Product Hunt Is in Current Y Combinator Batch
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Another disappointing move - I want the YCombinator that requested startups working in energy, robotics, healthcare and internet infrastructure back:
1. Company did something relatively novel with regards to growth hacking and/or digital hustling ("these guys got 10,000 users in a day")
2. Company/founder built an MVP with little technology experience, but got massive demand by using something off the shelf and wants to scale it with technology ("this girl sold these items using wufoo as an e-commerce and wants to scale now")
3. Company/founder did something important in tech before (sold a company) or had a role in a company people from YC alumni generally have an affinity for ("this guy was the head of marketing for X company, it grew to 100 million users and sold to Google for X million")
4. Founders are from MIT/Stanford/etc and did something cool while they were there ("AngelList says 'TEAM = STANFORD' and one of the founders built a robot")
5. Founders have some sort of extensive domain knowledge in a market that can be a billion dollar business (platform/data play) ("No one is building farm tech ($XXbil industry), but these 6 guys from Iowa are")
6. Company/founders don't fully meet 1-5, but have inklings of one or more and have the potential for a billion dollar business ("Smart scrappy guys who are building the next big messaging app")
There are of course exceptions to all of this, but the general theme is that (1) the business model doesn't necessarily matter (they'll figure it out, all 6 situations make these individuals smart) and (2) the makeup of the team matters more than anything else.
I'd put PH in bucket number 1.
Ironically YC (or at least PG) emphasizes how they want to back companies with a chance of becoming >$1B businesses. It's somewhat sad to see this violated in such obvious ways. Ryan is a talented guy and I've been reading his stuff way before he started working on PH. I'm sure he'll find a way to turn this into a nice business, maybe even pivot to something that has a much larger market size.
However, I agree with the overall sentiment of this thread. PH is a tool from SV insiders to SV insiders, sending exactly the wrong message of what types of products people applying to YC should be working on.
WRT to preferential treatment, YC doesn't get special benefits and looking back on the past several months, you'll find products from other accelerators like 500 Startups, TechStars, etc. as well side projects from non-SV folks reaching the top of the board.
I won't comment on YC companies not getting any benefits out of PH. Your argument that "there are also other products" isn't a real argument.
Again, I have nothing against PH. It looks great, I'm checking it regularly and I enjoy using it. Like others I just don't quite see how it fits into the investment thesis of backing potential billion dollar companies.
The way I see it PH is just a trendier (and barebones) version of these other comparison sites that happens to be in the same room with the guys making the products that are going to be compared.
That's a conflict of interest, there's no other way to say it, and I wouldn't take the opinions on PH as seriously as those from a 3rd party, same way I don't get a loan from a bank because of the ads they run but because of the rating unbiased consumer watchgroups give them.
Contrarily, YC investments appear to be more diverse than ever.
Ryan is a compelling founder. PH has traction. YC decided to back him. Period.
The next thing Silicon Valley needs to disrupt big time: its own culture http://qz.com/225782/the-next-thing-silicon-valley-needs-to-...
> Every time I read about this company I get a feeling everyone involved is completely insane
This is a bad comment in my opinion, but it's not a bad comment because it's particularly mean-spirited or because it's false. (I don't think that comment is either of those things.) It's a bad comment because it's not particularly germane to the discussion, any more so than the so common variation of "I knew [Employee related to YC Company] way back when [personal anecdote]! [Generic congratulation]!"
That's a roundabout way of saying the following: optimizing for signal vs. noise is not incompatible with optimizing for 'nice' vs. 'mean', but I'd prefer a forum filled with substantive criticism to one filled with hollow praise.
There's a possibility for something big here and makes sense for YC.
I doubt its going to scale to huge proportions but there is a place even for a business that employs 5 people.
Er, on most link aggregator websites, that's supporting a breach in integrity, not a "we'll give you $120k seed money" event.
It's worth noting that this behavior is explicitly punished on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972941) and will get you banned extremely quickly from Reddit.
This also leads to a massive conflict of interest for any YC products that are posted to Product Hunt in the future.
That it's managed to get so much traffic and now seed funding says a lot about how the Valley works, and probably not in a good way. It's literally a platform for someone's friends to upvote each other - "conflict of interest for YC" doesn't even scratch the surface.
I do think the platform has value, but only insofar as that it helps those who are playing the VC game by showing them what a certain "in crowd" thinks is cool.
I won't pretend there aren't voting rings but they're not limited to the "valley in group" at all. We see people across the world trying to game the site, as people do on Hacker News, reddit, and other crowd-curation sites. As I mentioned earlier on this HN thread, we have systems that help combat these rings and in part thank to YC/HN's guidance, we'll improve this.
I also want to point out just a few examples of products that reached the top of the day's board from non-valley, "famous" startup people. E.g.
- Notifyr (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/notifyr) was made by a 17 year old in the Netherlands. It's the 5th most upvoted product right now
- Instanerd (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/instanerd) was made by Alex in Skopje, Macedonia as a small side project. It received over 160 upvotes and ~5x the number of comments than the average submission.
- Pie (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/pie) is a team collaboration app by startup in Sigapore. It too hit the top of the board.
Of course, not everyone will agree with what's most upvoted and an upvote really is just a measure of interest, not a review.
I'm not implying of anything shady. I'm just saying that kinda stuff is really annoying for the average joe.
Do you think involvement with YC will accelerate that step and is it still a (very?) high priority--I say "very" because the fact that it seems to be an exclusive list that's not open seems to be one of the biggest criticisms.
I'm looking over the submitters' profiles and I see many of the same people submitting different items... so I'm deducing that 'members of the community' != 'the community'.
People will use it for different things. Some will submit products, some will upvote, some will comment and get involved with the discussion, and some will do all three.
You're right that voting rings, if not dealt with, can hurt the authenticity of the rankings. We have mechanisms to curb that and thankfully guidance from YC/HN on how to deal with this as the community grows. In fact I met with Daniel Gackle a month ago to chat about this.
With regards to the conflict of interest, I don't see this being too much of an issue. Whilst PH itself is part of a YC batch, the majority of the PH community won't be, and it's them who collectively vote.
Getting the rest of the upvotes and the traction to hit the top of the front page, in fairness, is dependent on non-collusive votes. The issue is that subtle collusion may get products exposure when they otherwise wouldn't in a fair system. (although, that's the startup world in a nutshell. I'm not fond of it.)
It doesn't feel like we're on even footing.
https://twitter.com/ErikTorenberg/media
He has posted hundreds of reply spam promoting Product Hunt on Twitter. He must be running some kind of script because he has posted so many replies many with product specific screenshots, I can’t imagine someone doing this manually so quickly (every few minutes).
I understand “growth hacking” and sometimes promoting yourself can seem like spam to some, but this really is just spam, and it’s not the good kind. This is probably in violation of Twitter's TOS and not what people should have to be exposed to, especially if you're trying to build a brand. This makes me just want to never use the product, and I really like supporting YC companies and prefer to give the benefit of the doubt and assume good faith in the face of self-promotion. But this is just a little bit too much.
I get the feeling that you're trying to play the messages off as not being automated as they come from Erik, but people already know they're automated. The gig is up. You could simply create an account such as "ProductHuntNotifier" or equivalent and remove any ambiguity.
I still think that the messages are both relevant and important.
You're in a unique position where you can even manually add and promote new startups to Product Hunt yourselves followed by automating a tweet out to the founder(s) and growth hack user acquisition that way. This seems to be the approach you're taking. I do applaud the fact you go so far as to do the legwork of finding the twitter accounts associated with the startup; that task is by no means automated. Most people can't take this approach as they have nothing beneficial to offer the user they're tweeting to.
Because there's some value add to what they're doing, I'm not sure I'd say it's a cut and dry case of calling it spam given it's not fully automated and the startups in question are getting promoted. It seems mutually beneficial in many ways.
If we can't find the founder's Twitter handle, we send a message to the startup/product's Twitter account.
Remember the InstallMonetizer incident while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711
I actually think it's something they teach them to do.
Many of them respond with a "Thanks". Not one person has said "Spam".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8032837
I hope you're not going to continue to do that. I get you're hustling, but this isn't the right way to do this.
> Not one person has said "Spam".
I marked the tweet as spam via the report the tweet feature, I don't know if people usually actually reply as "this is spam."
I agree with the other comments that this is a useful feature, but would be more well suited for a customized twitter account with a name explaining it better.
If anyone has suggestions for ways to automate part of this, as it takes a long time, i'm open!
Perhaps you could require your product submitters to insert the contact email for the products they are submitting. Then, you could auto email the founder as soon as their product is posted on Product Hunt.
for some reason, we find that people are more responsive on twitter.
Also, we're not using an automated script to send these tweets.
Clearly, you guys are also trying to benefit from the increased publicity from using a public message "board" platform instead of a more private form of communication. I believe that may be the origin of some of these concerns. You guys aren't addressing the fact that you are doing this on a public platform to promote your site. Instead, you are still trying to argue that you are doing this completely independent of the traffic benefits....
Most people's twitter settings require that they follow you to DM them.
"e-mail them with a bot that scrapes emails off the product site"
Not a bad idea and we could make some educated guesses as to what the email address is (e.g. support@company.com). That said, we've found some founders aren't as quick to respond to email as they are on Twitter. I personally prefer the more ephemeral nature of Twitter for these type of notifications as my email inbox is already difficult enough to manage.
"Clearly, you guys are also trying to benefit from the increased publicity from using a public message 'board' platform"
We send direct @mentions to founders/startups on Twitter. These tweets will not surface in other's Twitter feed unless they're following both people.
http://www.producthunt.com/posts/instant-chemistry
http://www.producthunt.com/posts/jumpido
http://www.producthunt.com/posts/customeed
Maybe if they made it something you could subscribe to, opt-in, I would think it wasn't spam, but as it stands now, getting a notification on all of my Twitter enabled devices about something I don't care about, that I didn't ask for nor subscribe to, is spam. That some are advocating actually "scraping emails" to automate email notifications because this is so useful just leaves me a little bit dumbfounded.
It seems to me that companies might even actually pay for a service like this and if enough people thought it added value, I don't see where the issue with scraping emails is. Perhaps you could enlighten me or provide a different viewpoint as this would be something that I'd have no issue implementing myself and the fact that it scares you so much has me worried that I would be overreaching if I ever did. I just don't see why an email scraper is seen as inherently evil?
[0] I imagine a system where there has to be a minimum amount of comments and not one in which the only comment is made by Erik (or a bot) and used as the "motivation" for responding to the thread as a founder.
I find it totally bizarre that you would claim "you don't care about" this. As in, I do care about it.
Am I saying it's okay for someone to start talking about my product, then spam me to let me know this is happening?
Yes.
It's a cool kids club for cool SV startups as selected by founders and employes of equally cool SV startups, where it's specifically "cool" rather than "notable" or "innovative". Secondly, while you can't join their ranks at will, you will be given a membership to comment on your own product should some cool kid submit it to the PH. Essentially they exchange memberships for adding content to PH and helping build PH's credibility. It's a reasonable approach, but they are just being ... too blunt and obnoxious about it.
On a related note: we just started handing out recommendations to give people in the community the ability to invite others to join the discussion. This way we can enable the community to help grow itself without opening the floodgate entirely. The site and team simply aren't prepared for it.
The site and team simply aren't prepared for it.
I am NOT part of any club. I live in upstate NH. I'm certainly not cool.
However I do think that you are noticing a trend that I have as well.. the actually innovative or disruptive products end up not getting as much attention as they maybe should.
What I am interested to see is the social graph that get's developed based on our product preferences.
I think it will be less about product leaderboards and more about product discovery.
my .02
Your comment, ironically, if anything, just made PH more desirable to the majority of the people that read it.
I feel like this will probably be Product Hunt's biggest challenge going forward. Product Hunt seems like a really well-designed and well-thought-out site, but I can't get myself to use it (for now) because it seems like a direct manifestation of one of the most criticized aspects of Silicon Valley, namely its huge monoculture in which people are only building and promoting products that solve First World Problems (i.e. their own).
With all that said, I hope Product Hunt becomes the type of diverse and open community that I'm sure its founder also wants it to be.
The whole scheme that is Product Hunt may very well be the harbinger of the end of the good times.
So a company that has a 100% probability of a $10mil/yr business would stand no chance against a company that has a 1% probability of generating $1billion/yr.
Product Hunt is great and Ryan is great but I just don't see it.
Julez Maltz has a good post about the importance of non-consensus opinion in startups: http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/20/don%E2%80%99t-follow-the-cr...
I would love to see a yc partner shed some light here.
Ryan: I would be interested to hear your take on why ProductHunt is better/different than ShowHN. I don't mean this to be a jab, I just want to hear your perspective.
I won't say PH is better than Show HN. It's just different. HN has a very engineering-focused culture and you see that in the conversation and products surfaced. Furthermore, you see fewer big startup product launches on Show HN and more side projects. On PH you get a combination of both but often we have well-known founders from prominent startups jump into the conversation. Again, this isn't necessarily better -- it's a different type of content and experience.
Personally, I like to see a variety of submission from VC-backed startups to weekend hacks.
The YC network benefits greatly from having these types of startups in the network. Even if Product Hunt doesn't raise a single dollar in funding or make a single dollar in revenue, they have shown they are able to deliver customers to early stage startups. And by bringing them into the fold, other YC companies get preferential access to a new way to find customers. It's clearly a win/win.
What's the big picture plan for Product Hunt?
Are there going to be features like a directory of products, in addition to new launches? I agree with others that it's a lot like Show HN still, and have always hoped you'd build more specific product-focused features too.
It's also cool that they let you know when your product is on PH and validate posts. Only thing I wish is that they had a little better/more responsive customer service but I guess they are still in their initial stages. One of their moderators posted my product but used a very unfitting title. I tweeted and wrote to them but didn't receive a response until the next day and, if you're familiar with PH, that is simply too late because my product was already buried in the previous days posts...and then I was told they couldn't do anything more to help me. Hope this serves as feedback for the future!
Product Hunt is still very new and we're already talking about how the algorithm is no good and bad tweeting practices.
Of course other users are going to ask their friends to upvote their submissions. Of course the founders are going to make sure that quality products are shown near the top. Of course the founders are going to make sure that engagement is higher even if that means notifying users via twitter.
Why can't we just say congratulations!? Why do we have to hate so quickly? Everyone acts like they have been doing this for 10 years and they should have all this stuff fixed by now.
Because not everything should get a gold star just by existing.
Either way, I'm looking forward to seeing where YC takes Product Hunt.
Its early days for Product Hunt and while specific criticism is great (X should be improved because a, b and c. I think you guys could try m, n or o), the general whining is in poor form. Almost peanut gallery level. We are better than this in HN :)
Product Hunt lets builders like us get a few "non-cynical" eyeballs. Look at the examples he mentions, what's not to love:
<quoting Ryan>
- Notifyr (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/notifyr) was made by a 17 year old in the Netherlands. It's the 5th most upvoted product right now
- Instanerd (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/instanerd) was made by Alex in Skopje, Macedonia as a small side project. It received over 160 upvotes and ~5x the number of comments than the average submission.
</end quote>
In addition, you're right - it really can help shed light on products/teams that generally wouldn't get the time of day.
Our product was submitted to producthunt (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/sparta) , we sat at the #1 position for a day - and it delivered a bunch of great prospects. We definitely wouldn't have been able to connect with so many Silicon Valley people so early, had it not been for PH.
Congrats to Ryan and team!