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AngelList acquires Product Hunt

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Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#111

Post by philipodonnell »

Alex3917 wrote: post #54
ThomPete wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What on earth would you need funding for when you do a site like Product Hunt? That makes no sense.

> What on earth would you need funding for when you do a site like Product Hunt? Because even though there are 300,000 - 500,000 new consumer products launched in the U.S. each year, 99% are generic commodities like a new kind of 2% milk or whatever. The number of new products that are actually interesting is very small, which means that there is a very high cost of discovering and reaching out to enough of these pro…

While true, I don't know that is the role that Product Hunt is actually playing. The curated nature means that highly placed products were defined more by what VCs and those connected to VCs wanted to feature, which (naturally) tended to be things they invested in or wanted to do the founder a favor instead of things that were "actually interesting".

Once you have categories called 'Slack', 'Amazon' and 'Netflix' as maybe half the current top products do, you've sort of given up your claim to being primarily focused on helping startups.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#112

Post by Jasber »

Don't understand the negativity.

What Ryan and Product Hunt did was incredible. So many people wanted to create an alternative to Hacker News and Reddit for product people. Everyone else failed but they figured it out. That's awesome.

Product Hunt personally helped me in my goal of becoming a independent app maker by showcasing my app https://www.producthunt.com/posts/focus. As of tomorrow I'm full-time indie (YES!) and I proudly display my Product Hunt badge on my app's page https://heyfocus.com/. I didn't have any connections there—I just made a product people liked.

And AngelList seems like a great fit. It looks like they're building a crowd-funding platform, and Product Hunt as a marketing/discovery engine makes perfect sense. In that context, Product Hunt is worth a bit of money.

This seems like a great outcome. Congrats!

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#113

Post by pdeuchler »

birken wrote: post #92
pdeuchler wrote: post #64

This smells fishy to me. ProductHunt had no hope of ever becoming an actual business with realized monetization, it was a glorified marketing tool built by SV insiders to sell the ventures of their friends, colleagues, and investors. Slimy, but I guess not illegal. I start to draw the line though, when PH raises millions of dollars on XX million valuations (that anyone could easily see they had no chance of ever meet…

1) An investor isn't marking a 1x as a win. Locking up their LP's money for many years to return 1x isn't making anybody happy. 2) AngelList isn't giving PH investors/employees $28M cash, or $20M cash, or whatever the figure is reported as. They are very likely giving them mostly stock, stock in a private company with an unknown valuation. Probably only enough cash to cover the taxes (10-20%). The 20M figure is pulle…

1) Being pedantic real quick, it's a ~2x win. And yeah, it's not the 100x most VCs dream about, but it's still a heck of a lot better than an embarrassing 0x loss after your founder shouts his billion dollar aspirations from the rooftops. The important thing here isn't that VC's are making money, it's that they're using an elitist social circle to absolve losses. "Too connected to fail", if you will.

2) How does this make it any better? What you're essentially saying here is instead of investors paying themselves cash they're just shuffling shares of stock from one investment vehicle to another... if this is true then in some cases investors are actually increasing their share in AngelList simply by, in your own words ("1x isn't making anybody happy"), making a failed investment. That doesn't seem above board to me.

3) If you're honestly trying to compare late 90's era Google with ProductHunt then I think that proves my point more than anything I can say myself

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#114

Post by CPLX »

sgrove wrote: post #76
L_Rahman wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That this is the top comment on this post gives me a lot of faith in this community. The general tone here can at times feel like an uncritical adoration of the valley ecosystem. I'm glad that some of us react differently.

Rather than insight, the post you're replying to shows a lack of imagination. Just off the top of my head, I ask myself how much revenue TechCrunch pulls in, and what it originally started as - and I can see a path for PH to become a 'real' (as in meaningful, sustainable revenue) company. Just because it isn't full of whizbang tech doesn't mean it can't make plenty of money and be valuable to other properties. And th…

TechCrunch was WAY more popular that ProductHunt ever will be, was in a different and more frothy media landscape, had a very real and lucrative sub-business called the TC Disrupt conference (which I hear accounted for something like 75% of TechCrunch profits at the time) and still was acquired for only about $25-40MM, depending on who you ask.

Which makes this PH acquisition even more of a head scratcher.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#115

Post by st3v3r »

pdeuchler wrote: post #64

This smells fishy to me. ProductHunt had no hope of ever becoming an actual business with realized monetization, it was a glorified marketing tool built by SV insiders to sell the ventures of their friends, colleagues, and investors. Slimy, but I guess not illegal. I start to draw the line though, when PH raises millions of dollars on XX million valuations (that anyone could easily see they had no chance of ever meet…

People who like to advocate "meritocracy" continually forget that actual people have to be the ones that decide what the "merit" is that is judged, and who has more merit than others.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#116

Post by j4pe »

dang wrote: post #51
svskeptic wrote: post #26

'Experiment' with no conceivable way of monetization gets 'investment' for some behind-the-scenes, non-investment reasons. Bros funding Bros, and then bro acquiring bro when the first-bro has blown through 7.1M. Its the Silicon Valley version of nepotism. Its all play money, but is only available if you are in the circle. Now that you have an exit to your name, next stop, VC partner. And then ask all the startups pit…

Much of this ("for some behind-the-scenes, non-investment reasons") you've simply made up for rhetorical reasons. But even if you were right on the facts, this kind of rant makes for a bad HN comment. A good HN comment is one that contributes to thoughtful, curious discussion. Stimulating rage among those who already agree with you is the opposite of that. Since such comments routinely get upvoted, they're a particul…

I'm not happy with your detaching this comment. Thanks for noting that you did it, and why, but other inflammatory comments in this thread have been tempered by well-reasoned child responses. That's reasonable dialogue.

Detaching an on-topic comment for taking the wrong tone doesn't feel like fair discussion.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#117

Post by jamesfzhang »

pdeuchler wrote: post #64

This smells fishy to me. ProductHunt had no hope of ever becoming an actual business with realized monetization, it was a glorified marketing tool built by SV insiders to sell the ventures of their friends, colleagues, and investors. Slimy, but I guess not illegal. I start to draw the line though, when PH raises millions of dollars on XX million valuations (that anyone could easily see they had no chance of ever meet…

This is such a negative, short-sighted outlook. A company doesn't need an immediate monetization strategy that's open to the public for it to have value that's attractive to an acquiring company.

Edit: Furthermore, PH definitely does have potential to have a large scale revenue stream. Any "destination" site that millions of people visit daily with intent to try/buy new products has major potential.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#118

Post by pdeuchler »

shubhamjain wrote: post #106
pdeuchler wrote: post #64

This smells fishy to me. ProductHunt had no hope of ever becoming an actual business with realized monetization, it was a glorified marketing tool built by SV insiders to sell the ventures of their friends, colleagues, and investors. Slimy, but I guess not illegal. I start to draw the line though, when PH raises millions of dollars on XX million valuations (that anyone could easily see they had no chance of ever meet…

> that anyone could easily see they had no chance of ever meeting sigh . I hope one day people would stop being so cocksure around an industry that has always proven otherwise. I mean, yes, SV does have a slew of absurd valuations based on non-existent business models but doesn't the past success of some of these ventures imply that it can actually work? And all those obvious facts are just "hindsight bias" at work?

Was there a possibility of them having a profitable revenue stream? Sure. Was there a probability? Definitely not, and people (myself included) have been saying this about PH ever since its inclusion in YC. These same people have been around the internet block so to speak, and personally I've seen dozens of much larger, much more valuable, and much more active communities die off because even after bombarding their users with ads, trying affiliate sales (PH's most recent revenue model), and charging subscriptions it is incredibly hard to monetize an internet community that is not predicated on money changing hands.

It's not a business, it's a social club. So why was $28mm pumped into it?

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#119

Post by bsenftner »

visakanv wrote: post #43
moeamaya wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tough thing about running a maker community is makers don't want to sit around all day to browse products and comment. But you know who does? Growth Hackers. I say this coming from my own experience growing a community of hardware hackers who have even less of an inclination to chat since they aren't always in front of a computer.

You just hit on one of the fundamental reasons why all online communities tend towards toxicity – the people who have the most time and energy to invest in discussions (which eventually snowball into flame wars) are the people who aren't actually doing the actual work. These things then feed off of themselves – in a sociopolitical 'guardian' type community (/r/atheism, /r/childfree, etc etc) it ends up becoming highl…

I think you have outlined the basic issue with human social interactions of any size greater than 3 people.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#120

Post by the_economist »

dang wrote: post #51
svskeptic wrote: post #26

'Experiment' with no conceivable way of monetization gets 'investment' for some behind-the-scenes, non-investment reasons. Bros funding Bros, and then bro acquiring bro when the first-bro has blown through 7.1M. Its the Silicon Valley version of nepotism. Its all play money, but is only available if you are in the circle. Now that you have an exit to your name, next stop, VC partner. And then ask all the startups pit…

Much of this ("for some behind-the-scenes, non-investment reasons") you've simply made up for rhetorical reasons. But even if you were right on the facts, this kind of rant makes for a bad HN comment. A good HN comment is one that contributes to thoughtful, curious discussion. Stimulating rage among those who already agree with you is the opposite of that. Since such comments routinely get upvoted, they're a particul…

Hi dang,

I don't understand what detached means in this context. I am still seeing the comment in the main thread. Is this because of a setting I have?

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