The strap line of Product Hunt is “the best new products, everyday”. Product Hunt is a site dedicated to “sharing new, interesting products” and I found over the last few months that it does exactly what it says on the tin:

1. A community around cool products – The main concept for the guys who started Product Hunt, Ryan Hoover and Nathan Bashaw, was to build a community for product people to share, discover, and discuss new products. Product Hunt is a crowdsourced site and is fully democratic in a sense that its members decide which products get featured and how they rank. For example, on 27 August, Monitorbook – which helps people to track things on the web – topped the list of products, with 466 votes (see Fig. 1 below).
2. “Reddit for products” – On Product Hunt’s page on AngelList, it says “Reddit for products” which in my opinion is only a partially accurate representation of what Product Hunt is about. Yes, at the face of it, Product Hunt does have a lot in common with crowdsourced news site Reddit; people can submit links, upvote and comment. Even the list-type design of the site looks like Reddit’s. However, I find the design of the leaderboard type lists on Product Hunt much cleaner and easier to read than Reddit. I can see at glance which products got the most votes on any given day and I can delve into the related comments if I wish. It only takes a quick look at Reddit to establish that the design of their page feels a lot messier and crowded.
3. Product discovery before everyone else does – One could easily argue that sites like TechCrunch already address the need for people to find out about new startups and new products. With Product Hunt, however, this process of product discovery is fully democratic and transparent. Anyone can submit a product to be featured on the site, which will then be curated by the Product Hunt community. I believe this process increases the chances of finding about cool new product ideas before ‘everyone else’ does (e.g. through TechCrunch or Engadget).

Main learning point: I’ve rapidly become a fan of Product Hunt, mainly because of two key reasons. Firstly, if you’re into finding about cool new products and startups, then Product Hunt should be an almost mandatory part of your day. Secondly, I really like how the content on Product Hunt is shaped democratically by a product-oriented community. If you haven’t done so already, please go and check out Product Hunt!

Fig. 1 – Screenshot of Product Hunt on 27 August 2014 

Fig. 2 –  Ryan Hoover explains about Product Hunt on This Week in Startups

Related links for further learning:

1. http://www.producthunt.com/about
2. http://pando.com/2013/12/04/can-the-democratic-power-of-a-platform-like-hacker-news-be-applied-to-products/
3. http://www.fastcolabs.com/3023152/open-company/the-wisdom-of-the-20-minute-startup
4. http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/04/product-hunt-is-the-social-news-site-of-tech-products-read-by-influential-people/
5. http://ryanhoover.me/
6. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-b-fishbein/what-the-startup-ideas-be_b_5708211.html