rrhoover

Sending love, whisky friend :)

This was written for investors but curious to hear the POV from more founders

Appreciate that. :)

We also entered the market at the right time. 2013 was very optimistic as mobile hit mainstream and barriers to build lowered. We’re entering a similar phase with AI today.

It's been a while since I've published an essay. Hopefully this is useful for a few folks.

I do implicitly as I've gotten to know talented, motivated people

I've been doing a lot of self-reflection going into the new year and thought I would share some learnings building Product Hunt over the past 5 years, along with our YC application video (perhaps against my better judgement). :)

Product Hunt (YC S14) | Full time | REMOTE

We love products, care about people, and thirst to build a community that celebrates making. Our distributed, tight-knit team is headquartered in SF. We're looking for a few fine folks to join us:

Head of Social Media and News: https://angel.co/product-hunt/jobs/325616-head-of-social-med...

Senior Full-Stack Engineer: https://angel.co/product-hunt/jobs/229499-senior-full-stack-...

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️AngelList | Full time | REMOTE

Additionally, we're building a small, strong team to work on a new stealth project inside of AngelList. Our mission: to support startups, makers, and those building and shaping the future of tech.

Senior Full-Stack Engineer, Platform: https://angel.co/angellist/jobs/407418-senior-full-stack-eng...

Head of Community Marketing, Platform: https://angel.co/angellist/jobs/405764-head-of-community-mar...

Community Manager, Platform: https://angel.co/angellist/jobs/435059-community-manager-pla...

Funny you ask. Jacq on our team is planning our next retreat. Earlier this year we brought everyone to SF. The year prior shortly after the acquisition, the entire team (including AngelList) went to Mexico which was a great opportunity to get to know the broader team.

This time we may do an offsite elsewhere, which might be more fun and affordable.

It's been a loooong time since we hosted a hackathon. The last one took place at YC HQ in Mountain View three years ago.

So far we have 1,000+ makers signed up and awesome group of judges, including YC's very own Michael Seibel, participating.

Love the idea of connecting makers with specific beta testers that match their target audience. We're exploring this as well.

Re: "spackling of existing services", you're right. We saw so many people piecing various services together (Mailchimp, Typeform, homemade landing pages, etc.) and see an opportunity to simplify and connect all these things together so that makers can focus more of their time building their product.

Product Hunt's ranking works similar to Hacker News. As mentioned in our F[AQ](https://www.producthunt.com/faq#how-do-things-end-up-on-the-...) is based on the number of upvotes, time since posting[1], and detected voting rings/spam accounts.

[1] Time is an important which introduces a "velocity" factor. For example, a product with 100 upvotes that was posted 1 hour ago would generally be ranked above another product with 100 upvotes that was posted 12 hours ago.

[2] We also slightly modify rankings for logged in users based on topics and friends they follow.

Hey, Sam! You recently announced HN is being split off from YC. What changes will we see to the site/community in the next 6 months?

My favorite quote: "If you are driven by social signals, you shouldn’t be an entrepreneur."

We do have voting ring detection in place and often inform makers of our policy on Twitter when we see them asking for upvotes (often times they simply don't know it's not OK) in addition to highlighting this policy in the email that people receive when they're tagged as a maker.

Hi, @taphangum! Sorry about that. :( We ask that makers tweet at @producthunt to get access if they can't already comment. My apologies if you already tried that but I've updated your account so you should be able to jump in the thread now.

As a long-time follower of the mysterious and opinionated Startup L Jackson, we had a fun time chatting with him on the podcast.

I certainly didn't mean to imply "teams have no leaders, and everybody is equally responsible for the success or failure of the business."

I have very strong opinions and recognize the importance of leadership.

Hi, alediaferia. First off, I understand this might be frustrating. Over the past several months, traffic and activity has increased significantly. We're receiving well over 200 submissions every day and while some of these products end up on the homepage (posted or promoted by curators/moderators), the current design won't accommodate several hundreds of posts.

That said, we're exploring changes with respect to submissions, to scale the community. It may be a while before we introduce significant changes here as this is a significant change, but please know that we're working on making Product Hunt more transparent and inclusive.

I've learned a ton from Nir's writing and talks.

Fun fact: before we published the book Nir had the genius idea of crowdsourcing feedback from his readers. Hundreds of people read a rough draft in Google Doc version, correct (the inevitable) typos and annotating suggestions for improvement. It was a great way to get early feedback before finalizing the book and allow its most dedicated readers to be a part of it. Everyone that helped is listed in the back of the book.