Ryan Hoover
Founder of Product Hunt, founder and investor at Weekend Fund
Where to hear and read about Ryan Hoover1 episode or test
Ryan Hoover founded Product Hunt, then started Weekend Fund, which has invested in over 110 companies. The thing most worth learning from him is to know the specific goal behind each big choice, whether raising, launching or choosing an audience, and to stay narrow and plain-spoken in pursuing it.
you also just can't scale yourself nor are you the best person at everything
How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund
Ryan Hoover: the story and the lessons
1What Ryan Hoover would change about building Product Hunt
Hoover started Product Hunt as an experiment, not a company. It began as a newsletter and website, and it was four to five months before it incorporated. Investors were courting him in late 2013 and early 2014.
He asked himself whether it was even a venture-backable idea. His view is that the goal of an experiment is to learn whether people want the thing, not to succeed.
He raised because he had to hire, and might not raise today. He had no personal capital to pay people, so the reason for raising was clear. Today he has enough to fund about a year of development with a very small team.
Product Hunt has no direct rivals like Uber and Lyft, where a huge war chest is mandatory. His rule of thumb for starting at all: can you see yourself working on this for a decade?
Hoover expanded Product Hunt sideways when he should have gone deeper. The team tried podcasts, video games and books on the thesis of one discovery platform for many communities. Each community needed a very different product experience.
He says they should have focused entirely on serving the tech community better, which is what Product Hunt does now. Reddit is one of the rare platforms that built a long tail of communities.
He waited too long to make money. Product Hunt raised a seed and a Series A but did not try to earn until after AngelList acquired it. Once revenue started it came quickly, and cash flow break-even arrived about 12 months later.
He thinks about 10% of focus on revenue would have cost little growth. Starting in 2014 could have meant break-even around 2015 or 2016, and control of the company's own destiny.
Hoover could not delegate, and edited the newsletter daily. He woke at 5 or 5:30 a.m. to edit the Product Hunt newsletter every morning until shortly before he left. The team was strong, so the problem was his own trust.
He calls full delegation his hardest founder lesson. Caring about every detail helps, but a founder cannot scale himself, and delegating is net positive even with mistakes.
2Ryan Hoover on launching a product
Hoover says decide why you are launching before you launch. Customer acquisition is the default goal, but a launch often does not deliver it. Other goals are recruiting, fundraising momentum, feedback, partnerships, SEO and team morale.
His answer is usually it depends, starting from the business priority. Side benefits are real but should not be the reason to launch, and a team should not be pushed to launch just for likes and votes.
Hoover tells founders to write launch copy like a person. He has seen tens of thousands of launches, and buzzwords and vague language do not click. Write the tagline the way customers, or you with friends, would describe the product.
He blames schooling that teaches big words over speaking like a human. Quote: "people are sick of the pr speech".
He treats the launch gallery as a slideshow that tells a story. The gallery is often the first thing seen, and eyes go to visuals. A before and after, or how the product has evolved, works well.
Keep the maker intro short, since people skim many ideas looking for curiosity and will not read an essay.
Hoover says no silver bullet gets you to number one. Winners range from boring B2B tools to silly apps, and probably more B2B than B2C companies reach the top. Results also follow what the early-adopter tech community finds interesting that moment.
He would like to run a historical analysis to see the actual numbers.
3How Hoover finds ideas and picks an audience
Hoover keeps a problem journal of annoyances without solutions. He wrote down things that felt inefficient, such as many San Francisco apartments having no in-unit laundry. He also immerses himself in niche long-tail communities like subreddits and hobbyist groups.
Quote: "i didn't try to solve it i didn't didn't say oh here's the solution i was just like this is annoying".
He looks for technology and behavior shifts, then asks why now. Weekend Fund bet on distributed work about five years before COVID accelerated it. He names mobile in the early 2010s as the biggest shift he has seen, and web3 and AI as current candidates.
With more people building, founders need a sharp answer on what changed and why the idea does not already exist. He and Lenny ask this when talking to founders as investors.
Hoover thinks a consumer company needs a unique insight. Consumer needs are fuzzy: people use Twitter to be informed or to feel less lonely, and compete for attention with giants like Netflix. He says building one without a unique insight is very hard, maybe impossible.
B2B like DocuSign has a clear problem and customers you can talk to, and a company can be paid on day one. A consumer product must eventually become an internal trigger, which needs external triggers first.
He starts narrow, because the market can widen later. A narrow audience makes the product, messaging and homepage easier to get right. His bias is not to worry that the niche is too small.
Airbnb began with couches and extra rooms, which looked niche, and he now sees its market as all housing. It is the generally easier path, with an asterisk that it is not for everything.
Hoover sees momentum feeding itself in both directions. When people ship and things go well, others feel the energy and match it. One person who slows down and underperforms can drain everyone else's motivation.
He links it to Marc Andreessen's idea that a company is either becoming a center of gravity or losing it. Quote: "high momentum leads to more high momentum low momentum leads to more low momentum".
Hoover reads dark mode before product market fit as a red flag. He uses light mode and says dark mode does not matter for 99% of people. The problem is teams polishing small things before the product is useful.
His asterisk is that developers may really want it. He says this is his product manager hat talking: is it the top item on the priority list?
4How Hoover invests through Weekend Fund
Hoover runs a small fund with small checks. Weekend Fund has invested in over 110 companies. The third fund is $21 million and about 30 to 35 percent deployed.
Small checks fit competitive deals, and the fund can bring in co-investors rather than take the whole round. He chose to raise a fund in 2017 so he could write many checks without much personal money, and may keep future funds near this size.
He treats fund hygiene as part of the job. A pass comes with context and details, because a bare pass gives a founder nothing to use. The fund always follows up with the person who made the intro.
His partner Vetica calls these habits hygiene. The team does it because it is what they would want from other investors.
Hoover never counts a portfolio company out until it is over. Some companies he had mentally written off later pivoted. Others got a big partnership or M&A offer out of nowhere.
This only works when backing resilient, creative, driven founders who can create momentum from nothing.
He bets on a founder alone only when he knows them well. The fund has no team-first or market-first rule and judges holistically. Resilience is hard to judge without knowing the person, so the product is an indirect read on the team.
One founder bet is a designer-engineer he has known for years, who will probably launch 10 apps with the 11th a massive success. Lenny avoids founder bets unless he knows the person.
Hoover tells aspiring investors to write memos on a fantasy portfolio. Vetica did this before joining Weekend Fund, doing the job before getting the job. The memos show your thought process to anyone you apply to.
Other routes trade effort against autonomy: angel investing needs money you can afford to lose and may take about 10 years to return, scout programs give less autonomy, and SPVs mean running a fundraiser for every company.
5Ryan Hoover's habits as a founder
Hoover says a founder wears a mask of confidence over real anxiety. People need to trust the CEO, so confidence has to show. He does not want to pass his anxiety to the team, so full transparency is not an option.
He describes waking up with a flutter in the stomach made of anxiety, stress and worry.
He turns founder DMs into micro blog posts. He opened his Twitter DMs and got very little spam. He screenshots and anonymizes an answer and posts one every three or four days.
The other person's question supplies the prompt, which avoids writer's block and sharpens his own view. He values the vulnerable questions strangers will only ask in private, such as a founder with three months of runway left.
Hoover now values a few deep friendships over a wide network. He calls it a cliche but says sometimes the cliches are true. Networking in San Francisco's tech scene matters less to him now.
He treats cities like products with a cost and a payoff: ten years in the Bay Area, two in LA and one in Miami, where he now spends about two-thirds of the year.
How to launch and grow your product | Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund
Ryan Hoover explains how to launch a product, why to pick a narrow audience, how to find startup ideas, and what he would change about building Product Hunt. He shares hard lessons such as waiting too long to make revenue and never delegating, and how he invests across 110+ companies.
Hoover started Product Hunt as an experiment, not a company. It began as a newsletter and website, and it was four to five months before it incorporated. Investors were courting him in late 2013 and early 2014.
He asked himself whether it was even a venture-backable idea. His view is that the goal of an experiment is to learn whether people want the thing, not to succeed.
He raised because he had to hire, and might not raise today. He had no personal capital to pay people, so the reason for raising was clear. Today he has enough to fund about a year of development with a very small team.
Product Hunt has no direct rivals like Uber and Lyft, where a huge war chest is mandatory. His rule of thumb for starting at all: can you see yourself working on this for a decade?
Hoover expanded Product Hunt sideways when he should have gone deeper. The team tried podcasts, video games and books on the thesis of one discovery platform for many communities. Each community needed a very different product experience.
He says they should have focused entirely on serving the tech community better, which is what Product Hunt does now. Reddit is one of the rare platforms that built a long tail of communities.
He waited too long to make money. Product Hunt raised a seed and a Series A but did not try to earn until after AngelList acquired it. Once revenue started it came quickly, and cash flow break-even arrived about 12 months later.
He thinks about 10% of focus on revenue would have cost little growth. Starting in 2014 could have meant break-even around 2015 or 2016, and control of the company's own destiny.
Hoover could not delegate, and edited the newsletter daily. He woke at 5 or 5:30 a.m. to edit the Product Hunt newsletter every morning until shortly before he left. The team was strong, so the problem was his own trust.
He calls full delegation his hardest founder lesson. Caring about every detail helps, but a founder cannot scale himself, and delegating is net positive even with mistakes.
Hoover says decide why you are launching before you launch. Customer acquisition is the default goal, but a launch often does not deliver it. Other goals are recruiting, fundraising momentum, feedback, partnerships, SEO and team morale.
His answer is usually it depends, starting from the business priority. Side benefits are real but should not be the reason to launch, and a team should not be pushed to launch just for likes and votes.
Hoover tells founders to write launch copy like a person. He has seen tens of thousands of launches, and buzzwords and vague language do not click. Write the tagline the way customers, or you with friends, would describe the product.
He blames schooling that teaches big words over speaking like a human. Quote: "people are sick of the pr speech".
He treats the launch gallery as a slideshow that tells a story. The gallery is often the first thing seen, and eyes go to visuals. A before and after, or how the product has evolved, works well.
Keep the maker intro short, since people skim many ideas looking for curiosity and will not read an essay.
Hoover says no silver bullet gets you to number one. Winners range from boring B2B tools to silly apps, and probably more B2B than B2C companies reach the top. Results also follow what the early-adopter tech community finds interesting that moment.
He would like to run a historical analysis to see the actual numbers.
Hoover keeps a problem journal of annoyances without solutions. He wrote down things that felt inefficient, such as many San Francisco apartments having no in-unit laundry. He also immerses himself in niche long-tail communities like subreddits and hobbyist groups.
Quote: "i didn't try to solve it i didn't didn't say oh here's the solution i was just like this is annoying".
He looks for technology and behavior shifts, then asks why now. Weekend Fund bet on distributed work about five years before COVID accelerated it. He names mobile in the early 2010s as the biggest shift he has seen, and web3 and AI as current candidates.
With more people building, founders need a sharp answer on what changed and why the idea does not already exist. He and Lenny ask this when talking to founders as investors.
Hoover thinks a consumer company needs a unique insight. Consumer needs are fuzzy: people use Twitter to be informed or to feel less lonely, and compete for attention with giants like Netflix. He says building one without a unique insight is very hard, maybe impossible.
B2B like DocuSign has a clear problem and customers you can talk to, and a company can be paid on day one. A consumer product must eventually become an internal trigger, which needs external triggers first.
He starts narrow, because the market can widen later. A narrow audience makes the product, messaging and homepage easier to get right. His bias is not to worry that the niche is too small.
Airbnb began with couches and extra rooms, which looked niche, and he now sees its market as all housing. It is the generally easier path, with an asterisk that it is not for everything.
Hoover sees momentum feeding itself in both directions. When people ship and things go well, others feel the energy and match it. One person who slows down and underperforms can drain everyone else's motivation.
He links it to Marc Andreessen's idea that a company is either becoming a center of gravity or losing it. Quote: "high momentum leads to more high momentum low momentum leads to more low momentum".
Hoover reads dark mode before product market fit as a red flag. He uses light mode and says dark mode does not matter for 99% of people. The problem is teams polishing small things before the product is useful.
His asterisk is that developers may really want it. He says this is his product manager hat talking: is it the top item on the priority list?
Hoover runs a small fund with small checks. Weekend Fund has invested in over 110 companies. The third fund is $21 million and about 30 to 35 percent deployed.
Small checks fit competitive deals, and the fund can bring in co-investors rather than take the whole round. He chose to raise a fund in 2017 so he could write many checks without much personal money, and may keep future funds near this size.
He treats fund hygiene as part of the job. A pass comes with context and details, because a bare pass gives a founder nothing to use. The fund always follows up with the person who made the intro.
His partner Vetica calls these habits hygiene. The team does it because it is what they would want from other investors.
Hoover never counts a portfolio company out until it is over. Some companies he had mentally written off later pivoted. Others got a big partnership or M&A offer out of nowhere.
This only works when backing resilient, creative, driven founders who can create momentum from nothing.
He bets on a founder alone only when he knows them well. The fund has no team-first or market-first rule and judges holistically. Resilience is hard to judge without knowing the person, so the product is an indirect read on the team.
One founder bet is a designer-engineer he has known for years, who will probably launch 10 apps with the 11th a massive success. Lenny avoids founder bets unless he knows the person.
Hoover tells aspiring investors to write memos on a fantasy portfolio. Vetica did this before joining Weekend Fund, doing the job before getting the job. The memos show your thought process to anyone you apply to.
Other routes trade effort against autonomy: angel investing needs money you can afford to lose and may take about 10 years to return, scout programs give less autonomy, and SPVs mean running a fundraiser for every company.
Hoover says a founder wears a mask of confidence over real anxiety. People need to trust the CEO, so confidence has to show. He does not want to pass his anxiety to the team, so full transparency is not an option.
He describes waking up with a flutter in the stomach made of anxiety, stress and worry.
He turns founder DMs into micro blog posts. He opened his Twitter DMs and got very little spam. He screenshots and anonymizes an answer and posts one every three or four days.
The other person's question supplies the prompt, which avoids writer's block and sharpens his own view. He values the vulnerable questions strangers will only ask in private, such as a founder with three months of runway left.
Hoover now values a few deep friendships over a wide network. He calls it a cliche but says sometimes the cliches are true. Networking in San Francisco's tech scene matters less to him now.
He treats cities like products with a cost and a payoff: ten years in the Bay Area, two in LA and one in Miami, where he now spends about two-thirds of the year.