Ryan Hoover shares Product Hunt’s ‘scale or fail’ lessons ahead of AccelerateOTT

Ryan Hoover
Ryan Hoover
Editor's Note

This article was updated to include a follow-up tweet from Ryan Hoover.

2018-06-07

Before he makes the trip from Silicon Valley to Ottawa for the annual AccelerateOTT conference – this year tackling the theme “scale or fail” – Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover shared some of his own lessons from scaling up the popular product listing site.

Despite its status today as one of the web’s most active communities, Product Hunt began as Hoover’s side project back in 2013. Back then he wasn’t even setting out to build a company, let alone one that would eventually be backed by Y Combinator and acquired by AngelList for a reported $20 million in 2016.

“It wasn’t initially going to be a company. It was a project, more of an experiment,” he tells Techopia.

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Hoover was looking to build a destination for tech heads to talk about the latest app or device in the same way sports junkies dig into last night’s game.

“There is this community of people … that talk about technology the same way people talk about sports, with passion and interest and curiosity.”