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We launched publicly about two months ago after Nathan Bashaw (@nbashaw) and I built it over Thanksgiving break. The backstory was published on FastCo: http://www.fastcolabs.com/3023152/open-company/the-wisdom-of...
Happy to answer any questions and would love feedback from the HN community!
I'm surprised it hasn't been posted on HN before today. Anyways, great job with ProductHunt!
Congrats Ryan! You've done an amazing job so far. I launched http://headlinr.com/ last Thursday, had no clue about ProductHunt :(
Thanks and congrats on your launch as well. I love the design of Headlinr and have been following it since its launch.
Thanks man!
I liked it...
But it is still invitation only, and so far I never got invited for anything invitation only and I end forgetting it and never using it.
Great job with the launch, Ryan!
Great Job on the launch Ryan!
I have a user account but when/how can I post something?
We're currently limiting contributor growth as have a few changes we need to make to the product to scale. If you're interested, please add your info here and we'll send you an email once you're added! :) http://bit.ly/ph-contributor
rooting for you pal, keep up the awesome
PH has been a pretty great resource for me. There aren't enough hours in the day to keep up with every company that launches. Quality > quantity any day of the week.
I use PH daily as well. I posted a side project of mine up there and received a bunch of positive feedback and insightful questions :)
Thanks! Which product was it? Want to link to the discussion thread?
Splashbox
http://www.producthunt.co/posts/868
Product Hunt is addictive and fun, but also useful. I've found a few cool things that I've used right away, and more that I've bookmarked for later.
Nice. We just launched something like this on http://beta.techendo.co/
Any feedback on how we can make the experience better, just let me know. :)
Once navigating to a sub-domain there is no link back to main. That's really frustrating so a small link at top or bottom back to techendo.co would improve my experience greatly.
Thank you so much. Will do that now!
How do you intend to balance the need for high quality with the desire of users to get involved in the community? Are you worried if someone can't post/comment for months after joining, they may lose interest?
Great question! Honestly, that's one of my least favorite parts of Product Hunt. I hate turning away people that want to contribute but to keep the contributions of high quality and not overwhelming, we need to curb our contributor growth.
We will be making product changes to grow the community, opening it to more people.
I can only vote on Product Hunt and can't comment on the site.
For me, I treat it as a daily digest of cool products rather than a discussion board. I haven't lost interest yet!
HN and PN are the two sites I now visit daily to keep up with the world. Great job rrhoover (and pg, of course!)
Thanks, Joe! I really appreciate your support. Also don't forget @nbashaw. Super happy to be working w/ him on it.
What's PN?
I think he meant PH (aka Product Hunt) :)
The way that Product Hunt has been helping me to discover new products is by the collective curation, by people that provide a lot of insight and are users themselves, just as it would on HackerNews. Above all, it allows me to get involved with the community (founders, PMs, designers, avid users). I used to go to the App Store for my discovery, but now I do it faster and easier on PH. That's why I really like it. Kudos!
Had one of my apps featured on PH and was amazed at the quality of feedback. Ryan himself wrote a detailed review and a designer from Pinterest pointed out a UI flaw I'd never even thought about.
Post here: http://www.producthunt.co/posts/442
Your comment makes me smile. :)
P.S. Pinterest engineer, @connor, is the man.
Can you share the link please?
http://www.producthunt.co/posts/442
Tell HN: It is a great website but hella addictive, so be-aware specially those who complain about HN sucking all their time, now you have 2 addictive websites to deal it. I personally would stay away from it.
Why would you stay away from ProductHunt? It adds value??
I can get everything I need on HN. Ultimately the best products will make the front page here, no need to look around.
If you aren't at least occasionally looking beyond the front page how can you be certain the best products are making the front page?
These new product discovery sites are awesome, been spending a lot of time lately on ProductHunt and Headlinr!
I think the big interface problem with the website is that it makes the user work extremely hard to figure out what the hell each product is about.
I don't think there's any point in emphasizing the product names, when they don't serve to explain the product.
A really simple improvement would be to display the name and description similarly to HN:
E.g.
I mean this in the most helpful way possible: the interface is really, really bad at serving one of its basic, fundamental functions.
The interface literally does what you just listed but backwards.
It emphasizes the product name, rather than the description, which I'd argue draws the reader's eye to the wrong place; that emphasis would be better placed on what something is, which information the reader will find useful in deciding whether she cares what something is called.
It's not exactly "extremely hard" to find the description, though.
But it is pretty hard on the eyes.
Why let bad design make it harder than it has to be?
Obviously we should strive for better design, but greatly exaggerating is not a useful method of critique. The original post makes it sound like this information is almost impossible to find, when it is actually the second most prominent information on the page.
The original post may have overstated the matter somewhat, but in the responses it received, the underlying issue was clarified to the point where it is easily recognizable and can be trivially addressed by the site developers if they so choose. That being the case, I can see a reasonable amount of utility in the original post, if only in that it prompted the analysis it did.
In general, I'm not fond of seeing "now, then, let's not be too harsh, shall we?"-type fussing on HN. Welcome to the Internet! People here aren't always as nice as you'd like them to be. This does not mean the things they say, however rudely, necessarily lack value.
I'm not suggesting that criticism shouldn't be harsh. I'm just suggesting that it should be accurate. The original post gave me the impression that either the poster hadn't looked at the site or else the site's design had been updated since it was written.
I don't think it's exaggerated at all. I looked at the page for like 30 seconds, thinking to myself, "What is this? I thought it was supposed to be like Hacker News, but for products. It appears to just be a bunch of people posting half-sentences that make no sense."
Seriously, the first post is "Go Dish HotelTonight for restaurants (SF)" WTF does that even mean? It's just a string of words that make no sense at all. It's literally incomprehensible to a typical reader.
The original post makes it sound like those half-sentences don't even exist. That's a pretty great exaggeration.
Each product takes up one line and is maybe a dozen words of description. It's a non-problem.
It's an example of poor design; the font color and weighting draws the eye straight to the product names and away from the descriptions, which are the real meat of what the site has to offer.
Sure, it only takes a moment's squinting to figure out what's what, but requiring your would-be users to put in that effort, or indeed any effort, to figure out the most basic nature of what you have to offer, strikes me as an excellent opportunity to limit your support and public relations commitment by reducing your user base.
The memory anchor is the product name though. I go back to PH often to find products I didn't have time to check out and to jump back into discussions, and the product name is the thing I'm looking for. I can find it in seconds, and I can also see how certain products have moved up the leaderboard in seconds. Sentences as the visual lead would greatly complicate that behavior, one I think is a primary one.
Said another way, the atomic unit is product names, which I actually think is more effective than the Show HN model. Some tagging/categories would really help overall, but I think this design actually helps beyond a cursory first-glance at the homepage.
You could more or less have your cake and eat it too, if you align the site names and their descriptions in two floated columns, so it's still - fairly - possible to scan whichever column you prefer.
Why do HN readers have to always complain, at least start your negatives with some positive congratulation sort of phrase, I bet most of people who post their newly created website or service want some sort of approval by HN which will give them a huge boost of positive emotions which will allow them to make service better. Just put yourself in his shoes, you just posted a service you l've spent lots of your free time building it, and the top comment on HN has nothing positive in it...
Criticism can be positive.
Criticism is usually the best type of feedback. Keep it coming. :)
Agreed and it's often really hard to get someone to criticise and tell you what could be improved - everyone just dishes out the usual "yeah, looks nice".
I agree! I think we should be balanced in our feedback, point out the positives and negatives. It starts to get real old when it's nothing but negatives.
Negatives are easy to point out. Similar to how "People don't know what they want", if something is working right, people may not notice it because it just works. However, if something isn't working right, it's often easy to spot it.
For what it's worth, I see a lot of positive feedback, though they're more about the service itself rather than something that the service (or UI) does well.
your right, the description color is too white , its hard to read
This may feel a little harsh but I do agree with the sentiment. I loaded the site, skimmed through a bunch of product names and had to go back and read the much less emphasized description which felt like a pain in the ass. My eye kept being drawn to the bolder, darker product names. I then closed the site. Mind you I'm very interested in the topic.
Huge congrats to Ryan & team for getting this out there. It's a great, focussed source of news on product launches that might not provide incredible traffic (yet) but that provides valuable, constructive feedback from smart people.
I really hope it retains this quality as it (inevitably) grows. We launched SupportKit for Zendesk (http://supportkit.radialpoint.com) on ProductHunt yesterday and the response was great.
Congrats @nbashaw! Glad to see it on here. Looks great, keep killing it.
Thanks!
Congrats to @nbashaw and @rrhoover, absolutely insane that you built this over Thanksgiving Break! It's been amazing to watch it grow in this short amount time. I always expect big things from the two of you.
Bookmarked a few weeks ago. Visit every day, love the site.
This is awesome, congrats!
Congratulations on getting this out there. My favorite hacker news posts are always Show HN so this is really cool. I love seeing what other people are working on and having a single place to find new tools could prove really useful.
That being said, in my opinion, product discovery doesn't seem well suited to the hacker news format. A new product's relevance lasts a lot longer than the average new news article does. I'd love to see tags added to each product and a way to browse by tags. Boring and probably done, I suppose, but I think it'd be more useful.
Thanks! Hacker News and "Show HN" is responsible for some of the market validation and product design of Product Hunt.
While we want to keep the product simple and useful, we do see value in adding more context and "searchability" with tagging. It's definitely on our radar.
The ability for people with certain domain knowledge or active interests to subscribe to tags, or customise their front page based on tags would be pretty nice.
Example, I'm interested in travel related ideas/products, but I've really no great interest in much of the stuff on the front page at the moment. But if something travel related does hit the site I don't want to miss it.
This might also allow for higher quality of comments, less eyeballs but more interested eyeballs so to speak.
I have been enjoying PH for awhile - congrats on the launch and getting the word out.
I would say that sometimes it is a little overwhelming to get through every service, and I look forward to a time where you are classifying/organizing the products that come through. Knowing there is a searchable repository of products would be a great resource.
Just learning about you- congrats on the launch!
I really enjoyed this site, at first my reaction was 'meh' but as I was starting to go through services and recognized some, I am seeing great potential. Startups as a rule need all possible ways to get the word out.
My scrolling experience was really laggy... as if images were constantly loading in the background slowing the page. But it's a nice site otherwise.
I like Product Hunt, I've been visiting it several times a week since its launch.
Question for Ryan, how are the contributors chosen?
Shame you can't open the comments in a new tab - I usually use Hacker News that way. I realize javascript things popping up in odd strips down the side of the page are trendy but not very nice to use if you want to actually read stuff. Otherwise nice.
Good point! I'm to blame for that :) but I'll fix it!
before producthunt existed how did you share links about cool new products @rrhoover?
I shared much less before Product Hunt but most of these discussion happened IRL. Products are watercooler topic and particularly interesting conversation starter for many techy, early adopters.
Online, I did and still share cool products on Twitter and occasionally Facebook. I've also written about several early products.
what about a special msgme group?
RSS feed?
+1. looks great, but I'd love to have a feed to follow. I tend to forget about this kind of thing if I don't subscribe.
My favorite aspect of PH is that it cuts out the fat of TC/HN/Pando and sheds light on the products we, the people, deem worthy of praise.
I found out about you guys last week when you linked to -my- project, Geocodio, from -your- site (came up in my Google Analytics). Since then I've been checking it daily. Nice work!
very cool! I'd prefer comments to be threaded though.
Congrats!
Did you use Arc for this?
Edit: nvm. Thank you for introducing me to Telesc.pe. This is exactly what I've been looking for!
Love Telesc.pe. Used it at http://lighthouse.io as a first test app, been great.
Exactly what i wanted! I actually deliberately scan for Show HN posts because even the half-baked ones are often very inspirational. Congrats!
I like PH. It could be more editorial in describing each product. Also, are you working on an improved mobile design?
I can't share much yet but we have something better coming than just a better mobile web design. /end tease :)
Tease? I was just wondering if you'll improve the mobile experience - because now I have to scroll through a big header, newsletter signup, tweet button, the voters avatars and related links before actually viewing the comment thread.
Can you add sorting by characters?
Here's a few things I couldn't easily figure out on your site: What is a best new product? How is this different than a linked list on a blog? How would I find the best X app? e.g. Best new iOS note app? Is this site for me or for someone else? Am I a product person?
Congrats on launching. Suggestions:
* Some of the images are broken, you should fix those * You should add all the product images from every site. Not having multiple angles is annoying * You should consider making the thumbnails rotate when I move my mouse across the image on the search pages * Would be nice if there was a larger selection of furniture
Furniture? Are you talking about http://www.producthunt.co/ or some other site? Anyway, thanks for the feedback!
Guessing that's in response to this thread instead?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7144369
When @nbashaw first launched this, I told him they should limit submissions to 10 products a day because they'd run out of new products after a few weeks.
It's been amazing just to see how many new products are out there-- more than any (productive) person could really check out on a daily basis.
Excited to see where @producthunt goes in the future.
I think you're on to something here.
Congratulations Ryan, I feel lucky to be an early part of this (user #3 baby!) when you just sat down to think about doing it. It's come along a long way already, I can't imagine where this is going to end up in a year.
how do I submit a product I found?
Something I can put in my feed reader (rss or atom)?
Dear Product Hunt, please fix "switch to weekly emails or unsubscribe" feature. I was trying to switch to weekly emails 3 times and unsubscribe as well. It doesn't work at all.
Love this site.