Creating a Massive Community and Making It Profitable with Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt
@rrhoover and I had a fun conversation about the history of Product Hunt, how to grow and run online communities, what it means to be a maker vs an indie hacker, and the things he and the Product Hunt team are doing to reach profitability post-acquisition. 👌
Thanks for having me, @csallen! 🙏🏼
Awesome interview @rrhoover and @csallen 😊 Nice work!
I needed this interview!
@rrhoover thank you for creating Product Hunt ! :)
Really enjoyed hearing two community builders (from different backgrounds) dig into the process of building community around technology! One comment: you guys joked about how funny it is that self-described introverts @rrhoover and @csallen are building online communities. But it's perfectly logical that introverts prefer online communities to offline because of the async communication pattern of most online communities. In this respect, both PH and IH are in part a reflection of the founders. And that's awesome!
True! People assume social people on the internet are extroverts where (anecdotally) it seems to be the opposite.
Awesome interview and lots of good advice from @rrhoover ( and @csallen as per usual ).
I especially liked the discussion around Product Hunt's habit of building out lots of smaller products / features and the pros and cons of doing so.
@rrhoover I love the idea to think about building a product as a way to express yourself!
I wish someone'd ask what was the biggest facepalm moment building IH/PH :D (i.e. biggest troll/biggest bug etc)
Funny because it's hard to even think of one… not because there haven't been any, but probably because my brain tries to forget about them and move on. A few candidates:
Taking 6 weeks after launch to realize HN would be a good distribution channel going into the future, even though that's where I initially launched and it went well. Should've been obvious. 🙈
Burning myself out in November 2016 looking for additional distribution channels and coming up with nothing.
Countless email newsletter typos and broken links. You'd think I'd learn eventually to always double check…
Letting the top navigation bar stay in such a miserable state for such a long time.
Lots of missed opportunities… things I should've built, meetings I should've had, and strategies I should've followed much, much earlier.
In general, not being sufficiently ambitious for the site until after joining Stripe.
Thanks, those are some pretty good "war-stories"
Very inspiring to listen to, thank you!
Awesome!
i am making a community based platform, so I found the different approaches to monetising and partnering very interesting!
@rrhoover what made you build the SAAS into PH, and not something separate, but launched via PH?
ProductHunt is a great product. I think that it shows the amount of work and love that Ryan and the guys at ProductHunt have put into their product.
The interview is great also! Thanks for it
Great interview! The really interesting part was the idea of turning IH into another Twitter. I'm intrigued and hope @csallen has an idea of how to keep it from becoming a hate machine like the actual twitter...
Certain topics are toxic. Politics is the big one. It's divisive, ideological, and has no minimum barrier to entry. Everyone participates, not just experts, thereby dragging down the level of conversation while simultaneously amplifying the number of conversations. It will always be a part of Twitter, because Twitter is for general discussion. Not so for IH, which is centered around a very limited set of topics. You rarely see politics on niche sites.
Additionally, Twitter's requirement that everything be a tweet (and that tweets be short) prevents substantive, thoughtful discussion. I'll always prefer threaded comments for topics like business.
Happy to talk more about this elsewhere. 👍
Just commented on this above, but glad to see your comment here. Based on what you write here, it sounds a lot like you're not really planning on changing it to something like Twitter...
Agreed. I've been thinking that the ability to retweet and add commentary to a tweet was a major factor in Twitter becoming as nasty as it has.
Yeah, that plus politics. I see bootstrappers on Twitter using that feature all the time in a way that's positive and helpful.
Great interview! I was excited to listen when I saw this in the Indie Hackers newsletter.
Thanks @rrhoover and @csallen.
Are monthly active users and registered user numbers for PH and IH public?
IH has about 12,000 signed-in members visiting each month, and a lot more anonymous
lurkersvisitors.Greatly enjoyed the interview, thanks for the insight!
@csallen - PLEASE don't change Indie Hackers into something like Twitter!