![]() Each new product submission is tweeted out with the handle of the person who submitted it. Twitter is also an important traffic driver. You also get notified when new products are posted by people you follow or when you are mentioned in a comment. Once you sign up as a member, you get a daily email highlighting the previous day's top 5 hunts, with an option to unsubscribe or switch to a once-a-week digest. Product Hunt started as an email list, and email is still an ongoing trigger that drives traffic to the site. I predict that his list of features (documented in more detail in Hoover's own post) will prove useful for many types of focused content communities. ![]() I interviewed Hoover last week to find out what makes Product Hunt tick. This sort of highly specific micro-community will become increasingly important to publishers of all sorts because they are a very efficient way to produce coherent collections of content. This leads to a very self-selecting group of active participants with a very specific filter for what they contribute to the community. There is a very natural progression (nicely described in a post by Jeff Morris Jr.) from lurking, to posting products, to joining the active group of commenters and finally to launching products yourself. ![]() Hoover is not yet releasing stats on daily or monthly active users (DAU and MAU), but registered members number over 100,000. What kinds of product? The site defines its scope as, "latest mobile apps, websites, hardware projects, and tech creations." So think Best Buy or the Apple Store, not your local grocery. And all of the methods of engagement that Product Hunt uses to get people hooked serve to make the curation of products and the commentary on products better. What Hoover has done with Product Hunt is to make a deeply satisfying product that helps you find other products. Why are people so obsessed with Apple and Google? We look at their products (and through their products) hundreds of times a day! What we see is the products and is on the products. We all use countless protocols, APIs and big data processes everyday, but that's not what we see on our screens. Products are how most people experience technology. And this places me firmly in the mainstream of tech consumers who are looking for useful or amusing applications more than basic research. I am interested in technology that people can use to help them do the things they want to do better. A designer by trade, it is the user experience I think about first. Bathing in the oceans of the tech world has made me realize that I am primarily a product person. The great advantage of content aggregation is that it can help you to figure out what you are most interested in. I find this stuff really interesting but its fairly off-topic for a mainstream tech blogger. The problem with Hacker News is that you get the full firehose of obsessions including lots of discussion of advanced programming topics and geeky science stuff. Hacker News proved to be a more reliable way for me to keep track of what's on the mind of developers and VCs.
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