Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AngelList acquires Product Hunt

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 280 posts

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#211

Post by zemvpferreira »

alexandersingh wrote: post #203
rfrank wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SomethingAwful's forums required a paid membership and have been around a long time. IMO one of the points of a paid model is keeping membership down to people who actually care enough to pay said membership.

Additionally, the implicit threat of having your paid membership revoked for bad behavior can provide a natural check. Something Awful has used this to great effect to keep trolls in line. I wonder what % of their membership revenue comes from banned users purchasing new accounts.

I'd say most of it, at this point. As a long-time goon, getting banned and rereging the account is a way of patronage. No joke, it's very common behaviour there.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#212

Post by Keats »

aartur wrote: post #17
minimaxir wrote: post #5

It's common knowledge that Product Hunt is rigged, and they will not heavily punish startups for soliciting upvotes (blatant example: https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/763156319058616321 ), or even paying for promoted Tweets for their PH submission ( https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/786286705263251456 ) Relatedly, there is no disclosure when an investor is closely affiliated with a submitted startup (and often…

I submitted my startup two days ago by myself, as someone who didn't have any PH "karma", but I somehow was granted permissions for submitting products (probably because I was subscribed to a newsletter for a long time). I asked by email if it's ok if I submit my startup by myself. I was told it's ok and wished good luck. On the launch day my site received literally five visits (in the first hours, probably a few mor…

As a counter-example, someone posted our product on PH and we only noticed when we saw a spike in signups and had a look at where they were coming from. It ended up being #1 that day and still is the main source of signups.

I don't have a PH account myself though and never go to that website, it was pretty bad in terms of design/UX.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#213

Post by MarcBodnick »

jballanc wrote: post #172
nostrademons wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more true of communities built around ideas rather than activities, and there are also moderating tactics you can use to avoid it. For example, online communities based around astronomy, or radio-controlled airplanes, or baking, or other hobbies remain relatively healthy even decades after their founding. Also there are communities around conventionally caustic topics (eg. Lambda: The Ultimate for programming…

I don't understand how people constantly miss the most obvious solution to keeping a community grounded: charge an entry fee.

What are examples where this has worked? MetaFilter is one, but very small.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#214

Post by birken »

nostrademons wrote: post #160
birken wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless AngelList is teeming in cash, which they probably aren't, the deal is likely either all stock or mostly stock. So imagine AngelList internally values themselves at $500M (a number I just made up), to get to the 20M figure they would be offering ~4% of their stock in exchange for PH. Most likely common stock. Adjust that figure up or down depending on what you think AL thinks they are worth.

Likely they pay out enough in cash to make the VCs whole. So assuming 1x participating preferred and 30% of the company owned by VCs, that's $8M + 0.3 * 12M ~= $12M cash returned to VCs, and then the remaining $8M is in Angellist stock distributed to the founders and employees. Assuming 20% employee ownership, it'd be just under $2M to employees collectively and $6+M to Ryan (I think he's a solo founder, right?). If…

Where is AngelList getting this 12M? According to Crunchbase they've raised 24M total. Also why the heck would the board approve spending such a massive chunk of cash on an acquisition which seems rather speculative (IE it isn't an obvious merger like GrubHub-Seamless or DraftKings-FanDuel)?

Additionally, why would the VCs prefer cash to shares in AngelList? VCs are in the business of putting money into rising companies, I'd assume they'd much rather have shares in AL than having to return a pittance of cash to their LPs.

I'd also make a large wager that none of the founders of PH have "FU" money as a result of this deal. AL putting their scarce cash into the pockets of founders is a very very stupid way for them to invest their money. You'd much rather structure the deal to give the founders AL stock so they have an incentive to work hard for you instead of just waiting out the deal and pocketing your cash. Remember that AL has all the leverage here, they can structure the deal however they want.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#215

Post by Spivak »

bbaumgar wrote: post #176
jballanc wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how people constantly miss the most obvious solution to keeping a community grounded: charge an entry fee.

Could you point to some examples where this has worked? It seems that the entry fee would either 1. limit the community's growth severely (not necessarily a bad thing), or 2. filter out good candidates.

I would think that LWN is a good example.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#216

Post by ci5er »

moeamaya wrote: post #25
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #16

As an early fan of ProductHunt I became saddened to watch their community get diluted and become more of a place for "growth hackers" to hang out than people who actually make things. But I also realize this was because they raised tons of money and was under heavy pressure to get traction at any cost. So I think this can be a good news, now that they can just let go and focus on the startup community instead of arti…

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.

> Growth Hackers

Based on its usage in these last two comments, I think I must not understand what the phrase "Growth Hacker" means. I thought it was someone who was critically focused on increasing the numerator and decreasing the denominator in various SaaS KPIs. You don't seem to be using it that way. Is this a new job title in the Bay Area? Or, more generally: would you define this phrase for me?

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#217

Post by DonHopkins »

The impression I got from AngelList was that the lights were on, but nobody's home.

Every time I tried to use their web site, I would encounter a comedy of errors, and trying to work around each problem would reveal yet another. I wrote several detailed bug reports to their support email address, and nobody ever bothered to reply, let alone fix the bugs. Do they even have any full time web developers working there any more? If they do, they must be asleep at the wheel. All I ever got from the experience was a bunch of parasitic spam email. Not one person who ever contacted me through AngelList had anything to offer that they weren't trying to shill by spamming every other random AngelList user.

When AngelList had their email privacy scandal [1], other people also complained that their support was non-existent [2].

So I described my earlier bad experience and lack of support from AngelList on that HN thread [3] [4], and although dave@angel.co responded to a few other messages and solicited people contact him with further questions and concerns, he has never replied to any of my messages [5].

Dave's lack of interest in replying to both the detailed bug report emails I sent to his support address and also the messages I posted to HN, not to mention the facts of AngelList's privacy violation email scandal itself, just reinforces my impression that the lights are on, but nobody's home.

My point still stands: Old unmaintained web sites running on auto-pilot that collect sensitive private information from their users (and automatically forge first-person email pretending to be from their users in order to virally promote themselves) are a dangerous security threat, which should be shut down for the safety of the internet.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326011

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11330160

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326557

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11350697

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11350504

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#218

Post by aml183 »

fourstar wrote: post #27
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, it's good that you write these articles and I appreciate them. But for gods sake, let them have today. There are a lot of difficulties in running a community and I'm sure they considered different options but couldn't move forward because they were under too much pressure. They deserve congrats for today.

Let them have what exactly? The whole entire site smelled like a get rich quick scheme from the start for the founder. I tried submitting something only to later come to the same realizations of the vote rigging aforementioned. Congrats on playing the VC system, I guess.

What? Ryan started a newsletter out of a love of discovering new products. I'm sure he was very surprised how popular it became.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#220

Post by cyberferret »

Jasber wrote: post #181
untog wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to sound mean spirited, but I know I am about to. Your post is an example of what frustrates me about Product Hunt (and, at times, HN) - people crowbaring in a reference to their startup/project/idea and throwing in a few links in a very transparent bid to get referral traffic from a popular message board service. On Product Hunt in particular it starts to sound like an echo chamber of people shouting st…

Yea, I agree excessive self-promotion can be bad for a platform. In this case I included a link because I think it strengthens the argument. Product Hunt was built to help people like me—and it did. Here's the proof! And I think my post confirms what you're saying—I was able to use Product Hunt as a tool to help reach my goal. I know this isn't always the case, which is why I wanted to give my experience.

Also don't mean to be a downer or salty, but you might as well have said "The lotto system was built to make people like me wealthy".

Until it is a platform that offers universal opportunity to everybody who builds something, then it is really no more than a pot luck draw that is too reliant on timing, marketing shine, and debasing yourself in front of 'influencers' in the hope that they will give you their royal blessing.

I've self posted, and had other post to PH in the past, with dismal results. Once I had a product of mine 'hunted' on there by a total stranger, which was cool, but I couldn't add anything to the conversation because I was never added as a 'maker' despite several requests via the site and Twitter. I missed that magical 24 hour window and the product listing sank like a stone never to be heard of again (because of their 'no posting repeats' rule).

Don't even get me started on the humiliating experience of having to beg around for an invite in the early days just so I could participate in discussions.

Post reply on HN