Product Hunt is a website that lets users share and discover new products. The site, which was founded by Ryan Hoover in November 2013, is backed by Y Combinator. Users submit products, which are listed in a linear format by day. The site includes a comments system and a voting system similar to Hacker News or Reddit. The products with the most votes rise to the top of each day's list. Products are organized into four categories; technology products, games, books and podcasts. A submission simply requires a product title, URL, and tagline. As of 2016, according to Hoover, the website has led to the discovery of over 100 million products across 50,000 companies. The site also includes a daily email list that sends out yesterday's top tech "hunts" as well as a featured collection. A version of the digest is also available for games and books. Product Hunt is also available as an iOS app, macOS app, an Android app, and Google Chrome extension. The company's headquarters is in San Francisco. In November 2016, AngelList acquired Product Hunt for $20 million. The acquisition was never confirmed by Product Hunt or AngelList when mentioned in interviews.
History
Product Hunt launched on November 6, 2013 when it began as an email list built using Linkydink. The first version of the website was developed by Nathan Bashaw and Ryan Hoover over the Thanksgiving break in 2013. On July 17, 2014, the company announced its Y Combinator backing. In Fall 2014, the company announced it would receive $6.1 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. On February 5, 2015, the company won the "best new startup" of 2014 Crunchie award. In September 2015, the company added a podcast section to the site. However, in 2016, they put an end to it, stating that it would "distract from our main mission" of surfacing great products. In December 2015, the company launched an iPhone app. In September 2017, it launched "Ship", which is a suite of tools for makers to generate demand for the products they create. In February 2018, Product Hunt released a new tech news aggregator app called "Sip." In July 2019, the company launched "Launch Day" to help users monitor their entire launch in real time.
Product Hunt has a live chat section on the website. In September 2017, the company published a book titled How to Build a Career in Tech that includes the best career advice from the 550+ chats on the site.
Product Hunt Ship
In 2017, Product Hunt launched Ship, a new toolkit for makers to ship products. The product lets makers create Upcoming Pages before the product is publicly available, and through which they are able to communicate with interested parties.
