Product Hunt Goes From Listserv To Multimillion-dollar Company

Like many tech startup founders, Product Hunt’s Ryan Hoover often talks about his company as though it sort of materialized from nowhere — a bit of Silicon Valley magic and all of a sudden a fluke idea becomes a multimillion-dollar company. By the time Hoover had brought his friend on board to help build Product Hunt into a website, it already had scores of users subscribed to the e-mail list. Among them were the influential eyeballs of venture capitalists — many of whom later invested — hunting for investment opportunities and entrepreneurs searching for inspiration. Product Hunt, in the broadest sense, is a company that hopes to exploit the sort of obsessive consumer enthusiasm bred by lives lived online. Product Hunt limits those who can post as a sort of filtration system to ensure that the quality of content on the site remains high. Some have even pegged it as a competitor to tech news sites like TechCrunch, which is often the place new companies go to pitch their products. The reason I knew it’d be big,” tweeted Alexis Ohanian, Reddit founder and Product Hunt investor, “was because it’s the atomic value of a tech launch story. [...] critics have also wondered whether Product Hunt might risk winding up like Quorra, Path or Google Plus — services that have won over the tech world but failed to translate Silicon Valley adoration into wider success.