A post mortem on YourStack
Ryan Hoover
10 replies
In 2019 we built a new project called YourStack.
Product Hunt is primarily about what’s new, a firehose of the latest tech launches. YourStack was all about the products you use and love.
Our goal was to expand beyond tech, to help people discover and buy products recommended by people respect and trust.
But it failed.
Occasionally I’m asked why, so I wrote a post mortem.
The TL;DR:
1. Product discovery isn’t a daily or even weekly activity. This made it incredibly difficult to build a habit and drive meaningful engagement.
The Product Hunt flywheel
2. It was too broad. We should have narrowed focus to build the best experience for a particular type of person and use case.
3. We should have built mobile-first. Building for the web has many advantages but mobile is where consumers live.
4. We overbuilt. I’ll take responsibility for this. I got too clever and should have pushed the team to launch something simple, faster.
5. I burned out. This deserves its own essay. :)
Here's an expanded version of the story on our learnings and opportunity in product discovery space.
For those of you that signed up for YourStack, would love to hear your take in the comments. :)
The Product Hunt flywheel
2. It was too broad. We should have narrowed focus to build the best experience for a particular type of person and use case.
3. We should have built mobile-first. Building for the web has many advantages but mobile is where consumers live.
4. We overbuilt. I’ll take responsibility for this. I got too clever and should have pushed the team to launch something simple, faster.
5. I burned out. This deserves its own essay. :)
Here's an expanded version of the story on our learnings and opportunity in product discovery space.
For those of you that signed up for YourStack, would love to hear your take in the comments. :)Replies
CY Zhou@lightfield
Thanks for sharing this, Ryan. It's always insightful to see the reflections and learnings from YourStack's journey.
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I didn't know that your activity was also beyond PH. Interesting.
IMO, the Product Hunt maintains its primacy because it focuses precisely on tech. When I put it this way, tech is the fastest growing environment where everything moves at rocket speed and I don't think any other type of product (or rather industry) moves so fast.
I originally started going to PH because I wanted to keep up with the latest trends in tech (because it's a leap forward) and get access to the latest products on the market before they arrive in my location.
If we were to apply this to other industries outside of tech, such as healthcare, gastro or whatever, none of it moves as fast as tech. So the frequency of posting, supporting those launched, etc. would be less frequent (which could result in less traffic, for example). If I understood the vision of YourStack correctly.
Thank you very much for sharing, very interesting to read.
Could you elaborate a little bit more about point 1 and product discovery? Specifically, what issues did you encounter, and what were your expectations in hindsight? Additionally, what job needed to be done, and what was the desired outcome?
@virtual_patrick first can you please confirm you're not an LLM? ;)
(no offense!)
@virtual_patrick haha, all good. :)
Re: product discovery not being a habit: How often do you buy or use new products (excluding repeat purchases like groceries)? Probably not often. That's a challenge for anyone trying to build recurring engagement, especially when the entire system or flywheel depends on it.
Great writeup @rrhoover, love the transparency.
I've just launched a Beta version of a similar tool in the product discovery world - a simple way to share your SaaS stack with others (https://hapstack.com/stacks). It's not our main product (SaaS management is), just intended to be a free tool since I see so much activity in this space. So I suppose there's less pressure to drive the daily discovery traffic you mentioned, though I'll still want to see strong engagement in order to keep investing in it.
I've been thinking about how to incentivize founders to share their stack on a new platform vs. Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Two ideas I've had so far are:
1. Allowing them to use their own affiliate links to monetize the traffic to their stacks, which is much trickier to do on social media
2. Promoting high quality stacks across our platforms (and in the 'Discover' section of our tool) to allow founders to grow their own audience.
Curious for your thoughts on that topic since you've spent more time than I have on this.
Thanks again for sharing!
@jfrancis hey, James!
Re: #1: This only works if you can drive a ton of traffic for them (you can do some napkin math to estimate what's required to hit a tipping point of value). And even then, unclear to me if anyone at the copy is motivated to make a little money through affiliates.
Re: #2: Unclear to me what the audience on Hapstack would be for. This has a similar dilemma as the above – it's hard to motivate people before there's significant traffic.
Ultimately, what founders really want is traffic, adoption, and revenue. I would only focus on things that achieve that.
@rrhoover That makes sense, thanks for the reply. For #2, I more meant growing their audience on their own platforms outside of Hapstack. Ideally we'd help them gain exposure by featuring their stacks, etc and making it clear where to go follow them.
Either way, it's certainly a marketplace challenge, and I think the key will be convincing early adopter founders to jump onboard before there's traffic.