Bloomberg TV interview
Hoover talks with Liu and Sculley about why teenagers like Product Hunt:
Teenagers are always looking for the next thing.
On whether the apps on the site will make good companies:
It’s not our job to make sure these turn into companies. Most of them should not be companies. They’re not companies but hopefully they can inspire somebody to take them and use them in their own companies or products.
ProductHunt Community NYC interview
Hoover does an ask-me-anything style interview with the NYC Product Hunt community. On what the next three months looks like for Product Hunt:
We’re really focusing on recruiting and building out the team and the existing product, and focusing on our current community and audience
Mashable interview
Hoover talks about the growth of Product Hunt and how people now recognize him in public:
It’s been happening more than I would expect lately. It makes me feel slightly more self-conscious and aware of what I’m doing.
Makeshift interview
Hoover talks about why he would rather take the risk of working at a startup:
I can’t see myself working at a larger company. I enjoy the absurdity of startups — the (almost irrational) hope of directly impacting a big change in peoples’ lives. I’d much rather have “high-high’s” and “low-low’s” than the “medium-medium’s” of big businesses. Ultimately my goal is to learn while building something I’m passionate about and startups are the best place for me to do that.
Disrupt Interview
Hoover talks about what Product Hunt is and what the future holds for the site.
At its core it’s a very simple product and within it we’ve created this community of people who are very passionate about products.
Google Ventures interview
Hoover explains how Product Hunt started, and what its appeal is:
You see it on Twitter and you see it on Hacker News and Reddit and other sites, but you don’t see a platform just for new products every day
CDNify interview
Hoover talks on the podcast about building a community site, creating a minimum viable product (MVP), and new products on the market. On creating Product Hunt:
My motivation is to build something that I’m a consumer of and that I enjoy using.
The Social Hour interview
Hoover talks about curating new products, how Facebook wants companies to use its service, Google’s investment of $50 million to inspire female coders, and how Product Hunt is somewhere between Reddit and Hacker News.
It’s not a review site and it’s not a site to find the best thing for [something specific]…people go there to find things they wouldn’t find elsewhere
ProductPeople interview
Hoover tells the podcast about his strategy of building an audience, and then creating something valuable for the community.
We built Product Hunt over four days, during Thanksgiving
Fox News interview
Hoover talks about how venture capitalists use Product Hunt:
VCs have two different hats, the investor hat and the consumer hat, they use the site they like to find new things [and there are] very many cases where VCs have invested in products that I know of that they found on Product Hunt.
That includes SV Angel’s investment in the TapTalk photo app, Steadfast Venture Capital’s investment in the Fitbay fitness social network, and Move Loot, which has got funding from Google Ventures.
I didn’t build Product Hunt for VCs, I didn’t build a product to serve investors, but it is serving them…ultimately I’m building a product for myself and for consumers.
This Week In Startups interview
Hoover and Calacanis talk about new products on Product Hunt like the Uber Wedding app and Soundcloud for iOS, how he got the idea for the site, and how viewers can interact with the people who create the products.
There’s some very interesting conversations that come out of Product Hunt.
He says that for an app called InstaNerd, site users contributed ideas and the founder incorporated them to improve the product.
#WaterCooler interview
Hoover talks with Smith and Curaytor.com’s Jimmy Macken about starting Product Hunt, how curation and tracking metrics like clickthroughs can help industries like real estate, and crowd sourcing compared with techniques like SEO. On building relationships online:
You have to provide value…The internet makes relationships much more scaleable
Allvoices interview
Hoover says that living in San Francisco helps, but that meeting people online can be more important for a startup founder:
Many of the relationships I’ve formed didn’t start in person. They began online through my writing, communities like Quibb and Twitter. Face-to-face meetings are the best way to get to know someone but they’re not nearly as scalable as online interactions.
Product management interview
Hoover talks to Jason Shah of Yammer about working in product management:
Getting thrown into the fire is often the best way to learn
Reality Makers interview
Hoover talks about the small but growing Portland tech scene, selling stuff on eBay, how his dad inspired him to become an entrepreneur, and what motivates people to start startups:
It’s ultimately freedom