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.
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). :)
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:
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
I've never told makers to beg for upvotes and in cases where people have incentivized people (e.g. donating money to charity for every upvote -- yes, that happened), we've removed the post entirely.