ProductHunt is the Hot New Destination for Sourcing Startup Investments | Hacker News Reader

ProductHunt is the Hot New Destination for Sourcing Startup Investments

mattermark.com

52 pointsdmor28 comments

I am a fan of ProductHunt and look forward to their emails. BUT I do have to gripe a bit about the current very limited, "exclusive" commenting system. I want to get real insights from people who have used the product/service being featured and instead it's usually just the guy who runs ProductHunt plus maybe one other friend or colleague who takes a couple of minutes to poke around providing pretty shallow feedback...and it's very rarely critical. Then an investor in the featured site/product chimes in about how awesome the team is. Not a lot of value there. Both consumers and founders would benefit from more openness.

I hear you, willu! Currently the product isn't ready for completely open comments. It will get unwieldy if there are 100+ comments on each product and we don't have the team to handle potential spam yet.

We're in the process of building an recommendation system so people in the community can invite new contributors (a la dribbble). Here's a screenshot: https://twitter.com/rrhoover/status/480377375192932352

Thanks for your patience and sorry again to limit access but we're working to open it up!

First off Ryan, I think its a great platform. As a very frequent visitor to the site I would have to reiterate that it is frustrating that I can't really participate in the conversation where there is an aspect of the product that I would like to ask the founder more about. Hopefully you guys can create a way that doesn't result in spam, but feels a little more inclusive.

IMHO, a good way to do the comments would be to focus on Q&A with the founders (or someone affiliated with the product) address the question. As a visitor I would like to easily be able to see which questions have been answered instead of scrolling around to piece together the conversation.

Certainly looking forward to seeing what you have planned for PH.

Thanks for the feedback -- I too really like the conversations with founders/builders.

I'm actually testing threaded comments in staging right now (might release today) and soon after we are adding a "badge" next to the founder's name so that it's clear who made it.

Ryan, how does one submit a product for consideration (assuming they actually have a good product to submit)?

You could just copy the Hacker News / Reddit system for the comments? It seems to work pretty well in general.

HN and reddit are a lot more sophisticated with managing spam and abuse than we are today. They also have staff 100% focused on those challenges. We'll get there! :)

HN doesn't have any staff who are 100% focused on managing spam and abuse, though some days it's easy to feel otherwise.

Any plans for RSS?

> ProductHunt Is Quickly Becoming the Hot New Destination for Sourcing Startup Investment Opportunities

> ...Product Hunt is an excellent sourcing tools for VCs looking to discover little known early stage startups.

If ProductHunt is "quickly becoming the hot new destination for sourcing startup investment opportunities" it cannot also be "an excellent sourcing tools [sic] for VCs looking to discover little known early stage startups." Lack of awareness of startups listed on ProductHunt is inversely correlated with ProductHunt's popularity.

I don't follow. Just because the featured startups are little-known doesn't necessarily correlate with ProductHunt's popularity. Perhaps PH has some secret sauce for finding startups no one knows about but are high quality, which would be great investment opportunities.

I think you misunderstood me. Put simply, ProductHunt's popularity means that once a startup hits ProductHunt, it's no longer "little known."

There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but the OP's suggestion that ProductHunt is a great sourcing tool for VCs looking for "little known" startups is flawed. If you're a VC compelled to find promising startups before every investor in the Valley knows about them, you now need to find startups before they are ProductHunted.

Hmm, I was expecting the end of the article to be an analysis of which investors are most active among ProductHunted-then-funded companies, not a list of the companies themselves. Unless I'm missing something, that's the most interesting piece of data in the whole analysis: effectively, "who reads and pays attention to PH?".

I've checked the site a few times. The sidebar popup comments thing drives me nuts and I leave. People make fun for HN for being so simple but too clever is far worse.

How is it being too clever? That is one of my favorite things about the site. If you want to quickly check the comments, you can without leaving the page. If you want to open a few to check later, you can just Cmd/Ctrl+Click the comments link and it'll be on its own page.

It's clever because it's a fancy and inferior alternative to browser tabs. Comments always show up in a partial width sidebar: http://www.producthunt.com/posts/sprites

Let's be honest though, saying "potentially sourced" is really saying nothing at all. </grumpy grandpa>

FYI, The 3 startups I tweeted about are confirmed. I've spoken directly with the investors.

Oh, I believe you on those three :) I suspect there's been a handful of others, if not many more, where investors decided to call up the startup after it was product-hunted. I am just not a big fan of link-baiting. If I am to spend time on an article, I want evidence, not speculation. Just me, maybe.

Sounds like an echo chamber

What does "sourced" mean exactly? For example, MoveLoot was in YC W14 so hard to think it was sourced through PH.

"This list indicates a correlation between an investment announcement and the company being added to ProductHunt BEFORE announcing funding, but it does not describe causation."

In other words, it means nothing. It's pure speculation shrouded in what purports to be some sort of statistical analysis. Which isn't surprising given some of the previous "analyses" from the OP's company.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7473904

But Move Loot was singled out by PH: "Hoover confirmed 3 deals that have been sourced on ProductHunt: Move Loot, FitBay, TapTalk"

The OP made the bold claim, "ProductHunt Is Quickly Becoming the Hot New Destination for Sourcing Startup Investment Opportunities", suggested that 206 investments "might have been sourced on Product Hunt", put together a meaningless table showing a handful of companies and the amount of time between their appearance on ProductHunt and funding (which doesn't speak to where these investments were sourced), and then at the end of her post noted that she had no evidence to back up her claim.

If you're going to make what amounts to a causation claim ("ProductHunt Is Quickly Becoming the Hot New Destination for Sourcing Startup Investment Opportunities"), noting at the end of a long post that you have no evidence of causation is kind of silly.

Did you see the quote I provided?

Yes, I did. We seem to be talking past each other.

Through manual detective work, Ryan Hoover was able to confirm that three companies (out of the several thousand that have appeared on ProductHunt) raised funding after being discovered on ProductHunt. Instead of doing the same sort of detective work, the OP, on the other hand, wrote up a post with a broad, bold claim, put together a bunch of statistics unrelated to validating said claim, and then added the caveat that her statistics did not show the causation her claim required.

Put simply, to establish that ProductHunt is widely being used for deal sourcing, you would need to contact the startups and/or investors and ask them. At that point, you could compare the number of startups that have appeared on ProductHunt to the number of deals that were sourced through ProductHunt and draw a legitimate, meaningful conclusion about ProductHunt's popularity as a sourcing tool.

I actually didn't knew about PH till they picked up on my HN submission (namegrep.com), I must say that I really like their daily links, some great stuff there - for instance, how awesome is this http://theorangechef.com/? :O

I do have to agree with @willu tho, their commenting system is way too elitist. =(

Did they open it up from Beta yet?

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