Ryan Hoover: recommendation

Transcript context

…Oh man. Oh yeah, he moved to Miami too. Oh my God. Everyone's over there. Okay, so he asked if you could go back and build Product Hunt again, what would you do differently? We talked a bit about this, but anything else? Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about this actually lately. And yeah, there's a few things. One, Product Hunt in the very beginning and still today is very much focused on tech. And there was at one point an ambition to expand beyond tech into all different types of categories of products. So we experimented with podcasts, actually podcast discovery. We experimented with video game discovery, we experimented with book discovery. And the thesis there was, okay, this could be actually discovery platform for all of these communities to discover all these different products. And I think there was a lot of good ideas in that. However, I severely underestimated how difficult it would be to do two things. One, the product experience and product is very different than how you would want to discover video games or maybe in the future fashion and a bunch of other types of products out there. And two, it's really difficult to translate a committee and expand into other communities. Some have done it like Reddit is maybe a great example, where Reddit has this massive long tail of every kind of community you can imagine, but very few companies and platforms can actually do that. So that's one regret is we should not have tried to expand horizontally. We should have just focused entirely vertically and serve the tech community better and with more things, which is effectively what we're doing now. Another regret, another thing I would've changed is I would've actually tried to monetize and generate a revenue sooner. We raised a seed in a series A, we had capital to grow, and we didn't actually try to make money until after we were acquired by AngelList. And my thinking at the time was, and to some extent there's some truth to this is everything you prioritize is at the cost of something else. You're essentially taking focus from one thing to direct it to something else. And what mattered most was growth and to grow the community. But what I really should have done is dedicated maybe 10% of our focus on revenue generation, because once we started generate revenue, we did so very quickly and we got to cashflow breakeven, I want to say a year, maybe 12 months after we started generating revenue. So if we would've started in 2014 to make some money, we could have been cashflow breakeven maybe 2015, 2016, which would've just given us a lot of flexibility in owning our own destiny and proving out some of the business model itself. And then the last thing, because I've been thinking about this lately, is delegation is a classic founder challenge. I am just generally a controlling person. It's something I'm working on and it's really hard sometimes when I have such strong opinions and I'm very particular about certain things, to fully delegate and fully trust everybody. That said, we had amazing team. I worked with some amazing people, still people that are at Product Hunt today, six, seven years later. out certain things, to fully delegate and fully trust everybody. That said, we had amazing team. I worked with some amazing people, still people that are at Product Hunt today, six, seven years later. It wasn't anything about the skills of the team, it was just my own trust and my own delegation. And what I shouldn't have done is up until shortly before I left, I was editing the newsletter every morning, for example. Every morning I was waking up 5:00 A.M., 5:30 A.M. editing the newsletter. And that's just kind of silly to be doing that so many years later after starting.…

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