Ryan Hoover on Growth Flywheels, Building Communities, Helping Founders, LP Investing
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Ryan Hoover is the Founder of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund.
Ryan’s probably helped more founders launch their products than anyone else on Earth. We talk about starting Product Hunt as an email list, and he open sources the growth flywheel that propelled it to one of the most important places in technology.
Ryan unpacks how he built and scaled a community around the product, how online communities have changed over time, how we’re thinking about software in the age of AI (tech will change, human behavior won’t), and how status has changed in Silicon Valley.
We also talk about starting Weekend Fund to invest in other founders, his first 400x investment, investing in consumer health, and why he started investing in other funds.
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Timestamps:
(5:52) Helping founders with software
(15:36) Early ideas for Product Hunt in 2013
(19:14) Starting as a social email list
(26:26) Product Hunt’s growth flywheel
(31:15) AI won’t change human behavior
(34:12) An audience is not a community
(36:42) Why every community needs utility
(38:52) Communities have shifted towards group chats
(40:10) How AI changes building products
(49:35) Importance of craft
(52:30) Starting Weekend Fund, Ryan’s 400x investment
(56:57) Weekend Fund’s software experiments
(59:26) What makes Ryan’s investing unique
(1:02:16) Why Ryan has a small fund
(1:07:41) Peptides, GLP-1’s, Ketamine
(1:18:57) Investing in funds
(1:20:53) Ways LPs can add value for GPs
(1:23:05) How status has changed in Silicon Valley
(1:31:37) Backing founders with secrets, why failing is hard
Referenced
Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products
Get Your Wish - Porter Robinson
Silicon Valley’s new status symbols
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