Product Hunt from a 20-minute email list to a 60 per cent cut
Ryan Hoover built the first version in about twenty minutes with a borrowed link-sharing tool. Twelve years, a $20 million sale and one round of deep cuts later, only about one launch in ten reaches the homepage.
On 6 November 2013 Ryan Hoover opened Linkydink, a link-sharing tool made by a small studio in London, created a group, called it Product Hunt and emailed a few dozen friends. It took him about twenty minutes.
He was director of product at a games company called PlayHaven and was not an engineer. He had been blogging about startups and products for close to three years, which had earned him a few thousand people's attention.
Investors and product people replied within hours. Within a couple of weeks the list had a few hundred subscribers.
The site itself came out of a holiday. Hoover asked the designer and developer Nathan Bashaw how a non-engineer should turn an email list into a community with voting and comments.
Bashaw was free over Thanksgiving at his parents' house in Arkansas. They sketched wireframes over Skype, he wrote a small Rails app in his afternoons and late nights, and five days later there was a working version.
After a week of testing with a few dozen friends, Hoover pitched a reporter at Pando. That was the launch.
By June 2014 TechCrunch was calling it the social news site read by influential people. It had only become Hoover's full-time job a few months earlier.
Product Hunt joined Y Combinator in July 2014 and raised $1m in seed money in August from backers including Google Ventures, Greylock's Discovery Fund and Ashton Kutcher's fund. Andreessen Horowitz led a $6.1m Series A that autumn, and in February 2015 it won the Crunchie for best new startup.
The unglamorous part did the work. Hoover emailed and tweeted at hundreds of people by hand to seed the list, answered everyone, and wrote up his mistakes in public. His term for the original email list was an MVP that required no code at all.
It also became a scoreboard, and scoreboards get gamed. A good day on the leaderboard could mean thousands of sign-ups, a TechCrunch story and a call from an investor, so hunters with large followings gained leverage over launches and upvotes were traded.
In December 2016 AngelList bought the company. The price was never announced; Recode put it at around $20m in cash and stock. The team was thirteen people.
Hoover stepped down as chief executive in October 2020 and now runs Weekend Fund. Rajiv Ayyangar, who had launched his own companies on the site, took the job in September 2023 and cut around 60 per cent of the staff a month later.
From early 2024 the site stopped featuring nearly everything submitted. Independent trackers estimated that by the autumn only about one launch in ten reached the homepage, down from the majority in earlier years.
Votes are now hidden for the first four hours of the day and the homepage is shuffled, so a product cannot win by lunchtime on a mailing list alone. Forums arrived in 2025, so a launch can outlast its twenty-four hours.
The lesson for a founder is in the first week, not the last twelve years. One person, a borrowed tool, a friend with a free week and a hundred emails sent by hand — preceded by three years of writing that built the audience the list went out to.
And a launch day is a start, not a verdict. Product Hunt turned launching into a sport; the companies that did best on it treated the day accordingly.
The Founder Gazette launches on Product Hunt today. We will not ask you to upvote it — that is against their rules — but if you have a view on what a founders' newspaper should be, the comments are open.
More: FG on Product Hunt