Makers gonna make, make, make
My fascination with Product Hunt has never been only because of the myriad of products being featured there on a daily basis. While I’m captivated by the sheer volume of ideas that have been implemented and launched on Product Hunt, I’m even more in awe of the “makers” behind these products. I’ve always thought the most important questions centered around why people have made the decisions they’ve made and not necessarily the decisions themselves. Understanding why a maker built a product gives you a peek inside their mind. It’s interesting to know why they’ve chosen certain languages, stacks, etc. My favorite part is when they ask for help as there is no better way than understanding a product than directly working with the person who has built it. I spend a significant amount of time “hunting” and inviting makers to Product Hunt and generally helping out the Product Hunt team as much as I can. However, I spend even more time helping makers. I spend hours per day testing their products, giving feedback, recommending tools to help them reach the next goal, and a host of other things. I love talking to people about products. I just love to see people build things so I help as much as I can.
This leads us to the creation of Maker Hunt.
I mentioned an idea to Ryan a few months back and I asked about it again just over two weeks ago. It came up again after a talk with Joshua from The Daily Hunt. We had been discussing his show and some of the things that could improve the Product Hunt community. One particular idea he had caught my attention as it was about connecting makers (similar to my original idea from months ago). My response to a statement Joshua made was “I had that idea a few months ago. I’m going to start tomorrow”. So the very next day I began to build this community for “makers”. Because I’m a moderator, I wanted to get the “blessing” from the team. Once everyone said they were cool with it, I purchased a domain and launched Maker Hunt. That was exactly two weeks ago. What I was once doing on twitter, email, online communities, skype, in different slack communities, has all migrated over to Maker Hunt. It’s a bit of a central hub to discuss anything related to building products. There is this entire universe outside any one specific product. So we’re there as a compliment to the Product Hunt community. The beautiful thing about it is that I’m not the only one who wanted this type of community. There are already 100s of us there.
It’s a complement to the Product Hunt community.
As I’m just one person with limited knowledge, there was only so much impact I could have with dividing my time between so many makers. Now, we have the entire community helping each other and it’s wonderful. Members are referring others to hunts on Product Hunt that can help them with their project-related issues. Some are offering to test products. We have people partnering up to do integrations between their products. We’ve had people come there recruiting for jobs. It feels like a natural extension of Product Hunt: a sanctuary to spend time with fellow makers.
We’ve already had the first project come out of Maker Hunt: Embed Hunt. Joshua told a great story about it in the comment section here. Now that I think about it. Maybe Embed Hunt wasn’t the first project. Maybe Maker Hunt itself was the first project to come out of Maker Hunt. Some of the members immediately started improving the “product” and “making” things for Maker Hunt. I should have expected that! We’ve had Cat Noone step up and help redesign the place. She’s also going to take our AMAs and make beautiful ebooks out of them leveraging the tech at her company, Liberio. Jonas Daniels has jumped deeply in and has essentially adopted Maker Hunt as his child. He’s been doing both front-end and back-end work. He is generally an idea-machine. Remco is a wizard who has rewritten the backend for the new site and generally taking care of the major development tasks. Mubs has also pitched in with some dev talks. Misbah is helping curate makers. There are others who have helped as well. It’s just all organically come together. There was no asking. It was just makers deciding to make things together.
Learning to become better makers.
We see Maker Hunt as a knowledge-sharing community. Thus, we’ve been trying to create an environment that encourages the exchange of ideas. A centerpiece of the community will be AMAs. We thought this would be a great format to spread great ideas and have deep discussion around topics. Making a product is just a small aspect of successfully creating something of value. We want to help makers become “better” makers.
The original plan was to start with 1 AMA per week. However, we’ve scheduled daily AMAs for the first month!
We’ve had 24 people sign up to do AMAs. We’ll be hosting Pieter Levels, Murat Mutlu, Erik Torenberg, Ben Parr, Brenden Mulligan, Michael Flurap, Nichole Elizabeth Demere, Sujan Patel, Chris Toy, Sacha Grief, Meng To, Cat Noone, Nathan Bashaw, Dylan La Com, Morgan Brown, Anand Sharma, Sandi MacPherson, Poornima Vijayashanker, Violeta Nedkova, Mattan Griffel, Talia Wolf, Perri Blake Gorman, Michael Siebel, and Sangeet Paul.
We thank you all for supporting us. We’re sure we’ll learn a lot and everyone is very excited. Obviously, we have to thank Product Hunt for being such an awesome community and for supporting us. There are some other things in the works so stay tuned.
And if you are a Product Hunt Maker, get over to Maker Hunt now.
Cheers,
Eric
