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AngelList acquires Product Hunt

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Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#81

Post by taytus »

goeric wrote: post #75
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…

Startups are hard. I don't know Ryan personally, but he really started PH as barebones as possible and grew it to millions of uniques. Without being on the inside, you have no idea the pressure or stresses he was under. Why are people so critical when they see a startup exit for less than a billion dollars? I am sure it's a huge learning experience for him and I congratulate him and wish him the best.

I love entrepreneurs, I just love the people overcoming all the obstacles and following their dreams and passion and just hustling and hustling until they succeed. They are plenty of stories like this. PH was far from a meritocracy. It was basically a forum with SV insiders and people trying to "get in" in that ecosystem. But it was totally rigged, so that's the opposite of a tool who supposed to democratize access to exposure. I don't believe people are hating on this, most of us just are just shaking our heads.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#82

Post by 2drew3 »

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…

>relatively small community

Lmk when you create a website with this much traffic. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/producthunt.com

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#83

Post by orky56 »

huac wrote: post #9

“On the plus side we’ll no longer be homeless and we’l [sic] be able to focus on building what we’re building.” Does anyone else feel uncomfortable when SF tech workers, in this case a CEO of an acquired startup, talk about homelessness in this way? Trivializing a very real problem to nothing more than a 'headache' or 'distraction' from the greater goal of, I guess, funding more startups?

It just contributes to the disconnect PH & SV have to the bigger issues at their doorstep.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#84

Post by Alex3917 »

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…

> funnels most of that money into things that simply make promoting other startups more effective, but don't create value

Making it easier for startups to promote themselves is a huge source of value. It's just hard to capture that value, because the newest and most interesting startups don't have any money, and the companies that do have a lot of money aren't new or interesting so no one wants to hear about them.

There's nothing shady or fraudulent. The problem is just that early stage companies in this space are walking a tightrope with basically zero optionality. E.g. normally you want to build a product with ten or twenty different paths to success without having to make any core changes to the technology. This space doesn't really lend itself to that.

There is a huge pot of gold at the end of the journey for anyone who can get there, but it's just really tricky because a lot of the things you'd ideally like to have in a startup just aren't there. (E.g. lots of optionality, low cost of leadgen, costs that substantially decrease over time, etc.)

PH is actually doing pretty well, I think it's too early to say if the PH/AngelList combo will eventually win the space, but I think they have as good a chance as anyone.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#85

Post by rl3 »

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…

I recall a podcast interview Ryan Hoover gave some time ago, where he said (if I'm recalling this correctly) that he wouldn't consider offers to sell under $100M, and his goal was 1B or greater.

At the time it sounded perfectly reasonable, though he since took the company in a direction that lead to today. The writing on the wall has been evident since at least a year ago.

>ProductHunt had no hope of ever becoming an actual business with realized monetization, ...

While I largely agree there, I think that Product Hunt could have made itself an otherwise incredibly valuable acquisition target. Had Product Hunt chosen a different path around late 2014, it's very possible it could have met or exceeded that 1B figure.

If I had to give a postmortem, I'd say the primary cause of death was an over-emphasis on the site's existing pattern of serendipitous discovery, compounded by community mismanagement, and attempts to monetize via turning PH into a store and/or referral engine.

The community mismanagement aspect in particular was unfortunate, since Ryan was one of the most voracious and effective community builders I've ever seen. Some of the bad press PH received was perhaps unfair and overblown. The original intent of ruthless product curation seems to have went somewhat awry—resulting in a self-promoting insider network of sorts. Unlike the bad press though, I don't think that it was the result of malicious intent.

Of course, armchair analysis in hindsight is easy. None of us were actually on the ground in his shoes, so there's probably a lot we don't know. At the end of the day, a 20M exit isn't the worst thing in the world.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#86

Post by AznHisoka »

wwalser wrote: post #31
apadmarao wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone explain why this is a reasonable ballpark price? The site is successful, and provides real value to the apps being hunted and the users that discover the apps - but the acquisition price is in acquihire territory.

The price is going to be some multiple on their revenue, I'd guess somewhere in the 4-6x range. $20MM is enough to get investors ($7MM invested) off your back and let the acquisition go forward and there is plenty of opportunity for back-end deals where key players have an earn out not represented by the acquisition price.

How do they make revenue currently? I don't see any ads, and I don't even see anywhere I can promote my product for a fee.

I'll go out on a limb and suggest it's 40-60X revenue, and even that may be too low (anyone from ProductHunt reading, please correct me, but I doubt it).

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#87

Post by jaoued »

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…

I think you underestimate the global reach PH has achieved within such a short time across the five continents. Most startups everywhere - including mine - building their product has a key milestone - almost as a habit- to get it on PH and shout loud about that this is a significant milestone for their users and customers to know about.

I am grateful to PH and the team lead by Ryan because they helped MyAppConverter raise our profile despite we are not based in SV. I will always remember one day one early user who found us, used our product and put it directly on PH. Soon after that, we got a huge spike in our sign-up and platform usage and gave us global coverage.

So thank you PH, Ryan Hoover & team and best of luck with the next chapter.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#88

Post by minimaxir »

2drew3 wrote: post #82
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…

>relatively small community Lmk when you create a website with this much traffic. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/producthunt.com

"Relatively small" is correct when Hacker News and Reddit are the competitors.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#89

Post by csolorio »

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…

Hmm...only number I could find is $2.4mm in revenue back in 2007
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