Comment by sparkzilla
10 years ago
I am so happy to read this article and I commend Ben Wheeler on bringing it to light. I had written a similar article in July but did not publish it as I was promoting a new version of my site. I was afraid to speak out because I believed it would hurt my chances of getting funded. I should have gone with my convictions. I have now published it. [1]
Ryan Hoover has not only outsourced VC product discovery, he has outsourced its class system too. It's incredibly disheartening to be outside the loop, trying to get your product noticed, and submitting it to what you think is a free system only to have other products by well-connected insiders block it out.
When I saw Hoover and Jason Calacanis congratulating each other on Twitter I knew immediately what was going on. Despite multiple emails, Hoover wouldn't even give me access so I could comment on competing products. I'm glad this is coming back to bite him and his investors too -- they went along with it.
I don't expect anything to change because sites are a reflection of the personality of the people who run them and Hoover has already shown he is completely corrupt. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
None of these people are bosses or gatekeepers!
Even if I gave you a magical power where anytime you wanted your site would simultaneously be posted on Techcrunch, #1 on HN and #1 on Product Hunt, it probably would make no difference in your success or failure. The bosses and gatekeepers are the people that try your product once, and decide if it is better than the 500 things they are already doing in their lives.
You can spend your whole life getting caught up in the perceived unfairness of it all, but that isn't going to help your company become any more successful. The tech press (and quite a few startup communities) are sirens that call you in and try to sabotage you in every way possible. Just ignore them, or at least minimize how much they are affecting your mental state.
The tech press affects primarily two things:
(1) Your ability to raise early-stage funding
(2) Your ability to hire engineering & product talent
Getting these two things won't guarantee success, nor will not getting these things preclude it. But there is a pretty strong correlation when you try to scale.
People who are well connected are getting preferential treatment on a system that outwardly appears to be fair. That's gatekeeping.
It seems you work for a company that has already broken through, but what of all the others who are trying to get attention from VCs and the media. For them it could be a matter of life and death for their company. One media report can make all the difference between success and failure. Instead connected companies on Product Hunt suck up all the oxygen, and promote products that are not as good as more deserving ones, which are not as well connected. It's also bad for VCs and the media because they are being fed a distorted version of the market.
As a minimum conflicts of interest should be declared and the system revised not to allow abuse of the voting process. I have other ways to promote my site so I don't care about the Product Hunt circlejerk. But it's sad to see a system with so much potential be corrupted.
> I don't expect anything to change because sites are a reflection of the personality of the people who run them and Hoover has already shown he is completely corrupt.
I'm sorry but that view is cynical and overdramatic. Have you ever tweeted @rrhoover? He's actually a pretty cool guy and very in touch with the community.
AFAIK no one got comment access by asking... (at least in the early days) you got it for being a creator or being granted comment access by another commenter. Doesn't everyone have comment access now?
I don't care how nice he is. I don't care how mean Steve Jobs was. I judge leaders by the products they make.
I'd disagree, he puts on the air that he is, it's his job to and how he gets traffic and reputation, but if you watch how and what he tweets and with who, it doesn't take long to see how brown his nose is. I had to unfollow as it just made me sick to watch.
He'll tell you what you want to hear, but none of it is genuine. He'll act like he's part of big important and/or trendy discussions, but he'll just chime in with the most popular opinion and make sure to include other SV twitter celebs and VCs on twitter to look like more of an authority. I cannot stand those people and they never stop tweeting.
I had a top item of the day early on (or whatever it's called, been so long since I've looked at PH now) and I tried interacting with him on twitter, before posting and after (and I had met him in person a year or two earlier), he said he'd support my project and share it, and he'd definitely back my crowdfunding campaign. He'd tweet me that he'd back it and share it and in DMs again he said he would, but he'd only actually retweet things that pointed to PH or only tweet at me (so not actually help share like he said he would). He said he loved what I had and would help share it, but instead of retweeting or even just composing a tweet, he'd favourite my tweets. Yeah, thanks for the sincere follow up on saying you'd help, a favourite is like a passing smile, not a helpful hand. He never did actually back the thing for even $1, even when prodded and saying that he definitely would, and then after getting practically zero results or traffic from being on top for a day, he sends me an email for testimonials and asks me to write an entire blog post myself about how awesome PH is and how it helped me (with stats)! In addition, I could use the PH Badge on my page to show my pride and drive him more traffic! I said fuck that, it didn't help at all and he lied to me, but I imagine so many others did because they wanted to be touched by this "awesome twitter startup celeb" and to be part of the massive PH circle-jerk that's taking founders by storm. Thus people buy into his brown nosing, and the perceived popularity of PH and make it bigger and bigger, because everyone wants to have an edge up in getting their new thing noticed too!
If you are thinking maybe my crowdfunding campaign sucked and that's why he didn't back or help, well, then don't tell someone directly that you will share or back it if you don't like it. You tell someone you are going to do something, and you announce to others that you did, but in reality you don't, that's not cool man, that's being a lying sack of shit. Especially so if you are using that and me to drive your own site's success. Sure that's what it's for, but still it's low. He'd make a great politician!
What most people don't realize is that behind that shitstained smile we are all just daily throw away products to his ever hungry machine, just like the news, they don't care, they just need content, but if you do just the right amount of spin and brown nosing you can hide that fact and draw people in daily and even promote it for free. It's a self feeding machine.
I'll praise you like the dickens today as it drives me traffic, but 24 hrs and 1sec later you are trash and I need the next hot thing to eat up and spread. It's the news business.
Maybe I might seen cynical, but this is what happened to me and these are my observations from watching the guy online, interacting with him, and thinking about how to make a site like his work long term.
You need to be a mastermind of building a limelight and engineering brand, reputation and hype. You need to jump on every trend, you need to appear like the good-guy darling child of SV, innocent and always supportive of everyone. You need to look like everyone important knows you and supports you. You need to get in everyone's faces all the time.
Look behind the curtains.