Ryan Hoover in 40 seconds

JDcarlu
Frontiers
Published in
3 min readJun 17, 2015

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Play Heaven/Blogging > Startup Edition > Hooked > ProductHunt

As today almost everyone in the tech industry knows who Ryan Hoover is. Co-founder and CEO of Product Hunt (PH) the winner of the Best New Startup 2014 at TechCrunch and the new destination website for everyone that loves new products.

One of the incredible things of the PH community is the common passion to discover, share and talk about new products.

“Product Hunt started really as my desire to find new product, talk about new product, technology, websites, mobiles apps, hardware products. Find them and share it with friends.” (Ryan Hoover)

Today YouPlus.biz is featured in ProductHunt (thanks Eric Willis!) and we would love you to come and get a look at it. Go here :)

Oh yeah, its super fun. I work a lot, but it doesn't feel like work to me.

Things we learned from Ryan Hoover:

1- “Being a good leader in my mind is: being transparent, honest but also not distracting everyone from what they need to do and what they need to focus on.”

Reading Ryan’s post on Medium.com you can see how he leads by being transparent and honest on some of the most difficult topics to talk about: being scared as a founder or even calling out himself by having f***ed on a typo of his own product. An important part of leading is to be an example for those who look up to you and Ryan is doing a great job by being transparent and honest.

2-”I grew up with an entrepreneurial father; he inspired me to do entrepreneurial things”

Some would not consider writing a post: “People I want to meet in 2013” as an entrepreneurial action but it’s actually the mindset you put yourself in when writing something like this that is impressive. Ryan Hoover posted this blog post in his site to later go and archive meeting most of the people. It shows not only the determination of Ryan but also his passion and knowledge about the importance of networking.

3-”ProductHunt was not supposed to be a company at the beginning; it was just a side project. Then it started to take off and I saw where I could take it”

When talking about his previews experiences (Play Heaven, Blogging, Startup Edition, Hooked) about Product Hunt Ryan makes it clear that “these are all kinds of things that lead to the formation of Product Hunt through my experiences.” As he mentioned in the YouPlus video: ProductHunt was just a side project. But this projects are most of the times the best projects that later take off and become great companies.

As Paul Graham mentioned in this essay: “it’s how Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all got started. None of these companies were even meant to be companies at first. They were all just side projects. The best startups almost have to start as side projects, because great ideas tend to be such outliers that your conscious mind would reject them as ideas for companies.”

4-”The community at product hunt inspires me tremendously. We get dozen of emails every single week, from founders and makers saying, “Hey we got great traction, hey we got a great feedback” Its kind of that personal connection we are doing across the world.”

We think there is no other better person to explain about PH community than Nicole Elizabeth who is the Community Manager at the startup.

“The community consists of founders, designers, marketers, etc. — people making products — so they have empathy for others doing the same. We also demonstrate the type of conversation and respect given within the comments ourselves.” To read more about Nichole and the community on Product Hunt read here in FreshDesk.

If you want your own cool good quality video, contact Michael at michael@youplus.biz Thanks for reading!

PS: I’m an advisor at YouPlus.biz and a friends of co-founders Phil & Michael.

Featured in ProductHunt today:

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