Ryan Hoover on Product Hunt’s Acquisition and Lessons Learned About Launches with Dalton Caldwell

Ryan Hoover is the founder of Product Hunt which was in the Summer 2014 YC batch and was acquired by AngelList. He also invests in startups through his Weekend Fund.

https://twitter.com/rrhoover
https://www.producthunt.com/
https://angel.co/
https://weekend.fund/

Dalton Caldwell is a Partner at YC where he runs admissions.

https://twitter.com/daltonc

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

https://twitter.com/craigcannon

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Topics

00:00 – Ryan’s intro

00:25 – Dalton’s intro

1:00 – Forming Product Hunt and applying to YC

4:50 – Product Hunt’s growth rate when they applied to YC

6:00 – Raising money for the right reasons

9:15 – Maker communities

11:00 – Why raise money for Product Hunt?

12:45 – Having buzz during the batch

17:45 – Brex changing their idea during YC

19:50 – Pivoting into something you know well

21:15 – In retrospect, how would Ryan have advised himself around monetization?

28:00 – Trying to build out other verticals

34:00 – Don’t act like you have infinite runway

35:30 – Creating urgency and developing products within AngelList

39:50 – Tips to launch on Product Hunt

44:40 – What Dalton looks for in applications

46:30 – Giving people the opportunity to start

48:20 – What motivated Ryan to leave his job before Product Hunt