Product Hunt's Email Origins

A story about how Ryan Hoover built Product Hunt's early community through manual, personalized outreach.

"Ryan Hoover built Product Hunt, and I was there front row when he was building that thing. I think I'm user number 17 in Product Hunt's history, very early first dozen people on the platform.

Every day he would wake up at 5 or 6 in the morning and go to Phil's coffee. He would sit down with his laptop, first tweet out that he was at Phil's every single day, and then he would start literally emailing and tweeting at people that they should be posting their product on Product Hunt. He'd say things like 'Hey I posted it for you, would love to hear your comment' or 'Hey I noticed this product that's a lot like yours, I wonder if you know about this one in your industry.'

All he was doing was manually being the human notification system for Product Hunt. He was the human invite system, the notification system, the retention system - he was all of it. At the time, that first group he sent it to was maybe 25 people. He didn't even have his own website, he was using this thing called Linkydink.

Every day he would send out the email digest in the morning of the cool stuff people posted, and then he would tag each person with an individualized thing like 'Sean, I know you guys had once looked at building a product like this, what do you think about it?' He'd get you to share your thoughts because he was asking in such a nice personalized way.

That generated all of the activity for that early community. Why did Product Hunt work? Why did it sell for $20 million? Because at the beginning, he got the right people from Silicon Valley to actually participate in the thing."