Communicate with Users, Build Something They Want - Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt

all right so maybe we could start with this question from Stuart Powell and his question is what's your advice for non-technical founders as you are a non-technical founder and solo founder or a cofounder Prada solo founder but had a founding team so can do without them of course okay so yeah maybe the best way to go about this is you explain how you made producthunt and then share some advice for Stuart yeah so I remember applying to YC and historically I always realized or thought that YC one didn't like solo founders and two always preferred technical founders to begin with so I was like I don't know if YC is gonna like me so ended up lying anyway after you know speaking with Gary and Alexis and Kat and some others and Kevin Hale getting their support and you know when I went into YC when we applied to YC we already had some traction where we had some proof that people wanted this thing so what does that actually mean like some meaning roughly what number I don't remember the exact numbers it was obviously still very small cuz it was pretty early days but we were seeing about 50 percent month-over-month growth in total like top-line user visits and that was consistent for the first I don't know two three four months and so that really demonstrated that oh wow this person he is single founder and he's non-technical but somehow this thing is growing and people seem to want it and when you're you know whether you're non-technical or typing or whatever it may be if you can demonstrate data like that it's hard to argue it's hard to say that oh actually no this isn't useful if you're demonstrating that people are using your product and that's that's the ultimate proof and so when people who are non-technical founders come to you now what do you advise him like how do you how do you figure out how to make prototypes and get something out the door there's a lot of ways that you can validate ideas or build products without really coding anything product on it was an email list in the beginning so really I was I was forced not being an engineer to not spend weeks and weeks building something that maybe something that people didn't want instead I was like okay well what can I build and then what experience could I provide that would maybe validate or test whether people wanted this so built this email list sent it out got a few hundred subscribers initially and it took me 20 minutes to set so it was like the ultimate MVP in from a product standpoint I was like email is actually a great place to put content to re-engage people because they you know our audience people and technology they use email every single day so for technical there are non-technical people you know things like email or hacking things together with like type form actually is a really good tool to almost like create a product essentially you can put like type form and stripe together and actually collect money that's the ultimate test yeah like you can get people to pay you money for something then you're like well wow they clearly want this mm-hmm so I think there's a lot of things you can do without doing any coding and even if you are technical it's actually in many cases wise to start testing with those types of non-technical tools so that you can put something out there sooner and earlier yeah and do you find that will you just launch ship like this new product or a new feature I guess yeah are people using that to beta test stuff or are these like fully functioning products yeah it's a combination of everything really so we we built ship in in many ways it's basically a tool kit for makers and startups two one announced new products that they're creating collect emails for those products and then get feedback and communicate with those users okay so a lot of these things we were actually doing a product on for several years through you know various tools like MailChimp using type forum just basically sending out you know screenshots and and usually actually envisioned as a great tool to get up and annotate screenshots and get feedback so you're sort of hacking all these tools together and we're like okay well people on products and are continually asking us like how can I use product to start getting initial users or feedback for my product before I'm ready to launch so we built ship and we're seeing people use it for everything we were just talking earlier about like Casey and I stand in his new app they used it to start capturing interests or beam panels or new apps that's coming out soon them and other similar people are using it then seed it with beta users to get actual feedback on the product so long story short our goal is like create something that people could use to start generating demand and communicating with our audience and ultimately what I believe is is like the more you can communicate with your audience make them feel involved in the process and get feedback from them the higher chance you are in building some that people want or a good product ultimately mm-hmm and I think this also relates to another question which is which is a little blunt but Diego asked is there a business model in producthunt are you trying to go in that direction with the ship product or yeah what's the plan yeah so historically we've never really charged for anything yeah outside of a long long time ago once upon a time we did post for charge people for job postings but then we we stopped that to focus entirely on building the community in the audience now we're shifting some of our focus towards monetization and ship is actually the first thing that we've directly charged for outside of those initial tests and the fun part is yesterday we launched we set up of course a slack bot to notify whenever someone gives us money and so those are like the best notifications we're getting it's like wow this person just subscribed you know for like $249 a months this thing that we built it's like that's awesome and I woke up this morning to a bunch more notifications I was like this is amazing so our strategy going forward here and especially in q4 is to think more about what are the things that we can build and provide that people like so much that they're willing to pay for and ship is showing a lot of promise and you know helping startups with you know communicating and marketing and so on another piece that we are working on that hasn't really shown that you'll start to see soon is also leveraging the community and the platform we've built to connect companies with talent so now that we're inside of AngelList there's this whole a list talent platform it's a great place to recruit great talent and we also improbably have a lot of talented engineers designers marketers a so on that might want to join companies that you know we're launching a part-time there's a nice opportunity to make those connections and as a result generate some revenue out of that without being super heavy-handed and showing pop-ups and already having stuff yeah it makes us see that from Protestant yeah yeah yes maybe maybe audio playing videos with with sound and everything about will see well you guys do email well but you could like push it even further have you always so you like it was first email list have you always believed that email was going to be the most effective way for you to stay in touch with people yeah it's always been you know a lot of people say email is dead emails dumb I don't like email people use email all the time though and it's it's a great plant channel for re-engagement back in 2013 or 12 I can't remember I wrote in I used to write a lot and block a lot and wrote about an article called email first startups actually is one of the early articles that I had on hacker and who's that guy oh cool on the home page I was like well this is cool people are reading my thing and it was basically just outlining various startups that started office emails to begin with angellist ironically was one of those like Angeles MVP essentially was an email digests but yeah it was an email list in the beginning and and it's a very simple way to MVP something and see if people actually open it and click on it it's also very malleable so every single morning or every day when you send that email you can change the copy you can try different things whereas when you put something in code it's a lot harder to change in most cases it's fairly stagnant so when you're sort of testing ideas emails great channel for that that's awesome we own a bunch of questions around the YC application it's like application season right now oh yeah that's right yeah a few of those actually David Adom ooh I might be mispronouncing his last name tell us about a time you successfully hacked an on computer system to your advantage this is a YC application question I forgot what I okay I can't remember if this was my answer in the YC application or not it may have been so as a kid I was always interested in working on different projects and trying to turn trying to turn something into money I hated working for money for time like I hated getting paid hourly because if I did a terrible job or an awesome job I got paid the same whatever $6 or $7 an hour so I was always trying to find entrepreneurial ways to make money and one of those was actually selling things on eBay when I was kid so I would browse fatwallet and slick deals which of these like communities and forms that people would post different deals that you can get on usually electronics and it would usually involve things with rebates price matching and all these like hacks that you'd have to like work around some of them slightly gray hat is like a little bit Shady in any case what I would do is browse those websites daily and then fine I used to buy things that were maybe 30 or 40 percent off MSRP and then buy them and then sell them on eBay mm-hmm and I think I sold it wasn't a lot like one hundred and fifty thousand dollars maybe two hundred thousand dollars and like merchandise but I really wasn't it was almost like it enjoyable for me to find and hunt for these things and then make money on it it didn't even matter how much money I made for me it was more like oh I could turn this thing into like this idea into money yeah and so I did that through I don't know high school and some in college that's great so that was fun there was a whole plan of money episode about that yeah people going to was a year two ago Toys R Us and reselling on Amazon oh yeah there's this whole culture of like that little arbitrage but just get enough volume here's another one what were the main points you were trying to get across in your YC application and interview this is from Phil yeah I think looking back on it I believe that you know part of it was I was going in there again as single founder non-technical so I had that concern and so my approach really was to communicate in and sort of sell them on this this vision an idea that we need a place in the internet a place to discover all these products being built you know I think the audience that YC you know partners they understood the pain point that makers and startups are seeing when it comes to discovery so I felt that that was you know a strong thing to capture and to kind of double down on but really was just about selling the vision of like how do we create a place where in a world where we have all these products people can discover the best ones I mean really other than that it was also just like communicating confidence in some ways I think you go into that interview people are nervous I was nervous you have these I think everyone's freaking out yeah yeah in my case is like three to four people in front of you drooling you with questions I remember Sam Sam Allen was one of them and it's just like you cut me off a couple times and I came prepared knowing that so I was like okay if they cut me off I'm just gonna move on and you know tried to be succinct and clear yeah I think that's psychologically very difficult for people and at that point is one of my main points of advice when they're asking like pre-interview make you can't let that ruin your flow and ruin your energy a lot of people start to get defensive when they're interrupted and then it just spirals out of control oh yeah it's like a weird psychological tactic yeah especially if you have more multiple founders - it's the dynamic of how he speaks when and how do you make sure that you don't look like you're fighting the last thing you want is two founders to look like they already have found her problems yeah ten minute interview yep which can be challenging yep all right oh yeah I did have a question about a podcast discovery mm-hm so where do you see that going right now like obviously you guys have a podcast section yes and no we actually kind of quietly killed podcasts oh yeah so this is some of the history and product and is you know early on we of course have been targeting the tech community and and we made some mistakes admittedly on some of the execution of some kind of category expansions we went into like games and books and podcast was like this sort of fourth category that we introduced and in hindsight it was very clear why podcasts didn't belong in our current content ecosystem one podcast uh you know discovering the we consume podcast is wildly different than you discover an app or a product it's also very frequent like there's a new podcast every week or more than that so that good dynamics didn't really work with just shoving it into the pradhan community mmm however the direction and the opportunity that we were tackling with podcast specifically I think is still something I would love to see and there's a YC company called breaker which you probably know of which in many ways is executing on the way that we would have or wanted to execute on podcast if we focused on podcasts mmm ultimately we decided podcast is not our business like we're focused on product discovery primarily and we're gonna stop doing that breakers approaching it in a similar way where they're leveraging community and enabling you know people to discover podcasts in a new and different way through other people and Friends so I think I mean from a market perspective I don't see a world where we don't have something like that in podcasts like a place where people can discover and engage and almost geek out about podcast together now to date those exist in like on reddit to some extent and various places on the internet but there's no there's no leader in that space right now no well I think about it in the context of YouTube and you mostly rely on the algorithm and then like the old-school methods of you know basically a guest post sooner like you're on my vlog I'm on your vlog like that's how it works podcasting is pretty difficult but I agree I really love the search on breaker yeah that's the one thing that all the other apps haven't done but yeah yeah so download breaker alright yeah next question what were your biggest take aways from YC hmm I think part of it is one of the great things about being in YC is you are held accountable and you're it's it's a it's almost like to some extent school like you're your professor is gonna be like did you read the comp did you do the homework your test results are gonna show like whether you learn the thing or not at YC during that three-month process I'm losing track even you know you have this accountability on a week over week basis and you go into these group office hours where you're sharing your updates and at the time castor and Kevin Hale where our group partners and they would ask questions like alright did you do that thing we talked about last week and so it was a forcing function to just get done because you don't have much time and there's I think that mentality is very healthy and well it is uncomfortable and stressful in many cases it's the best way to specially get off the ground because you you just need to do a lot of work and hold yourself accountable I um always curious how how the behavior changes after YC because there's like there's this period of I guess you producthunt wasn't around all that long before you did YC right yeah it was about five six months before we actually entered right so you didn't have that many defined habits yeah but do you find yourself adapting like new styles of running the team after YC or is it pretty similar to the way you're going about it before it's hard to say why she was so focused in that initial phase and then once we we raised a series a basically right after YC and then hired and so our process changed and as it does when you hire another five or ten people and so in many ways we continued to have to change things the way that we're doing things effect we're still doing that now like this next quarter like we might make some changes in our process again hmm partly just because it's you you see what didn't go well last quarter and so you want to change it so I don't know in some ways I think a lot of it is YC instills data-driven and like very deliberate like talk to your customers type of culture which I think is something that I believe we had prior to YC so for us maybe it didn't direct dramatically change our culture the way of operating so much um but it certainly changed things in ways that I couldn't probably realize just because you know it's hard to know what we would be without YC oh so okay cool and so are you guys all you there were a couple questions for you about remote teams yeah what does your distribution look like are you mostly in the Bay how does it work yeah so we're about two-thirds outside of a side of SF okay so we have headquarters in SF and but from the beginning we've been a distributed team in fact the first person that ended up while paying out of pocket initially was Ricardo in Italy and so he was a developer that came on board and you know awesome guy and so like from the very beginning we had sort of a distributed team andreas came on our CTO shortly after that and he was at the time in Vienna now he's here in San Francisco but we now have 17 people across I think it's eight or nine time zones from Bulgaria London Denver like all over the board yeah and not just like community moderation these people are yeah developed yeah there's a designer yeah yeah it's combination of community and engineering actually Julie's in Paris she joined a month or two ago cool so which we need to hit Asia we don't have anyone in Asia at that's next on the list maybe so yeah if you're looking for a job um okay and so what are what are the learnings I mean did you did you set out to build a distributed team or was it just by happenstance that you knew someone in Italy and they could help you know it it wasn't intentional in the beginning it was almost a necessity mm-hm and frankly because at the time one not being an engineer I need to find engineers and then Andreas and I naturally came together and we both had this passion for building this community he then recruited a lot of the early engineers who were based in Europe because that's where a lot of his network at the time was okay and so sort of organically formed that way and then in hindsight we realized there's a couple huge advantages to distributed teams like one you can hire anyone in the world you don't need to hire people just in San Francisco or people who want to move here too it's very expensive to hire in San Francisco of course like the cost of living here is dramatically higher than it is in Bulgaria and the third piece too is is also very competitive when it comes to hiring especially for early-stage startup when you're trying to take someone from like Google or Facebook they're getting paid I don't know $200,000 with like beautiful cafeteria lunches you is like a seed stage or pre funded company it's like hard to convince them to come on board so I think there's a lot of benefits and building remote and distribute teams the other kind of fourth pieces also we get this global perspective to some extent we're you know half more than half the product and communities actually outside the US and I don't know for certain but I think part of that is because our team itself is distributed across the world and so maybe there's this level of empathy or understanding of like those communities hmm so I think we'll see I believe we'll see more and more distribute teams more remote workers it's sort of this movement towards that direction and and I think more people will be willing to build teams like that because it's easier to to work remotely with slack and like various video chat apps like zoom which we use and love so I'm happy that we're distributed it does come with challenges but overall it's a lot of benefits yeah but nothing like outside of the normal complaints and yeah workflow yeah communication and you know sometimes it's difficult when you have overlap on maybe four hours working together instead of like a full day yeah but those are those are workable okay yeah a few people asked about community I think they're particularly excited like you know figuring out how you just got started you know one person asked Hattie's you asked how did you acquire your first 1000 users sebastian mossad asks how do you create a community so quickly basically the same question yeah how'd you get started what was your so you started this email list but did you have a following before online how did it go yeah so it started brought in some ways started years before Prada hadn't started in some some ways you know it's before product and I mentioned earlier I was writing a lot and I would love to play with products and explore products and write about I was running with like a snapchat and all these other new apps and new behaviours and I was just super curious about you know why are people engaged with these things you know I helped near with his book hooked and did more writing there and so I was building a tiny bit of an audience not massive not Kasey's and I like he's ridiculous but a big enough audience within this centered kind of tech community to the point where when I did launch product and when I announced the email I had enough people following me to say oh I know Ryan this looks cool I'm gonna try it out and so it was combination of having this first like a few hundred people to sign up which was super important and then also building relationships with other founders and investors and people that had known me for a long time that made it exciting and allowed them to be comfortable joining and participating in the community mm-hmm so the initial kind of few first few hundred let's say or just people that I built an audience or following with for like years prior and then after that when it launched it was okay how do we grow this community there's a couple thing tactics that we did that one was press was actually a great growth driver in the beginning and so we we worked on getting press or doing guest publishing actually wrote ironically I wrote in Fast Company something titled like how we got our first 2,000 users read in limited yeah and this was like way back when yeah and it's ironic that I was writing about that because my entire goal of writing about that was to get you know another thousand users yeah and that worked in the beginning because you know probably it was new to the tech engines at that time and so people would sign up and be like what is this thing so we did things like that we also realized that when makers and and founders saw their product on producthunt naturally wanted to join the conversation they wanted to share it and so when we realized that I would every morning go on Twitter and like search for their Twitter username and say hey Jill your product is is over here people are talking about it do you want to join in answer questions and like 80% of the time they'd say yes of course I'd love to so we did more of that I just would spend first hour so my day finding those makers online and getting them involved and that led to more and more growth hmm so it had a natural kind of growth effect in the beginning and those two tactics alone we're like what led us to I don't know several thousand people in the very beginning and are the bots effective still like you know I'm the congratulations though those yeah yeah yeah so for those that don't know we have these these Twitter bots that we've set up one of them is - so going back to what I said before first I would look for the the makers and invite them it was all manual these were like alright this is not scalable let's productize this let's make this scalable so then we allowed the community to tag the makers and be like here's a product I found here's Jack the person that made it or whatever and we'd asked like what's Jack's user name and they would add it and then we'd have a bot that would say hey Jack your product was or you've been added as a maker to this product here's the link and so that would allow us to scale ibly sort of recruit makers and that's been still effective to this day no in fact makers get upset if they are posted and they don't realize it because they're like oh I I couldn't answer questions or I didn't have a chance to share it yeah so we do make it like a an effort to make sure they're they're notified that's cool yeah it feels like a missed opportunity I mean I love getting into the comments like on a Chen product on all that stuff so your growth now is it coming more from the US or is it going international as you find these other types of people it's it's pretty even if there's no we're not seeing necessarily growth in a particular pocket it's it's maybe unusual most startups you see very let's start in the US are very us centric and you'll see 80% of their traffic or more will be us from pretty early on we've had a fairly international audience and I think it's it's largely related to where you see different startup hubs around the world of course San Francisco being a major one in New York and some other cities in the US but there's also you know places like like Paris and Berlin and other places around the world that have these communities of people who love startups and they're building products and so if you look at our like Google Analytics like a heat map of where people are a lot of it centers around those start-up tech hubs actually and those are everywhere so yeah for us it's still quite international and it always kind of has been when it comes to the growth are there particular types of products that come from particular areas that you can kind of like group automatically or distributed it's pretty distributed yeah although there's some trends we'll see I think for whatever reason Paris is very design centric in general so you'll see a lot of design related or like beautiful looking products coming from Paris or France in general but I would love to do like an analysis or something we do have an API if anybody wants to hack like something together use our API to like come up with cool visualizations okay that'd be cool have um have you looked back at the products that you've loved over the past couple years to figure out if they're like three lines for you in particular like this is what you're attracted to like is a what I like most your favorite kinds of products it was like yeah by far the most common question really what are your favorite things would have to use everything of that ilk yeah well it's interesting if you look at product in some cases is like a representation of the theme at the time or the trends so if you look back a couple years ago let's say back when Secret was blowing up there were a ton of apps building anonymous social experiences there were every single almost day or week there was like multiple different apps that were like in that space because it was a time when everyone is like this is working and maybe there's an opportunity to build new experiences around this theme now today fast forward like things that are built on blockchain and crypto of course are super popular everything there's at least two or three things related to that and it's quite interesting to see these trends happen and like AI is kind of another one like people using machine learning and AI in part because there's a lot of opportunity there but also like the there's open source code and things that you can use like introduce that to your product so I don't know it's interesting to see these trends over time me personally I I like all kinds of things in terms of I like to explore new ideas and especially if people are using new platforms and new interactions in in different ways take voice for example I'm pretty interested in voice based applications like Lyle bird is one that comes to mind which I think it was in the last YC batch which it's kind of crazy but you watched a demo and it takes a sample of someone's voice and then is able to recreate it to to create basically make it sound like Obama is saying something he never said so some like crazy applications for that and those are the types of products I get really excited about because it's a lot of about what product is about is really like seeing what could be made in the future what might change the world or at least maybe a tiny part of your life mm-hmm yeah it's a that was one of my favorite companies and yeah it's amazing it emulates your voice was like 20 minutes it can do it like perfect a cursor yeah cuz it's insane yeah I was gonna define they open up the beta and I was gonna record my voice and then I got nervous I was like oh I mean we're recording a podcast so you sort of have my voice already but I was like we're gonna use this against me yeah no fake news is gonna be terrifying have you seen the video emulations yes yeah yeah bat with video emulation is frightening yeah so when you see that then you also think okay what's how do we prevent against that how do we create technology or products to help people not you know fall into this this like a hyper-realistic fake news feature yeah has anyone launched anything on product hunt that uh addresses like watermarks or security checks anything like that nothing that I can think of right now that would be interesting though yeah I'm sure there's somebody out there doing it yeah well it mean it's tricky because you got like people believe what they want to believe so like if you did any amount of research now with a photo I used to do Photoshop of the onion so like I did that I like made fake news professionally nice and yeah you know you see like the article just gets picked up in China and people just want to believe it yeah that's just how it goes so yeah we're yeah we're headed toward a world that's kind of scary it's gonna be have there been any products that launched on product hunt that didn't do well and then proceeded to do very well in the real world oh I mean I'm sure tons like what I tell people is like the number of up votes you get on Pro 10 honestly doesn't mean where they're gonna be successful or not yeah I mean as that should be obvious to people with some people they're really disappointed like I got 20 up votes and you know people don't like it well the reality is launching is like a one-time thing and whether your launch success successful or not it's really like startups is like a multi-year journey mm-hmm some of the most successful startups really are like until year five six seven is when they really are taking off it takes a long time you don't hear about those because you don't hear the first four years usually nope so I'm sure there's tons tons of them and the other piece is like product n doesn't today isn't encompassing everyone in the world either so like if you're building a product for a particular type of audience that doesn't use product in today then like it's probably not a surprise that you didn't get a ton of up votes or attention or whatever but then yeah yeah totally it happens in YC all the time what are your pro tips for launching on product huntin yeah so part of it goes not to sound too promotional but part of it is the reason why we built ship so what we've what we realized is a lot of people get into you know a box and they build a product that they think they love that the world will love and maybe they will maybe they won't but they don't really interact or get feedback from a community nor do they actually build an audience and get people following them in advance not to we keep talking about KC or I do but KC is a good example like he he has initially before they built the product he built an audience and that audience has grown more or more now no matter what he puts out he's at least guaranteed to get people to care or try it out mm-hmm and that's hugely valuable you don't need KC's a live audience but going back to my sort of product n if I didn't have you know this first few hundred people willing to sign up that I had built that audience for over several years I don't think probably it would exist today mm-hmm so I think is a combination of like my pro tips is like one be okay with building an audience in the sense that an audience of people you're actually targeting and also engage with those people get them involved and get feedback from those people early on and ship as design in our hope is is it will help people do exactly those two things yeah yeah I mean I would say that I'm engaging with the audience is something you guys do super well it's like customer service is highly yeah high up there and you're high or ities customer service is seen as like a cost under in many cases but it's it's actually a great opportunity to engage an audience like what they're doing is they're coming to you and saying I have a problem where I needs help and many people many people are like oh now they're coming to us but like in reality it's like a great thing people care enough to talk to you yeah so we use Twitter heavily to interact with people I have I use TweetDeck and I command tab to it way too much and I have a column for every single profit convention and I see almost every single one so I can see what people are talking about what they're sharing if there's issues that come up make sure that I respond to them so small things that make the community feel personable and approachable is it ever overwhelming with the amount of new stuff like I'm constantly overwhelmed by the amount of like cool things that come through YC and that's just like a tiny fraction of the world yeah do you ever have you built up like an intense stamina for like consuming new products or are there ever points where you're just like I don't need a new app today I mean I'm a weirdo and then I just love doing this stuff like exploring every single morning waking up and seeing what people are making so I'm an usual in essence I also don't try to see everything obviously it's kind of like some people with their email they're like I gotta get to inbox zero the reality is I don't try to get an inbox zero it's just it's just fine if it's not totally taken care of so for me I know I don't mind it like our hope with product and some things were exploring is how do we there's certain people weirdos like me who love to consume the firehose and there's some people who just tell me like the cool one or two things this week that I should know and so we're exploring how do we appeal to both user types you know making sure they don't feel overwhelmed but making sure this audience gets all the information they need mm okay and is there an offering for the one or two a week yet the closest thing in we've offered this for a while is our weekly digests so we have a newsletter that goes out either just on Mondays if you want or Monday through Friday so the people who are maybe less actively engaged but still want to know like what happened this week in the weekly digest and that'll include like the most uploaded products that week as well pretty easy takes 10 seconds to consume and a lot more consumable than like our feed of just fire hoses and stuff absurd it's crazy but it's crazy to see a grow man they're like yeah yeah it's amazing a bunch of random questions so akshar i'm gonna mispronounce this akshar bone ooh asked what is the most counterintuitive thing you learned building product on and then watching it grow and be used I don't know if I have a great answer for that one to be honest I think there's things that internally from a process and like leadership standpoint that I don't know if I'd say they're counterintuitive but it's challenging to one thing I learned early on as a product manager was I thought it was being helpful in doing more of the work so to put it make it more tangible there's a time where I made a mess a mistake of like basically changing one of the UX designers work says like oh it's this isn't quite exactly right to spec let me just like spend the weekend fix it and we'll save everyone time and like I'll do him a favor I did the exact opposite what it did was cause frustration and ultimately I'm not a UX designer in any way so like I shouldn't be doing that work and I think that's that lesson early on is something that I think a lot of product managers or CEOs or founders need to realize is that you're used to doing all the work in the beginning but as you grow a team you alternately have to give up work and it might feel like you're being less productive and less effective but and maybe you are technically in the short-term but long-term you need to want hire the right people and then give them autonomy to like build and do what they're good at so that's I got a challenging almost counter - and the thing I think for a lot of people who are used to just doing all the work yeah I think that's an important learning and it's one that I'm still kind of like grappling with on side projects that's just managing people well is insanely high leverage like way higher leverage then even if I was the best programmer in the world mm-hmm but it's hard when you get satisfaction from making yeah yeah so there are a couple angellist questions so as now you're part of Angelus and potentially related to the fund so a mirror asks as part of Angelus has product hunt considered investing through a syndicate or other form in the top featured products or even just the top makers on product um yeah you know early on I think the first like months of product on some of our investors actually were like Ryan you guys should start a product an indica Tour fund of some sort and at the time and even to this day that was not important what I realize is if we went down that route what we would do is prioritize building like a platform for investors and that's ultimately not what we're set out to do that doesn't mean we're not going to build features for investors and make those connections but that's a very different community and a very different product than a product discovery platform for the world and so it's it's funny of its I always been kind of a theme or an opportunity that said we may do things with the AngelList fundraising team right now we're not actively doing anything on the product side but what we have been doing is bringing the communities together and hosting dinners and smaller meetups with founders and investors um so nothing too crazy really pretty lightweight but it's been a cool way to bring these two communities together who have a lot of overlap and similarities mm-hmm and there's talk though that you are now investing in startups this is true yeah yeah so I the day before I left for Burning Man Axios spread some news about it which is fine I wasn't meaning to announce anything publicly but news got out there and you know basically I've raised a small fund using AngelList angel fund platform which they announced it two or three months ago it's sort of in beta sort of quietly out there but basically people are familiar with Angelus syndicates for the most part which are ways for people to raise money for a particular deal or a particular company they're great for for people who are just getting into investing or they're great for people who doing like giant SP vs for very specific investments but they're not as good for people doing ongoing investments so they realise this they've been working on it for several months and they release angel funds which is essentially this is a cheesy way of saying it but it's like a VC in a box in the sense that they do all the work for you in setting up an actual VC fund okay they do the legal paperwork they set up the banks they even Samet on the team is super helpful in talking to LPS on the telephone like old-school style it's like get them comfortable with some like the side letters and things like that so they do all of this work that would normally cost maybe a hundred thousand dollars to set up all for like twelve thousand dollars and they take a piece of the carry and as a result you have a fun just like you normally would and can invest in a start-up just as a regular VC so it's not deal by deal basis but you have committee capital from LPS that you then invest so I raised a fun after talking to Nevada bunch of other people three million dollar fund and just investing in of course early-stage companies everything from 50,000 to 200,000 and yeah it's been been fun I called it weekend fun wait it has a couple different meanings for me well one I had a spreadsheet of tons of different names I was like what I want to call this thing took me forever to come up with a name that I liked but I really like weekend fun because it has a few different meanings one it's you know product n is my full-time thing I'm super super pumped still loving what I'm doing in many ways we can find is like my weekend side projects in some ways weekend is also something like you see a lot of founders starting projects in the like product in itself that was like a weekend nights and weekend project a lot of those things start off is like really humble and small and grow into something big so it those two meanings mean a lot to me and it's it's also more friendly than like Hoover capital or so yeah I don't know if there's a hue tight there but the best and do you have a particular thesis that you're going for I imagine there are tons of learnings from producthunt what's your what's your goal you know it's intentionally fairly open in that I'm not strictly defining or looking at a like e-commerce or biotech space in fact I'm excited to invest in areas that I could be helpful in first like actually biotech is a place where I'm probably not going to be as helpful as I would with maybe a community-based product as an example so a lot of it is trying to invest in companies I think I can be helpful with there are some areas and I'm particularly interested in like we talked about remote and distributed teams I'm very interested in people building products and tools and things for this new future where we're seeing more distributed teams and and people working remotely I also see voices a really interesting space it's hard to know exactly what voice will play in people's lives but inevitably voice will change the way people interact with technology in in different ways like my Google home right now is my audio player it's just easier than opening my iPhone to like play Rufus to Seoul or whatever mm-hm so those are two areas I'm like particularly interested in but you know the the investments I've done now to date have ironically been a little bit community focus which is something I have experienced I run it I guess not ironic yeah but those are things that I get excited about and okay and want to support so we have another interview coming up actually later today with Courtland from indie hackers okay and you asked him a question but I'm gonna ask it back to you and that is asked I forgot it is what do you believe that most others do not oh man oh my face I finally face of course I added a smiley face oh man I asked this question I don't have a good answer for myself you know I think this I think 50% of the people in technology will agree and maybe 50% won't I think that this technology is makes the world ultimately better and there's certainly some downsides that you see in negative things that happen in startups and technology but ultimately like technology is like this this water is here because I can drink this because of technology and I always believed that progressing in more startups and founders and people succeeding is ultimately good for the world but more specifically I think the extreme future that you read about in sci-fi books and see in movies I think the world where we live in VR is actually a good thing and I know a lot of people get really scared and nervous about like a future where we all live in like a ready player one or at least like some sort of virtual world like that I actually think it's a awesome thing and the reason for that is ultimately if you can recreate and build relationships and live a life that's in a better world than your own like we live in a great place and and we're very fortunate but a lot of people are not and they live in in you know dirt shacks and if they could escape and and go to a different world and live there that seems like a great thing so I know there's a lot of negative things that can come from a world where people live in a virtual reality but I also almost don't see a future where at some point that's where majority people spend their lives because we're already pretty close like this phone in my pocket and my computer screen I already live inside of that most of the day mm-hm and I think most people do or they watch TV like the average American it's I forget if it's four hours at eight hours a day but it's something crazy they watch a lot of TV and you you can kind of imagine that extending into that that screen and that technology extending into their everyday life through VR and AR and other things like that so I think it's a good thing I think we should embrace it and be responsible with it but also I I don't think it's a bad thing that people live inside of technology differently how much time do you spend in VR on an average day I actually don't spend any time I don't have any of your equipment maybe I have a Samsung headset somewhere in a gear VR but I don't right now it's - I haven't found an application that I really enjoy and it's too cumbersome too heavy but eventually it's going to be you know a glasses it's gonna be comfortable eventually it'll be in my car say I feel like anything you can imagine almost will happen at some point is just a matter of time yeah and so I just don't see a world we don't have that it's almost like will it will happen in my lifetime not sure I bet it will yeah I also completely agree with you that event the fact that like just because your life in San Francisco is great doesn't mean that other people wouldn't want to be LeBron James for four hours a day yeah yeah if you could you'd fly I mean there's so many cool things that I wish I could do and I already live a very fortunate awesome life here and the other piece to that too is like of course VR is not accessible to the people in the dirt shacks right now today but technology it innovates and it becomes accessible to let's say the 1% and then it becomes more accessible to more and more people and then the price is lower and lower and lower so it's a I guess I want to mention that point because I don't want to say like oh how is is someone like that who makes you know 20 bucks a month you can afford oculus well just imagine a future where inevitably it's becomes almost free yeah and I think I think that's inevitable t I mean if you just like look at the graph of smartphone distribution and said yeah saying yeah and the prices are going up - you can buy $1000 iPhone now I know that's for like the 64 gigabyte I think one mistake any other ones more yeah like a 256 I don't know what the price is but you can expect 13 14 - probably alright so yeah I guess that's probably the last question so Soren asks what does Ryan think of the rising crypto assets and their implementation and products hmm oh so it's something I've been I've been following this base of course but I've not dug in nearly as much as some other people I actually don't well I own a little bit of file coin but I don't own any other cryptocurrencies so I haven't actually taken the plunge maybe I should well I certainly should have but but I think it's a what I will say is that one it's really interesting when you see these these almost like greenfield opportunities mmm and new platform shifts like we've talked about voice a little bit and how that has a potential to change behavior and create new variances same thing with blockchain and crypto and other things like that it has an opportunity to open up new pathways open up new doors for makers and founders and companies to create new experiences that may actually change people's behavior dramatically I mean we're already seeing this to some extent with fundraising people are launching an ICO instead of going to VCS and you know the deals they're getting it's like I'm it's unheard of like you basically are getting way more money and you don't have investors to pay back like you own everything and I mean there's just a lot of like crazy things that flips everything on its head and so there's a lot of interesting things happening there angeles's has been you know working with coin list and and trying to legitimize and bring some trust to the platform and in the ecosystem but honestly I think even the people who are deep into or still like I'm not sure where this is gonna go yet it's hard to predict it's the same somebody I forgot who it was I wish I could credit them is it's hard to predict you know early in the the world-wide-web day is like is that that a Facebook would be you think like it's hard to extrapolate and go that far because you just don't have the mental model or the infrastructure built yet to imagine what's gonna be created with this in two three four years mm-hmm great actually last question how do you spend your spare time what do you do for fun I love maybe in the past two to three years I've enjoyed going to concerts and seeing live music more and more I went to Coachella back in 2015 and that was one of those aha moments I was like this is so fun this is great like go there were some great fans go dancing listen to good music and so loved loved doing that I also just love I love my alone time and going I go to Phil's all the time that's where probably had started actually it was you know Phil's coffee shop and I enjoy on the weekends especially like going there and catching up on work and it was a weird thing but I'll get get up at 6 a.m. to probably tomorrow and just work and hang out and drink coffee so I know normal stuff I guess cool all right thanks man yeah thanks you

Channel: Y Combinator

Views: 47,783

Keywords: YC, Y Combinator, Ryan Hoover, Product Hunt, Podcast, Interview

Id: tckGI4C7k10

Length: 49min 1sec (2941 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 04 2017