigh of relief a little bit, more than anything.

• 40:47Shaan Puri?

  So you told the waiter, bring out the sparkling wine.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Give me one glass of sparkling wine, a prosecco, please.

• 40:52Shaan Puri?

  I think that's what the kids call Molly.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no Molly that night. And then, and then it was really just back to work, I guess. I mean, back to work in, in terms of like, okay, how do we make sure everyone is comfortable? Everyone feels taken care of? How do we work together in this new organization? But, you know, now it's been two and a half years later and we're, we're still just back to work, I guess.

• 41:12Shaan Puri?

  Love it. And so, you know, my goal with this podcast is interesting people telling their true, which happens to be really interesting stories. And then the other part is a level of transparency around numbers and money. So people can get educated. Cause money's this weird taboo thing where we like, don't talk about, you know, how we got it, how we spend it, how we invest it, how we earn more of it. Which is strange because the more open we are, the more people can kind of better their own situations. It won't affect your situation. And so give somebody who's listening to this and people who are listening to this, the way I imagine it is you're commuting to work. You're an employee at a job today. You dream of startups. You're either working at a startup or you dream of starting one one day. And they can relate to kind of your story by saying, hey, he was at Play Haven. Like, what were you making when you were at Play Haven?

• 41:57Shaan Puri?

  What was your, like, salary then?

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it was, I got a one or two raises over the years, but I think I ended at a hundred and twenty thousand.

• 42:05Shaan Puri?

  Right. So you're making a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year. Great salary. You got this job. You got this certainty. You end up taking a leap of faith, going to starting your own thing, which is fantastic. And now, fast forward to today, how do you think, like, I guess, what's your relationship with money today? Are you, is this something you're really driven by? Do you not even look and don't even care? Are you trying to explore new ways to make money? Tell me about how you're thinking about money now.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I, so I was able to buy a condo in San Francisco, which is a huge milestone that is hard to achieve here after that acquisition. And that was partly like an investment decision as well, which so far, according to Redfin, it's done well.

• 42:41Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  We'll see.

• 42:43Shaan Puri?

  Gotta love that Redfin estimate.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  I know, I know. You know, we need more housing here in San Francisco, that's for sure. And so for me, I've been fortunate. I came from like a middle-class family, so I've never had challenges or worries about like food or shelter or anything like that. I've also been able to go to college without having to pay for it. I did like work through college, but, you know, it's a part-time job, but it wasn't like I had to work to pay, you know, off eighty thousand dollars in debt or things like that. So I'm super fortunate in that sense. So in some ways, money hasn't changed dramatically now today. However, the way I think about it is I'm trying to, I'm trying to think long-term in my sort of professional career. And so I have multiple things going on right now. One, Product Hunt is still primary focus. And, you know, frankly, a lot of my net worth is tied up in Angel List,

• 43:26Speaker 01

  so I'm incented to make sure this is successful with Product Hunt being part of Angel List. So that's sort of one piece. And then I have the fund I started too, which is another piece, which I'm trying to...

• 43:35Shaan Puri?

  And that's called the Weekend Fund.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:37Shaan Puri?

  Love it.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  And, and that's partly to learn. Like, I always wanted to invest in, partly to learn, but also, like, we'll see in six, seven, eight years if I make any money on it. But that's another opportunity for me to make money and kind of gain leverage in a different way. Naval actually talks about this in a lot of this podcast around like, how do you gain leverage?

• 43:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you should probably just stop listening to this podcast and go listen to Naval's podcast. That's what I would do if I was you. That's my actual recommendation. I would start with that. And then somehow wander back here eventually.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's, he's got a lot more insights than I have, that's for sure. But I'm really trying to explore, okay, how can I have multiple parallel things going on that? Gain leverage and either create money in some way or impact in other ways. And that's not using my time. So this is going back to what I said before. I hate getting paid by my time. With the fund, of course, I spend a lot of time on it, but my time doesn't have a direct input in the outcome.

• 44:26Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  It's really, do I?

• 44:28Shaan Puri?

  Pick the right companies.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Pick great companies and do they succeed over the long term? And does that return capital to me and the LPs and the fund? And the same is kind of true for Proton Angelus too, is if we're successful and we do really well, the stake and equity that I have in Angelus will hopefully grow as well. So I'm sort of, my like real payday, I kind of put that in quotes, is still TBD and it's like out there because a lot of it's kind of invested in the fund and Angelus itself. But for me, I don't know, I don't have to worry, I don't have to worry about food and shelter unless something bad happens. But I certainly can't retire, I'm far from that.

• 45:00Shaan Puri?

  Plus, you basically eat rotisserie chicken anyways every meal.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 45:04Shaan Puri?

  I think you're safe no matter what.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  And I buy spinach.

• 45:07Shaan Puri?

  Seven bucks at Costco? What are we talking here? Where are you getting your chickens?

• 45:10Speaker 01

  The pro tip, the pro tip actually is I like, I eat the same things all the time. And then a lot of it's like spinach salads and stuff. And so, but on Instacart, there's like a bulk, it's not a Costco, but it's actually where all the restaurants go for bulk foods. You can buy a two and a half pound bag of spinach for four bucks there. And so I just buy that and that lasts me quite a while.

• 45:28Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Pro tip.

• 45:30Shaan Puri?

  Nice, the Ryan Hoover diet. Get fit in 90 days while building your company. This is your new.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  It's my next book. That's my other lever, I'm going to write a book.

• 45:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, of course. If you haven't written a fitness book, are you even trying? Is kind of the way I feel about it.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  That's the name of it, actually.

• 45:44Shaan Puri?

  So, all right, so what if you're 21 today? You, let's say, let's take Proton away. You have your time back, you have your youthful energy back. You're 21, you want to make a million bucks. What sort of thing would you do today? Where would you, where would you spend your time?

• 45:59Speaker 01

  I mean, my path has always been spending my time on the things that I find fun and interesting. And I find that motivating because, one, it's just if you're having fun, then you're not going to stop. It's going to be the thing that you want to wake up and do, or the thing you want to do on a Saturday, you know, afternoon. And so I would prioritize those types of things.

• 46:16Shaan Puri?

  So what's fun for you nowadays?

• 46:18Speaker 01

  I mean, there's the non-work stuff, like going to live music is fun. But when it comes to more professional fun, I really enjoy investing and speaking with founders and. Researching spaces and that's really enjoyable. Product Hunt is still fun for me, of course, partly because we're building new things. We have like a new, we're building an entirely new site and brand, which I'll tell you about offline, actually. That leverages Twitter as well.

• 46:40Shaan Puri?

  We're gonna go grab some Chinese food and talk crazy ideas after this. But I do wanna wrap it up on one note. So you have the Weekend Fund. Tell us a little bit about that. How should entrepreneurs reach you? What type of entrepreneurs are you looking for? Tell us how you're gonna turn my 10 Gs from the Weekend Fund into 10 million dollars. So that's what we really want to, that's what the people want to hear.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  I don't know if I can do that. I'm not gonna, not gonna lie. 10K to 10 million. Yeah, so it's investing in early stage. Usually it's the first round of funding. So I say that because different definitions of what pre-seed even means or seed stage. And it is broadly focused. So invest across everything from like an audio and voice company to B2B, SaaS, to shipping logistics. So all over the board. Now, there are some spaces I'm really excited about. You know, I could go deep into why I'm excited about them, but like audio and voice is really interesting. Remote distributed working is a super interesting category. Lots of problems to be solved there. And then another one that I'm personally interested in is low and no-code tools. You know, things like Retool or Airtable or Glide and others that just allow people to build things faster and more efficiently that maybe aren't engineers.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Maybe they are, maybe they're not. Which actually, if that space does really well, Product Hunt will also just see more activity and more engagement and more, there'll be a bigger need for Product Hunt to exist if that works.

• 47:54Shaan Puri?

  Double leverage.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  Double leverage, yeah. So invest in the company that then leads to more products being built, which then leads to more launches on Product Hunt and so on and so forth. And so, so yeah, I'm just investing in early stage, 50 to 100K check size typically. And, and yeah, it's been fun. I brought on an awesome teammate to work with me part-time as well, Vetika. She's in London and she's just helping a lot and has been a cool partner to kind of work with on this as well.

• 48:19Shaan Puri?

  And so what's the right way for an entrepreneur to get your attention nowadays?

• 48:23Speaker 01

  It's a good question.

• 48:24Shaan Puri?

  Launch on Product Hunt?

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Maybe. So for the past almost six years, I wake up every morning and see new products that launch. So I see so many things. And a lot of what I try to understand, if it's super early and there's not much traction or data to even prove out that this thing is working, is to understand like what is, what's unique or different about their approach or their thinking around the space. And, you know, some might call it like, what's the insight or the non-obvious thing that this founder, this team has discovered. Because oftentimes I'll meet an entrepreneur and not that I'm, I certainly am not the smartest person in the world, but if I can almost foresee all the answers to their questions, that's something wrong. Meaning, they should know way more than me about a space. They should almost be educating me and surprising me with something that they've seen that

• 49:09Speaker 01

  the market doesn't see. And so sometimes it's requires kind of weird out there ideas. Those can make really great investments sometimes. Or sometimes they're just weird and out there and like, no one wants that thing they're building. I like to just discover sort of the things that are non-obvious, that haven't been proven, that are, might just seem weird.

• 49:25Shaan Puri?

  So we have Ryan Hunt, Ryan Hoover, Ryan Hunt.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  I've gotten that before. People have called me Ryan Hunt.

• 49:31Shaan Puri?

  Is there like a famous Ryan Hunt? I feel like there is.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe.

• 49:35Shaan Puri?

  He's like a baseball player, but nobody watches baseball anymore. So, all right. So we have Ryan Hoover, founder of Product Hunt, investor in the Weekend Fund. You can find him on Twitter. You can find him, I believe, in LA nowadays. So if you're trying to go bump into him on the street, that's the place to find him. But thank you so much for coming on the podcast, man. I really appreciate it.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks, Sean.

• 49:51Shaan Puri?

  Sweet.