YouSaid · the spoken record

Ryan Hoover

lines on the record: 85
first: 2022-08-07
most recent: 2022-08-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, thanks, Money. Yeah, these conversations are helpful in like reflecting them. What do I actually believe anyway? So it's just like writing. It's helpful.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm just easy to find or Hoover on Twitter, RyanHoover.me is a simple website. I have a bunch of old blog posts on there, probably with a bunch of broken links and broken images, but it's in there. The content's there. I don't know. We're investing. We're investing in the early stage companies, B2B, B2C. Building something weird. I don't know, DM me, email me. I'm around.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, I don't know. I don't know if I'll. Part of me is like, do I ever want to raise from venture? Now, it depends on the idea. If I need it, if it's required strategically, then yes. But to be quite honest, maybe I shouldn't say this. Like I'm kind of really interested in like just owning something 100%. And you can always resent your later. Like it's a one-way door. So I kind of want to delay that door, you know, for whatever I build next if I can”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a company, I don't know. I don't know what it is. I'm not going to even call it a company, but building something is hopefully in my future. I just got to figure out the right idea and maybe reflect on your blog post too on the idea generation stuff that you shared, because that is helpful”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, I'll let you know when I figure it out. Yeah, we're on a third fund right now. We're actually about 30, 35% deployed. So we have plenty of capital. We're not going to be raising anytime soon. And yeah, we're just investing in early stage companies right now. But yeah, when I fast forward longer term, I don't know. I will always be investing. I'm also more of a fan of maintaining a smaller fund. Our latest fund is 21 million. And that might I might change my mind on this, but that might be the biggest fund we ever raise. I might keep it around that same size for the next one because it really allows us to be really collaborative. We can write smaller checks. We can fit into competitive deals. I think it's a better product for founders. Like we're not trying to take the entire round. We can, you know, try to bring on the lennies of the world as co-investors, things like that. And so investing will always be a part of my future. But I also love building. Building is the most fun. So creating something is”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should do SVV for whatever reason you can't do a scout, you don't have any money to annual invest. One thing you can also do is just pretend angel invest. And that doesn't mean that you're meeting the founder and like writing a check, but you can write memos or you can like almost create a fantasy portfolio. And this is what Vetica, before she joined, joined me was doing to some extent. She was writing memos about companies she was excited about. In some ways, she was like doing the job before getting the job. anyone could do that today. And that can be helpful too if you're applying or trying to prove your abilities. You can say, hey, here are the memos. Here are the companies that I would have invested in. You know, if I had the opportunity and here's my thought process behind that.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For that company, which can actually be a strong value add for that founder, the biggest trade off is it's a lot of work sometimes. You have to basically do a fundraise for every company you invest in. And that's super time consuming for a lot of people. And then the last thing is raising a fund. So that's the decision that I decided back in 2017 is I wanted to raise a fund. It's a lot more work to raise the capital and there's a lot more responsibility in managing funds and so on and so forth. It provided me with the most flexibility in a way to deploy many checks into many companies, especially when I didn't and still don't have like a ton of money to Angel Invest. Those are like different options. Like I think my blog post goes into more like pros and cons for each of those things. But the last thing I'll say actually is let's say none of those are really an option. You don't want to sort of fun. You don't have enough relationship.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Approval, but you send the deals and you get carry on those deals in many cases. Those have pros and cons too. Like they're easier to start and get into than raising a fund typically for most people. But you also are sort of reliant on that program or that fund. You might have less autonomy in what you can't invest in and what you can't. And then there's a few others. There's SPVs is one angle, which works really well for a lot of people. For those that maybe don't know, I'm listening to this right now, SPVs are essentially like a single vehicle investment into one company. So you raise money from LPs, from other investors to invest in this specific company. And there are a few great things about that. Like one, you get deal by deal carry, meaning the outcome of that company is you get paid when they exit essentially, assuming there's a positive outcome versus a fund you have to like return the entire fund first, two, it allows you to also bring in maybe very strategic helpful people into that particular”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, actually, I wrote a TweetStorm and converted it to a blog post on this because we'd gotten a lot of, you probably as well get a lot of emails or people saying, hey, I'm thinking about raising a fund. How should I do that? Or I want to get into venture. I want to start investing. Like, what advice do you have? So yeah, wrote a blog post on this. And there's many different ways to invest. There's, you know, Angel Investing is one. So great thing about that is if you have the capital angel invest, you would do it today, tomorrow. There's no sign-offs required. We have maximum flexibility. But of course, you need to have disposable income. You need to be able to, you will need to lose all of it. And then hopefully, you know, you'll be on the other side of that and make some money in 10 years. It takes a long time. They're scouting. That's another opportunity. They're more and more scout funds probably than ever before right now in different flavors. Some of them are like dedicated kind of scout programs where you have capital to deploy on your own. Some are more like you still need.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a few founder bets that we've made. One, going back to consumer social kind of thing, he's someone I'm known for many, many years, one of the most talented designers and deers, product builders. And I've just been waiting for him to start a company. And so that was one of those, I'm going to bet on you because I believe in you. I'm not sure about this first idea. Who am I to judge? But I don't know if that's going to be it. He's probably going to launch 10 apps in the 11th is going to be a massive success. And so that's sort of the way I think about those consumer social founder first bets.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say we don't have my cop out, it's contextual kind of answer. Some people are like, we are team first only. Some are we're market first. Some are we're product first and we look at everything kind of holistically. And I think the evaluation of the product is sort of a reflection on the team. So our assessment of the thinking behind the product that they built today and maybe some of the traction is a reflection on like the team's abilities and like the thought processes. We try to look at it holistically. And I mean, yeah, I mean, every investor would say like, yeah, we want to back, you know, resilient founders that are very driven and insightful and all those things, of course. But it's also sometimes hard to fully evaluate that unless you really know that person. So we try to take as much data around like how the product is working, how they made those decisions leading up to this to evaluate the team sort of indirectly.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got to be careful of how this is interpreted in some ways, but there are cases when I didn't think the company would make it. Either the product wasn't working and many months had passed and it was very clear that, well, to me, I thought it was clear that, okay, this probably isn't going to work out in my head. I kind of wrote it off. And then that company either pivoted or some massive partnership or M&A kind of event came through out of nowhere. And so I guess the learning is like never count a portfolio company out until it's over. And, you know, that relies on, of course, backing founders that are very resilient and creative and driven to create momentum, you know, out of nothing. But that's been surprising to me. And it makes me kind of excited because, you know, we invested in over 110 companies now. And it's fun to be able to kind of see behind the scenes a little bit how all these things kind of play out.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I feel like there's a lot we've learned. So there's things on the operational side. This is a whole category of running of funds. There's a bunch of things that go into it from LP communications, LP fundraising. There's also Vedica who works with me on the fun side. She describes it like hygiene. There's also good hygiene when it comes to running a fund. For example, when you meet a founder, you should get back to them. Like if it's a pass, you should let them know. And then there's a lot of different ways that you can do that. Some people, you know, might just say like pass and that's not very like encouraging to a founder if they give you no context, no details. There's also an element of hygiene, which is we always follow up with the person that introduced us to that company. And we just feel it's kind of like that's what we appreciate. Like we like to kind of know what happened, like have them close the loop. And so it was like good hygiene, operational things that we've learned and kind of honed over the years. I mean, the biggest surprise, the biggest surprise has probably been”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You'll see parallels maybe to other communities or other problems. And a lot of companies eventually expand well beyond that. Like go back to Airbnb, you know the story way better than I do. But initially it was like just basically couches and extra rooms and houses and like a lot of people, most people in the US would not do that. Like my parents, not in a million years. Even me, like I don't want to like stay in some stranger's room. I want my own space, my own house. That probably at the time seemed really niche and like small. But obviously extended well beyond that. Now if you, Airbnb is like housing in generally speaking. Their TAM is housing in my mind, which they haven't yet expanded into like real estate sales or like long-term rentals per se, but like that, that's a possibility.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's effectively the more narrow your idea generally, and this is where I throw in the big asterisks, like not for everything, there's always contextual differences, but generally the easier it is to build a great solution for those people because now you can actually hone in the product experience, the messaging, and everything to serve exactly those people. And it can help with the product side. It can help with the marketing and go-to-market as well, where you're messaging when people land on your homepage, you don't need to create kind of a broader kind of like value prop to everybody, but really you can focus on what is the problem this particular audience or community is facing. And so generally just easier now, there is always that challenge of like, well, is this too small? Is it too much of a niche? If my goal is to build like a massive company, my bias is not to worry too much about that because what you probably find is over time opportunities to expand beyond.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Startups since there are more and more people building companies and technology. There's essentially more efficiency. It's certainly not an efficient, super efficient market, but there is more efficiency in problem discovery and solution exploration. And so for that reason, you need even more reasons for things to sort of answers to the why now, like what's changed, what insight do you have? Why doesn't this exist already? Because a bunch of people are trying to build something in this space most likely. So that's a lot of what we think about, especially on the investing side when we talk to founders.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trip that I want to take during these days in these areas. It's like a very different browsing kind of experience. So that's just one example. Consumer behavior shifts is one thing to observe. The other is technology shifts. So what new thing can you build today that could be built yesterday? And so there's a bunch of categories around there, like Web3, AI, the biggest shift that we've seen is mobile from early 2010s that unlocked a whole bunch of things. So yeah, I think it's observing those shifts and those changes. Last thing I'll say on that is like, I think.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then there's the other component too, which is really about observing trends and changes, whether it's like a consumer behavior shift. Let's take an obvious one today is like distributed working. So five years ago when the weekend fun started, that was one of our themes. I was like, I think distributed working will be on the rise for a number of reasons. One, it's harder and harder to recruit. Two, there's a subset of people who really value that flexibility and autonomy. And then fast forward, we had COVID that accelerated remote working and now that's a huge consumer behavior shift, not just in how people work, but also like going to your air maybe like world, like Airbnb has shifted their entire product to support more of this remote working kind of lifestyle. Just the way that the homepage is now more of a catalog of places that you could explore at different times of the year versus, or maybe before was more like, I have a very specific vacation.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the problem journal is one. And again, I think it's helpful not to try to come up with a solution, but just simply write down the problem you observed or experienced. Another one I think is interesting is just to immerse yourself in different communities. Ideally, like maybe like seemingly niche or weird long tail communities doesn't have to be that necessarily, but that might be where you'll see more unique insights or gather more unique insights. And you could do that through, I don't know, participating in subreddits, meaning all.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hard to build a consumer company without some sort of unique insight, maybe impossible. And you can get that in many different ways. It could be through your own experiences. I used to write a problem journal. Like just when things annoyed me or when things were less efficient, I would write it down as like a note. And I didn't try to solve it. I didn't say, oh, here's the solution. I was just like, this is annoying. Like in San Francisco, one example is a lot of people don't have laundry in their unit. So I'm like, that's kind of annoying. Like that's a problem. Maybe there's a solution out there. Things like that. I don't know. There's a bunch of different ways. Like your blog post does a better summary, I think, of like the different ways different companies ideated and came up with their ideas. But yeah, many different ways to navigate it, but it needs an insight of some sort.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ask someone like, why do you use Twitter? And people will have different answers that are all kind of like fuzzy. And they ultimately tend to come down to some sort of innate human desire. Like it could be for Twitter, it could be about like, I want to be informed with what's happening in the world. Or it could be I want to feel less lonely or connected to more people or something like that. Whereas if you go to, let's say DocuSite, I think is a great example of a B2B company. It's like super simple. It's like a way to get legal docs signed online. That's what it does. It's a thing that people have to do. It's very clear, like what it solves. And so B2B is easier just to navigate that idea maze. And so with consumer, your first blog post on this topic touches a lot on the ideas side. And a lot of it resonated with me, especially the insight piece. Like, what is the insight that you as a founder have to build this thing? Because I think it's really.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or they could be using your product or your social app, let's say. So now you're competing with so many different things. Many of those are incumbents where the consumer also has like built-in habits, routines. This is a big, big part about consumers too, is eventually you want to be like an internal trigger in someone's mind where they just without even thinking, they go and use your product or service for some reason. Usually you don't start that way. You need like external triggers to pull people in, but eventually you have to get to that point. So how do you overcome those internal triggers they have for other services and other products? It's really, really hard. And then I think a lot of it is like B2B companies usually, you have a clear problem that you're solving and you can talk to customers. You can understand what are their current behaviors, what solutions are they using now? What do they like about them? What are they not like about them? Whereas consumer, there's a little bit of that, but it's fuzzier. You know, if you take like Twitter and you kind of even”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, it's tough. I mean, there's obviously consumer is pretty broad, so there's like different levels of difficulty. I think like consumer social or gaming, like games building games probably the hardest and the one filled with the most failures. And I think a lot of that is because a few things. I think one monetization is generally harder than like a B2B company. Historically, a lot of it's been like advertising driven. And to do that, you have to first get to massive scale for advertisers to really care. And then you have to, you know, double it and double it and double it again. So MonStation is super tough versus a B2B company. It's like people have a problem. They have a need. They are willing to give you money on day one. The other thing about consumer that's tough is you're always fighting different, essentially you're fighting for attention. And so you might be some consumer social company, but you're kind of like competing with Netflix too, which isn't in your direct domain, but like people could be watching Netflix.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's fine as long as it's just one mode. It's the teams that prioritize all these small things that don't matter before the product is actually useful for people or This is where I like my product manager hat comes in. And I'm like, is this like the highest on your priority list? I don't know. No, big asterisks. It's all contextual. Sometimes the audience you're building for really cares about dark mode. Like if you're building for developers, maybe you need dark mode or some version of it. But yeah, I'm light mode.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Light mode, never use dark mode like ever. Actually, I take that back. Tweed Deck is the only dark mode kind of app that I use. I don't know if a founder is prioritizing dark mode before they have product market fit too. It's like a big red flag for me. That's a little bit of a hot take. Some people are going to hate me for that, but. Know, I don't think dark mode matters for like 99% of people.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nothing against electric bikes, but I feel like if your goal is to get exercise, then just get a regular bike. But I don't have either. I have a recumbent bike at home that I use for exercise. And the reason why it's recumbent and not like a peloton where you sit up is because I can do mills and work basically while I'm exercising.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. We lived in Hollywood up in the hills for a while. So I don't know if that's east or west, but wherever that is.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay Los Angeles. Although it depends on my goals. If I was, you know, a new college grad or someone young and new and kind of the tech industry, definitely San Francisco, you'll create a lot of serendipity. You'll meet a lot of people. But from a lifestyle perspective, LA, I just find more enjoyable weather's better. There's hiking. Housing is cheaper. So LA today, San Francisco 10 years ago.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Isn't a tough one? Because I'm generally a La Croix kind of person, but Topo Chico, I like the bottle. So when Topo Chico is available, I'll go Topo Chico. I'm sorry, LaCroy.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not entirely true, but I feel like I see a lot of TikTok videos on Instagram Reels after, you know, weeks after we've been published.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, okay, got it. TikTok for me. It's funny. Reels, I kind of joke with Susie, my girlfriend. I joke that it's like, reels is like TikTok, but like two weeks late.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I was listening to a podcast about someone who was basically describing psychedelics as a gateway into like meditation and everything and how it can be one of those things that makes people, a lot of people who take psychedelics come across as another hippie cliche like person who repeats like the same things we've all heard many, many times. But there's a reason why there's a pattern there. And he describes psychedelics as one way to feel that and learn that feeling that you can't achieve with meditation with experience.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. That's a really good point. I mean, it also mirrors with like the power law of investing where it's in most people's situation, it's one company is returning, you can invest in 100 companies. One of those companies is probably going to return three to five X in the returns of all the others, maybe combined in some cases. So it's wild.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People, but I think there's some nuances to it, which is momentum matters so much. And momentum is reflexive in that, you know, high momentum leads to more high momentum, low momentum leads to more low momentum because there's this energy that kind of goes through companies where when there is momentum, when people are shipping, when things are going well, other people feel that energy and they want to do the same. But in the reverse, someone who might be slowing things down, not shipping, not really performing very well, that actually does the reverse too. It might lead other people to feel less motivated and repair less. And so I don't know, momentum is this weird thing that, you know, arguably it's one of the most important things in early stage startups. And of course, it's an input to a lot of things, but it's just so important to nail.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and maybe there is no answer. Maybe the question is actually doesn't matter. So, I mean, if I'm honest, I'm still figuring all these things out. I mean, I think in life, some of the things that I've reflected on is so damn cliche, but sometimes the cliches are true is like friends and authentic relationships have been, I don't know, they just matter so much, I think. And the older I get to, it's less about, I don't know, I care less about having a lot of friends and more about a few deep close relationships. I don't know. I feel like that's very different than like middle school, Ryan, or like, you know, when you're on the playground metaphorically speaking where everyone's trying to be popular and, you know, meet a lot of people and even joining and being in San Francisco and the tech community, you want to meet a lot of people and network and all those, do all those things. That's less interesting to me and less important. And then more on the business side, the thing I've been thinking about is like, again, I think this is obvious to a lot.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, still figuring it out. I'm still asking the old stereotypical questions. Like, what the heck is the meanial life? What am I here for? Like all those things.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's kind of like a lot of things. What doesn't break you makes you stronger to some extent. So it didn't break me. It just scarred me a little bit, but it didn't break me.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, don't want to subject them to the same anxiety that you're feeling and be 100% transparent. So it's a struggle because I think I value authenticity so much and I kind of like thrive around people who are authentic. However, there is this tension with being a founder or CEO. You can't necessarily share everything. So anyway, everyone's gone through hardship building a company. The positive aspect of that is like I think hopefully grown some empathy for founders who are going through hard situations. I think it's made me a little bit stronger, maybe thicker skin for certain things and just provide a more perspective into the company kind of like building journey.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, there's actually, I recently, in the past couple weeks, sort of blog posts that I'm not really able to publish because it's basically when you, there's certain things I want to share that it can make things challenging and complicated for others. So I don't want to put anyone else in a pickle. So someday, maybe I'll publish this post. But to speak more vaguely about it, like there are some hard, really hard times in product time. We have all faced in different ways as founders or not even just as founders, just as people. But yeah, there's some times where I felt physically ill, many different moments in product time. And it was just really tough. And, you know, I don't know if I don't know how to articulate that feeling, but that flutter in your stomach that you wake up with in the morning of just anxiety and stress and worry. Being a CEO or founder makes it slightly harder in some ways because you still have to put on this mask. You have to put on the space of confidence externally and internally as well where people need to trust you.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. It's really hard. And I think it's a tendency that is in some ways, it's good in that you care so much about the product as a founder. You care so much about what you're building. You care so much about. Details, and you need that kind of like almost OCD behavior. However, you also just can't scale yourself, nor are you the best person at everything. So I don't know with hindsight, I'm like, all right, I should have delegated more. I should have trusted people more. And yeah, there will be mistakes. I make mistakes all the time. But at the end, it's going to be way net positive because you kind of have to, this is a good company anyway.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm 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, like we had an amazing team, I worked with some amazing people, still people that are at product today, like six, seven years later. It wasn't anything about the skills of the team. It was just my own trust in my own delegation. What I shouldn't have done is, you know, up until shortly before I left, I was editing the newsletter every morning, for example, like every morning. I was waking up, you know, 5 a.m., 5.30 a.m., editing the newsletter. And that's just kind of silly, you know, to be doing that so many years later after starting.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to say a year, maybe 12 months after we started generate revenue. So if we would have started in 2014 to make some money, we could have been cash flow break even, you know, maybe 2015, 2016, which would have just given us a lot of flexibility in kind of owning our own destiny and proving out some of the business model itself. And then like the last thing, because I've been thinking about this lately, is delegation is a classic founder challenge.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My thinking at the time was, and to some extent there's some truth to this, is like 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 generating revenue, we did so very quickly and we got to cash flow break even.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, every kind of community 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 served the tech community better and with more things, which is effectively what we're doing now. Another regret, another thing I would have changed is I would have actually tried to monetize and generated revenue sooner. We raised a scene in a series A, we had capital to grow. And we didn't actually try to make money until after we required a Biangelist.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about this actually lately. And yeah, I mean, there's a few things. Protectant 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 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 community and expand into other committees. Like some have done it, like Reddit is maybe a great example where Reddit has this massive long tail.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the most important aspects of early stage startup investing, meaning oftentimes when you're building a new company, there are a lot of risks and there's a lot of important things to nail, but it all ultimately comes down to the product that you're building. And so I think having a product management or product background is helpful in, one, having more, I guess, perspective and evaluating different ideas and arguably more important how the founder thinks about things. So it might be less about me evaluating this particular idea, but it's, what's the thought process and having this founder come to these product ideas, these insights? And so I think having a product management background is helpful for that. And I don't know, I also just find it really fun to jam on product with founders. And when it's early, early days, there's more opportunity to create some sort of impact or, you know, help shape the product in a slight way.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so my background is marketing and then product management pretty quickly. Used to work in the gaming industry, which is like, I think an awesome industry, really hard to make it in that industry, but amazing place to learn. And I think product, I don't know. I have so many biases, so I have to be cautious of that. But having a product.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Partners and so on. But it's also just a general kind of zeitgeist of the early adopter tech community, like what are they interested in? What do they find compelling in general?”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I don't know. It's funny because if you should do some historical analysis on product hunt, because I'd be curious to know the actual numbers, but it varies all over the board. So some people, they ask me, hey, like, I don't know, is product unlike do B2B companies do well there? And I'm like, yeah, like probably more B2B companies than B2C companies actually. And so you see, you know, seemingly boring companies that tap into something that people find useful or resonance resonates with them can go to the top. And then you also have the weird wacky stuff, you know, the silly apps also hit the top. So I don't know. It really varies. And sometimes it's also driven by like the almost like the zeitgeist. Like what do people find interesting right now? Like what's sparking people's interest? Because product on one side, you are potentially attracting people who might be future users and customers.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reading like an essay from the maker. So keeping that short, I think, is helpful. And then another big one is the gallery is often the first thing that someone is going to see once they land on the page. And so just naturally, her eyes gravitate towards visuals. And some of the most interesting presentations I've seen is people use the gallery almost like a slideshow, like telling a story where each slide is communicating like a different, well, a story of some sort. It could be like here is the before and after with our product or here's the evolution of what this product can do. There's many different ways to approach it, but like a very clean visually interesting story can also be a great way to capture people's interest in what you build.”
2022-08-07 · Lenny's Podcast · How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source