He hunted for cheap electronics and flipped them on eBay for a profit. He sold between $150k - $200k in merchandise in high school and college.
He learned he enjoyed hunting for products.
1/ .@rrhoover wasn't a founder that investors typically like:
- He was solo.
- He was non-technical.
He built and sold @ProductHunt to @AngelList for $20M and is now a VC with @weekendfund.
Here are Ryan's smart tactics to build PH into an industry-known brand... 👇👇👇
He hunted for cheap electronics and flipped them on eBay for a profit. He sold between $150k - $200k in merchandise in high school and college.
He learned he enjoyed hunting for products.
He knew email was a great channel for re-engaging his audience. His post "Email-First Startups" outlined companies that started as emails, and it went viral on Twitter and Hacker News.
However, the popular narrative was that email was dead and dumb.
He built it in 20 minutes and got a few hundred subscribers.
Email worked. All his users were active in their inboxes. Email let Ryan experiment with content in ways websites wouldn't allow.
This following became Product Hunt's first few hundred users.
Ryan wrote for Fast Company "How We Got Our First 2,000 Users Doing Things That Don’t Scale."
Hilariously, his entire goal with that article was to get Product Hunt an additional 1,000 users! 💀😂
As users submitted products, Ryan spent his first hour every morning finding the products' makers on Twitter. He'd invite them to join PH to answer questions and join the discussion.
Twitter and press alone got PH to several thousand users.
Although he thought being solo and non-technical hurt his case, he applied after encouragement from @garrytan, @alexisohanian, @KatManalac & @supalyt.
He raised PH's Series A right after YC.
@andreasklinger joined Ryan as CTO. He was in Vienna and recruited engineers from his network in Europe.
Andreas and Ryan came together with a shared passion for the PH community.
To him, user complaints were chances to engage his users, not a cost center.
He Command-Tab'd to TweetDeck constantly and saw every PH mention. His responses were so quick that the community felt personable and approachable.
Within my founder circles, everyone takes their PH launch very seriously. PH can move the needle so much that some of my friends take weeks or months to prepare for their PH launch.
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