- The founder of Product Hunt, a non-technical solo founder, shares advice for non-technical founders.
- He applied to YC (Y Combinator) despite thinking they preferred technical founders and had some traction with his product.
- Demonstrating data and proof that people want your product is essential for non-technical founders.
- Non-technical founders can validate ideas and build products without coding, using tools like email lists and Typeform.
- Product Hunt's new product, Ship, helps startups announce products, collect emails, and get feedback.
- Product Hunt is shifting focus towards monetization and exploring ways to generate revenue, including connecting companies with talent.
- Email has always been an effective way for Product Hunt to stay in touch with people and engage them.
- The founder successfully hacked non-computer systems as a kid to make money, such as selling items on eBay.
- In his YC application and interview, he aimed to communicate his vision and the need for a platform to discover products being built.

- The speaker's approach was to sell the idea of creating a place on the internet for discovering products being built.
- The YC partners understood the pain point of makers and startups when it comes to discovery.
- The speaker emphasized the importance of communicating confidence during the interview process.
- The speaker discussed the decision to quietly kill the podcast section on Product Hunt due to the different dynamics of podcast discovery.
- The speaker mentioned Breaker as a company executing on the podcast discovery opportunity.
- YC instills a data-driven and deliberate culture, but it didn't dramatically change the speaker's team's culture.
- The speaker's team is distributed, with headquarters in SF and team members in various time zones.
- The advantages of a distributed team include the ability to hire globally and lower costs.
- Building a distributed team also provides a global perspective and understanding of different communities.
- Communication can be challenging with a distributed team, but it is workable.

- The founder of Product Hunt, Ryan Hoover, explains how he acquired his first 1,000 users and created a community quickly.
- Before Product Hunt, Hoover had built an audience within the tech community through his writing and collaborations with other founders and investors.
- Press coverage and personal outreach to makers and founders were effective tactics for growing the community.
- Product Hunt's growth has been international, with different startup hubs around the world contributing to its audience.
- Trends in the types of products featured on Product Hunt reflect the themes and interests of the time.
- Hoover is personally interested in exploring new ideas and platforms, such as voice-based applications and AI.
- There is potential for technology or products to address issues like fake news and video emulation.
- The number of upvotes on Product Hunt does not determine a product's success, as startups often take years to thrive.

- The speaker discusses the importance of building an audience and getting feedback from a community when launching a product on Product Hunt
- They mention the value of engaging with customers and providing good customer service
- The speaker talks about their love for exploring new products and how they use Twitter to interact with people
- They mention a weekly digest newsletter that includes the most upvoted products on Product Hunt
- The speaker shares a lesson they learned about giving up work and allowing the right people to do their job when growing a team
- They explain that Product Hunt has not considered investing in top products or makers, but they have hosted dinners and meetups with founders and investors
- The speaker reveals that they have raised a small fund using the AngelList angel fund platform and are now investing in startups under the name "Weekend Fun"

- The speaker believes that weekends are important for starting small projects that can grow into something big.
- The speaker is interested in investing in areas where they can be helpful, such as community-based products and tools for remote and distributed teams.
- They are also interested in the potential of voice technology and believe that living in a virtual reality world could be a positive thing.
- The speaker does not currently spend any time in virtual reality but believes it will become more accessible and widespread in the future.
- They have been following the rise of crypto assets and believe it has the potential to create new experiences and change behavior.
- In their spare time, the speaker enjoys going to concerts and seeing live music, as well as spending time alone at a coffee shop.

- The founder of Product Hunt, a non-technical solo founder, shares advice for non-technical founders.
- Demonstrating data and proof that people want your product is essential for non-technical founders.
- Non-technical founders can validate ideas and build products without coding, using tools like email lists and Typeform.
- Product Hunt's new product, Ship, helps startups announce products, collect emails, and get feedback.
- Product Hunt is shifting focus towards monetization and exploring ways to generate revenue.
- Email has always been an effective way for Product Hunt to stay in touch with people and engage them.
- The founder successfully hacked non-computer systems as a kid to make money.
- In his YC application and interview, he aimed to communicate his vision and the need for a platform to discover products being built.
- The YC partners understood the pain point of makers and startups when it comes to discovery.
- The speaker emphasized the importance of communicating confidence during the interview process.
- The speaker discussed the decision to quietly kill the podcast section on Product Hunt due to the different dynamics of podcast discovery.
- The speaker's team is distributed, with headquarters in SF and team members in various time zones.
- Building a distributed team provides a global perspective and understanding of different communities.
- Communication can be challenging with a distributed team, but it is workable.
- The founder of Product Hunt, Ryan Hoover, explains how he acquired his first 1,000 users and created a community quickly.
- Press coverage and personal outreach to makers and founders were effective tactics for growing the community.
- Product Hunt's growth has been international, with different startup hubs around the world contributing to its audience.
- Trends in the types of products featured on Product Hunt reflect the themes and interests of the time.
- Hoover is personally interested in exploring new ideas and platforms, such as voice-based applications and AI.
- The speaker discusses the importance of building an audience and getting feedback from a community when launching a product on Product Hunt.
- They mention the value of engaging with customers and providing good customer service.
- The speaker talks about their love for exploring new products and how they use Twitter to interact with people.
- They mention a weekly digest newsletter that includes the most upvoted products on Product Hunt.
- The speaker shares a lesson they learned about giving up work and allowing the right people to do their job when growing a team.
- Product Hunt has not considered investing in top products or makers, but they have hosted dinners and meetups with founders and investors.
- The speaker reveals that they have raised a small fund using the AngelList angel fund platform and are now investing in startups under the name "Weekend Fun".
- The speaker believes that weekends are important for starting small projects that can grow into something big.
- The speaker is interested in investing in areas such as community-based products, tools for remote and distributed teams, voice technology, and virtual reality.
- They have been following the rise of crypto assets and believe it has the potential to create new experiences and change behavior.
- In their spare time, the speaker enjoys going to concerts, seeing live music, and spending time alone at a coffee shop.

Ryan Hoover is the founder of Product Hunt.

Get a 10% discount on Ship pro plans by using this link - https://www.producthunt.com/ship?promo=YCFRIENDS

Ryan also just announced the Weekend Fund, a "$3M venture fund to invest in your next favorite thing" - https://medium.com/@rrhoover/weekend-fund-%EF%B8%8F-72dfdc830f00

YC's podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon - http://twitter.com/craigcannon

All right, so maybe we could start with this question from Stuart Powell, and his question is what's your advice for non-technical founders?

As you are a non-technical founder and a solo founder or a co-founder of

Solo founder, but had a founding team, so couldn't do it without them, of course.

Okay, so maybe the best way to go about this is you explain how you made Product Hunt and then share some advice for Stuart.

Yeah, so I remember applying to YC and historically I always realized or thought that YC, 1, didn't like solo founders and 2, always preferred technical founders to begin with.

So I was like, I don't know if YC is going to like me.

So I ended up applying anyway after speaking with Gary and Alexis and Kat and some others and Kevin Hale, getting their support.

And When I went into YC, when we applied to YC, we already had some traction, we already had some proof that people wanted this thing.

It was obviously still very small because it was pretty early days, but we were seeing about 50% month-over-month growth in total top-line user visits.

And that was consistent for the first, I don't know, 234 months.

And so that really demonstrated that, oh wow, this person, he's a single founder and he's non-technical, but somehow this thing is growing and people seem to want it.

And when you're, you know, whether you're non-technical or technical or whatever it may be, if you can demonstrate data like that, it's hard to argue.

It's hard to say that, oh, actually, no, this isn't useful.

If you're demonstrating that people are using your product, then that's ultimate proof.

And so when people who are non-technical founders come to you now, what do you advise them?

How do you figure out how to make prototypes and get something out the door?

There's a lot of ways that you can validate ideas or build products without really coding anything.

Product Hunt was an email list in the beginning.

So really I was forced, not being an engineer, to not spend weeks and weeks building something that may be something that people didn't want.

Instead I was like, okay, well what can I build and then what experience could I provide that would maybe validate or test whether people wanted this?

So I built this email list, sent it out, got a few hundred subscribers initially, and it took me 20 minutes to set up.

From a product standpoint, I was like, email's actually a great place to put content, to re-engage people, because they, our audience, people in technology, they use email every single day.

So for non-technical people, Things like email or hacking things together with Typeform actually is a really good tool to almost create a product, essentially.

You can put Typeform and Stripe together and actually collect money, that's the ultimate test.

You can get people to pay you money for something, then you're like, well, wow, they clearly want this.

So I think there's a lot of things you can do without doing any coding.

Even if you are technical, it's actually, in many cases, wise to start testing with those types of non-technical tools so that you can put something out there sooner and earlier.

Yeah, and do you find that well, you just launched Ship, like this new product or new feature, I guess.

Are people using that to beta test stuff, or are these fully functioning products?

Yeah, it's a combination of everything, really.

It's basically a toolkit for makers and startups to, 1, announce new products that they're creating, collect emails for those products, and then get feedback and communicate with those users.

lot of these things we were actually doing at Product Hunt for several years through various tools like MailChimp, using Typeform, just basically sending out screenshots and using actually Envision as a great tool to get people to annotate screenshots and give feedback.

So you're sort of hacking all these tools together and we're like, okay, well, people on Product Hunt are continually asking us, how can I use Product Hunt to start getting initial users or feedback for my product before I'm ready to launch?

So we built Ship and we're seeing people use it for everything we were just talking earlier about, like Casey Neistat and his new app.

They used it to start capturing interest for Beam Panels, their new app that's coming out.

Soon them and other similar people are using it to then seed it with beta users to get actual feedback on the product.

So long story short, our goal is to create something that people could use to start generating demand and communicating with their audience.

And ultimately what I believe is the more you can communicate with your audience, make them feel involved in the process and get feedback from them, the higher chance you are in building something that people want or a good product ultimately.

And I think this also relates to another question, which is a little blunt, but Diego asked, is there a business model in product hunt?

Are you trying to go in that direction with the ship product or what's the plan?

Yeah, So historically we've never really charged for anything.

Outside of a long, long time ago, once upon a time, we did post for, charge people for job postings, but then we stopped that to focus entirely on building the community and the audience.

Now we're shifting some of our focus towards monetization, and SHIP is actually the first thing that we've directly charged for outside of those initial tests.

The fun part is yesterday we launched, we set up, of course, a Slack bot to notify whenever someone gives us money.

Those are the best notifications we're getting.

It's like, wow, this person just subscribed for like $249 a month to this thing that we built.

And I woke up this morning to a bunch more notifications.

So our strategy going forward here, and especially in Q4, is to think more about what are the things that we can build and provide that people like so much that they're willing to pay for.

And SHIP is showing a lot of promise and, you know, helping startups with, you know, communicating and marketing and so on.

Another piece that we are working on that hasn't really shown that you'll start to see soon is also leveraging the community and the platform we've built to connect companies with talent.

So now that we're inside of AngelList, there's this whole A-list talent platform.

It's a great place to recruit great talent.

And we also in Product Hunt have a lot of talented engineers, designers, marketers, and so on, that might want to join companies that are launching in Product Hunt.

So it's a nice opportunity to make those connections and as a result, generate some revenue out of that without being super heavy handed and showing pop-ups and

Maybe audio playing videos with sound and everything.

guys do email well, but you could push it even further.

Have you always, so it was first email list, Have you always believed that email was going to be the most effective way for you to stay in touch with people?

Yeah, it's always been, you know, a lot of people say email is dead, emails, dumb.

And it's a great channel for reengagement.

I wrote in, I used to write a lot and blog a lot and wrote about an article called Email First Startups.

Actually, it was 1 of the early articles that I had on Hacker News that got on the homepage.

It was basically just outlining various startups that started off as emails to begin with.

AngelList MVP essentially was an email digest.

But yeah, it was an email list in the beginning, and it's a very simple way to MVP something and see if people actually open it and click on it.

It's also very malleable, so every single morning or every day when you send that email, you can change the copy, you can try different things.

Whereas when you put something in code, it's a lot harder to change in most cases.

So, when you're sort of testing ideas, email is a great channel for that.

We had a bunch of questions around the YC application.

Actually, David Adomu, I might be mispronouncing his last name, tell us about a time you successfully hacked a non-computer system to your advantage.

I forgot what I, OK, I can't remember if this was my answer in the YC application or not, it may have been.

So as a kid, I was always interested in working on different projects and trying to turn something into money.

Like I hated getting paid hourly because if I did a terrible job or an awesome job, I got paid the same, whatever, $6 or $7 an hour.

So I was always trying to find entrepreneurial ways to make money.

And 1 of those was actually selling things on eBay when I was a kid.

would browse Fat Wallet and Slick Deals, which are these communities and forums where people would post different deals that you can get on, usually electronics.

And it would usually involve things with rebates, price matching, and all these hacks that you'd have to work around.

Some of them slightly gray hat, it's a little bit shady.

In any case, what I would do is browse those websites daily and then find opportunities to buy things that were maybe 30 or 40% off MSRP and then buy them and then sell them on eBay.

And I think I sold, It wasn't a lot, like it was $150,000, maybe $200,000 in like merchandise.

But I really wasn't, it was almost like enjoyable for me to find and hunt for these things and then make money on it.

It didn't even matter how much money I made.

For me, it was more like, oh, I could turn this thing into like this idea into money.

And so I did that through, I don't know, high school and some in college.

There was a whole Planet Money episode about that.

Yeah, people going to, it was a year or 2 ago, Toys R Us and reselling on Amazon.

There's this whole culture of that little arbitrage, but you just get enough volume.

What were the main points you were trying to get across in your YC application and interview?

Yeah, I think looking back on it, I believe, you know, part of it was I was going in there again as single founder, non-technical.

And so my approach really was to communicate and sort of sell them on this vision and idea that we need a place on the internet, a place to discover all these products being built.

You know, I think the audience, the YC partners, they understood the pain point that makers and startups are seeing when it comes to discovery.

So I felt that that was a strong thing to capture and to kind of double down on.

But really it was just about selling the vision of like how do we create a place where in a world where we have all these products, people can discover the best ones ultimately.

Other than that, it was also just like communicating confidence in some ways.

I think you go into that interview, people are nervous, I was nervous.

In my case, it was like 3 to 4 people in front of you drilling you with questions.

I remember Sam, Sam Alderman was 1 of them and it's just like, you cut me off a couple times and I came prepared knowing that.

So I was like, okay, if they cut me off, I'm just going to move on and, you know, try to be succinct and clear.

I think that's psychologically very difficult for people.

And at that point is 1 of my main points of advice when they're asking like pre-interview, like you can't let that ruin your flow or ruin your energy.

A lot of people start to get defensive when they're interrupted and then it just spirals out of control.

So it's like a weird psychological tactic.

Especially if you have more multiple founders too.

It's the dynamic of who speaks when and how do you make sure that you don't look like you're fighting.

The last thing you want is 2 founders to look like they already have founder problems in a 10 minute interview, which can be challenging.

All right, oh yeah, I did have a question about podcast discovery.

So where do you see that going right now?

Like obviously you guys have a podcast section.

Yes and no, we actually kind of quietly killed podcasts.

Yeah, so this is some of the history in Product Hunt is early on we of course have been targeting the tech community and we made some mistakes admittedly on some of the execution of some kind of category expansions.

We went into games and books and podcast was like the sort of fourth category that we introduced.

And in hindsight, it was very clear why podcasts didn't belong in our current product ecosystem.

1 podcast, you know, discovery and the way you consume podcasts is wildly different than you discover an app or a product.

It's also very frequent, like there's a new podcast every week or more than that.

So like the dynamics didn't really work with just shoving it into the product community.

However, the direction and the opportunity that we were tackling with podcasts specifically I think is still something I would love to see.

There's a YC company called Breaker, which you probably know of, which in many ways is executing on the way that we would have or wanted to execute on podcasts if we focused on podcasts.

Ultimately we decided podcast is not our business.

Like we're focused on product discovery primarily and we're going to stop doing that.

Breaker is approaching it in a similar way where they're leveraging community and enabling people to discover podcasts in a new and different way through other people and friends.

So I think, I mean, from a market perspective, I don't see a world where we don't have something like that in podcasts, like a place where people can discover and engage and almost geek out about podcasts together.

To date, those exist in like on Reddit to some extent and various places on the internet, but there's no leader in that space right now.

Well, I think about it in the context of YouTube and you mostly rely on the algorithm and then like the old school methods of, you know, basically a guest post.

So you're like, you're on my vlog, I'm on your vlog.

Podcasting is pretty difficult, but I agree.

That's the 1 thing that all the other apps haven't done.

What were your biggest takeaways from YC?

I think part of it is, 1 of the great things about being in YC is you are held accountable in your, it's, it's a, it's almost like to some extent school, like your, your professor is going to be like, did you read the, did you do the homework?

Your test results are going to show like whether you learn the thing or not at YC during that 3 month process, I'm losing track even, you know, you have this accountability on a week over week basis and you go into these group office hours, where you're sharing your updates.

And at the time, Cass or in Kevin Hale were our group partners and they would ask questions like, all right, did you do that thing we talked about last week?

And so it was a forcing function to just get shit done because you don't have much time.

And there's, I think that mentality is very healthy.

And while it is uncomfortable and stressful in many cases, it's the best way to, to especially get off the ground because you, you just need to do a lot of work and

I am always curious how, how the behavior changes after YC, because there's like, there's this period of, I guess you product on wasn't around all that long before you

Yeah, it was about 5, 6 months before we actually entered.

So you didn't have that many defined habits.

But do you find yourself adapting like new styles of running the team after YC or is it pretty similar to the the way you were going about it before?

YC was so focused in that initial phase and then once we we raise a series A basically right after YC and then hired and so our process changed and as it does when you hire another 5 or 10 people.

And so in many ways we continue to have to change the way that we're doing things.

Like this next quarter we might make some changes in our process again.

Partly just because you see what didn't go well last quarter and so you want to change it.

So I don't know, in some ways I think a lot of it is, YC instills a data-driven and very deliberate talk to your customers type of culture, which I think is something that I believe we had prior to YC.

So for us maybe it didn't dramatically change our culture the way that operating so much, but it certainly changed us in ways that I couldn't probably realize just because it's hard to know what we would be without YC.

And so are you guys all, there were a couple questions for you about remote teams.

Yeah, so we're about 2 thirds outside of SF.

So we have headquarters in SF, but from the beginning we've been a distributed team.

In fact, the first person that ended up well, paying out of Pocket initially was Ricardo in Italy.

He was a developer that came on board, and awesome guy.

From the very beginning we had a distributed team.

Andreas came on, our CTO, shortly after that.

He was at the time in Vienna, Now he's here in San Francisco.

But we now have 17 people across, I think it's 8 or 9 time zones, from Bulgaria, London, Denver, all over the board.

These people are developers or designers.

Yeah, it's a combination of community and engineering.

I mean, did you set out to build a distributed team or was it just by happenstance that you knew someone in Italy that could help?

You know, It wasn't intentional in the beginning.

And frankly, because at the time, 1, not being an engineer, I needed to find engineers.

And then Andreas and I naturally came together and we both had this passion for building this community.

He then recruited a lot of the early engineers who were based in Europe, because that's where a lot of his network at the time was.

And so it sort of organically formed that way.

And then in hindsight we realized there's a couple huge advantages to distributed teams.

You don't need to hire people just in San Francisco or people who want to move here.

2, it's very expensive to hire in San Francisco, of course.

The cost of living here is dramatically higher than it is in Bulgaria.

And the third piece too is it's also very competitive when it comes to hiring, especially for an early stage startup when you're trying to take someone from Google or Facebook, they're getting paid, I don't know, $200,000 with beautiful cafeteria lunches.

You as a C-stage or pre-funded company, it's harder to convince them to come on board.

So I think there's a lot of benefits in building remote distributed teams.

The other fourth piece is also we get this global perspective to some extent, where more than half the product community is actually outside the US.

And I don't know for certain, but I think part of that is because our team itself is distributed across the world.

And so maybe there's this level of empathy or understanding of those communities.

So I think we'll see, I believe we'll see more and more distributed teams, more remote workers.

It's sort of this movement towards that direction.

And I think more people will be willing to build teams like that because it's easier to work remotely with Slack and various video chat apps like Zoom, which we use and love.

It does come with challenges, but overall it's a lot of benefits

But nothing like outside of the normal complaints and workflow?

Sometimes it's difficult when you have overlap of maybe 4 hours working together instead of like a full day.

I think they're particularly excited like figuring out how you just got started.

1 person asked, Hattie Zhu asked, how did you acquire your first 1,000 users?

Sebastian Massad asks, how do you create a community so quickly?

What was your, so you started this email list, but did you have a following before online?

Yeah, so it started, Product Hunt in some way started years before Product Hunt started in some ways.

You know, it's before Product Hunt, I mentioned earlier, I was writing a lot and I would love to play with products and explore products and write about, I was writing with like Snapchat and all these other new apps and new behaviors.

And I was just super curious about, you know, why are people engaged with these things?

I helped Nir with his book, Hooked, and did more writing there.

I was building a tiny bit of an audience, not massive, not Casey at all, he's ridiculous, but a big enough audience within this centered tech community to the point where when I did launch Product Hunt, when I announced the email, I had enough people following me to say, oh, I know Ryan, this looks cool, I'm going to try it out.

And so it was a combination of having this first few hundred people to sign up, which was super important, And then also building relationships with other founders and investors and people that had known me for a long time.

That made it exciting and allowed them to be comfortable joining and participating in the community.

So the initial kind of first few hundred, let's say, are just people that I built an audience or a following with for years prior.

And then after that, when it launched, it was, okay, how do we grow this community?

1 was, press was actually a great growth driver in the beginning.

And so we worked on getting press or doing guest publishing.

I actually wrote, ironically, I wrote in Fast Company something titled how we got our first 2,000 users.

And it's ironic that I was writing about that, because my entire goal of writing about that was to get another thousand users.

And that worked in the beginning, because Product Hunt was new to the tech industry at that time, and so people would sign up and be like, what is this thing?

We also realized that when makers and founders saw their product on Product Hunt, naturally they wanted to join the conversation, they wanted to share it.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Communicate with Users, Build Something They Want - Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt