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Ideation

Product Hunt Example

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Product Hunt

“for people who love products”

Intro & Goal

Our goal is to make Product Hunt the destination to share and discover new, innovative products and services, from mobile apps to hardware products. Others in this space focus on editorial curation, following more of a blog-like model. Product Hunt is a community, a place to geek out about products with other enthusiastic people.

Who’s it for?

Product people - those building products that enjoy discovering, playing with, and learning from new, innovative products. Also serves as a pulse on potential competing products

Seed-Stage Investors - always sourcing new deals and seeking signals to curate what startups to evaluate and meet.

Everyday Tech Consumers - people that love to find new stuff

Why build it?

It’s something we personally enjoy using

Early, initial traction from “linkydink MVP” - 175+ subscribers, 30 contributors (some VC’s and founders)

Community verticals on the rise. GrowthHackers.com, Designer News, and Quibb have gained traction in specific startup/tech verticals.

Monetization opportunities in advertising and/or data

Tech-risk very low

What is it?

Glossary

Post - new product hunt submissions

Comments - comments on a post

Replies - replies to comments

Vote - votes for a post

Index View - homepage of Product Hunt (all users can view this)

Detailed View - permalink page for each post

Profile View - user profile page

User Types

Non-Registered Users - people that have no yet registered

Registered Viewers - people that have registered and can vote on posts but cannot post or comment.

Contributors - registered users that can post, comment, and upvote (ie, “Hunters”?)

Admins

Index View

The Index View (ie, homepage) displays the list of posts chronologically, segmented by day (a la linkydink).

When not signed in, a CTA must be presented to signup. When signed up, a CTA to post must be present.

The “Hunters” (ie, contributors) must also be listed, highlighting the community of product people curating the content.

Detailed View

The Detailed View (ie, permalink page) displays information about the post (same as noted below) but with comments expanded.

Additionally, this page should include “who’s here,” showing profile pics of the people engaging in the conversation and/or voted

Posts

Each post must contain:

Name - name of the product or service

Tagline - short (<60 character?) description of the product or service

URL - duh

Submitted By - person that submitted the post with their profile picture and/or name

Votes - number of votes for that post w/ profile pics of each user that voted

Comments - number of comments for that post (maybe with profile pics of those that commented)

After submitting a post, the user should be instructed to say something interesting, adding the first comment to spark conversation.

Comments

Every post has a comment feed, algorithmically ranked like HN to surface the top comments. Each comment includes:

Comment Text - CTA should frame the conversation (e.g. “say something interesting about Coin”)

Submitted By - user that commented

Votes - users can vote up comments

Replies - replies are chronologic, one-layer deep (ie, no threaded replies)

Following

Users can follow other users. This does not change the Index View (the feed of posts) but will be used to re-engage users when people they follow take actions like post, upvote, or comment.

Email Notifications

Users receive the following email notifications:

Daily Product Hunt digest - list of all posts for the day (later could be top 10 products and could be changed to weekly digest if the user prefers)

Social Re-engagement

Follows

Votes on Their Posts

Comments on Their Posts

Comments on Posts They Voted On

Replies to Comments They Made

Registration

Every user must register with Twitter, pulling in the following information:

Name

Profile Pic

Twitter URL

Twitter Username (for tagging/mentions in the future maybe)

Additionally, they must also provide:

Email Address

Title and Company Name

Brainstormed Ideas

Guide and Structure Comments - preface comments with structure (e.g. “this product is similar to…”, “this product is awesome because…”) a la Facebook’s “I’m watching…”, “I’m eating…”

Competitors & Product Inspiration

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Beta List⁠

- paid promotion (and maybe some editorial) of early, often in beta, startups

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StartupList⁠

- editorial curation of new startups

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TastemakerX⁠

- music discovery community

Seeding Users & Content

Initial contributors will be hand-picked to create exclusivity and reduce potential spam. Ideal contributors will be recognizable product people (e.g. Nir Eyal, Semil Shah, Hiten Shah) and investors (e.g. Josh Elman, Nick Chirls) in the startup space but may also include lesser known, early tech adopters.

To capture higher profile startup personalities like Hunter Walk we may submit product finds on his behalf with permission (e.g. based on something he’s tweeted).

Mockups

Index View

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Detail View

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Tech Notes

Models

User

twitter_uid

name

username

image

headline

daily_email?

Post

user_id

name

tagline

clicks

url

PostVote

user_id

post_id

Comment

user_id

body

CommentVote

user_id

comment_id

user_id

body

Go to Market

Engage/Recruit Influencers - make them feel part of the product’s success and design

Ask for direct product feedback

Feedback on blog post/press release

Invite Contributors Before Public Launch - ensure content is populated

Blog Post - “30 Minute MVP”

Post on PandoDaily or Andrew Chen’s blog?

Submit to Hacker News, GrowthHackers.com, Designer News, Quibb

Press Release

Reach out to press contacts (PandoDaily, FastCo)

Mass distro other press (see http://customerdevlabs.com/2013/09/24/google-news-api-mturk-press/)

Startup Edition and Ryan’s Personal Email List - ~4k subscribers

Email Existing Linkydink Users

Post-Launch Marketing

Product Deconstructions Blog Posts

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OLD STUFF BELOW

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Architecture

Homepage Landing page (not signed in)

Homepage Feed (signed in) - list of posts

Product Post Permalink - deeplink to a specific post

User Profile

User Settings - update email address, notification preferences

About/FAQ

Homepage - Not Logged In

Homepage (producthunt.co) when the user is not logged in, doesn’t let the user browse the full feed of products, pushing users to register (see andrewchen.co’s blog - he’s had success putting up this walled garden). Users can still view permalink pages though.

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Homepage Feed (Viewing Posts) - Logged In

Initially, everything is displayed chronologically rather than algorithmically or based on votes. Since the user base will be relatively small at first, we won’t have enough people voting to meaningfully rank products (yet).

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Permalink Page

Each post has it’s own URL to share. Will be useful for encouraging hunters to post links to their findings (e.g. “I just posted Coin to Product Hunt -

http://producthunt.co/posts/coin⁠

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Interactions & User Feedback Loops

The success of Product Hunt relies on effective feedback loops and re-engagement with the service, something heavily lacking in the linkydink MVP. Users can interact in the following ways:

Submit Posts

Comment on Posts

Upvote Posts

Post-v1

View a Post - a la Quibb, show who viewed a post and if not registered, anonymize. Could also just be the count.

Upvote Comments

Follow Users

Mention Users - ability to tag a user in a post description or comment (e.g. “@ryan posted a similar product, XYZ”)

Forward to Users - notify specific users (a la Potluck) of a product/post they might be interested in, could be seamlessly part of the posting flow

Submitting a Post

Each post includes:

URL

Title/Name - 100 char max

Description - 250 char max

Submitted By

Upvote Count & Who Voted

Comments

No deduping of URL’s (e.g. if a user already submits a link to mindie.co, it shouldn’t prevent another person from submitting again) is necessary for v1 but something to consider in the future

Commenting on a Post

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