Product Hunt's Community-First Growth

A story about how Ryan Hoover built Product Hunt from scratch through careful community curation and strategic growth tactics.

"Ryan started Product Hunt on Linkydig, which was like an off-the-shelf social news tool. Because he'd been blogging for 4 years before that, he had built up a nice network in Silicon Valley that prepared him to succeed.

He curated the initial people, inviting cool people like Kevin Rose and other interesting folks. He set clear rules: this was for cool new products only - don't post Facebook and Instagram that everyone knows about. This was for discovering new things first, different than going to TechCrunch or app store charts.

He made it where you had to be whitelisted to participate in the community. The average person could not just go post, which solved the bots problem and moderation problem because he was only letting trusted people post. Anyone could view it though, which created this exclusive effect - people would beg to get in, prove themselves, and if they got in they would be on their best behavior.

He was maniacal about curating the community. Every morning he would wake up at 5 or 6 AM, go to Phil's coffee shop, sit down with his laptop and immediately start scouring Twitter. Anyone who mentioned Product Hunt, he would thank them. Anyone who posted a cool product, he would say 'Hey I'd love for you to post this on Product Hunt.' He wouldn't post it himself - he would give them access to post it. He did that every day for about 9 months before hiring a community manager."