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What should we build at Product Hunt?
Next week most of the Product Hunt team is flying into San Francisco from around the world to plan our roadmap for the second half of 2019. We'd love to hear your ideas.
What should we build? These could be completely new products or improvements to existing features. Feel free to get creative. There are no bad ideas. 😉
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Replies
@whale great suggestions!
PH API – We recently updated the API to expose more functionality but you're right, we could expose more to support these use cases and others.
Founder Guild – What would you look for in a group like this? I.e. what would you hope to get out of it and how might you interact with these people?
Who Uses this Product – We're building something around this now. Stay tuned! ;)
Who can help with this product – That's a clever idea. We're building something that touches on this but we might be able to extend our idea to support this use case. Can you give us an example of a situation where you wanted help or to pay someone for support?
@rrhoover
API : 👍
Founder Guild:
* Solicit experience and advise from non crappy people that aren't looking to "network" but to genuinely help each other. Well curated would be key.
* Share recommendations for contractors who are not just talented, but good communicators, ethically strong, etc.
Help with this product:
* Who can help me implement a setup with Vero, or Segment? (Contractor or potential hire)
* Who can help our team get setup with Phrasee? (contractor)
* Who can teach my team more about how to use Notion to it's best effect and provide us with templates? (Consulting)
@rrhoover For the product launches, the PH community leaves comments. There are times when I clearly see where I can help the product team such as for the message, marketability, onboarding, growth strategy, the support center, or brand voice and tone. The founders of course welcome every relevant request if that helps their product.
So for every product launch, the founders should be able to select categories where they are open for direct (paid or otherwise) inputs or consultancy, and while writing a review, the reviewers can say YES to one or more of these open categories. PS: This is different from the *hiring* option of course.
The goal is to tighten the product for experience, sales, growth, and to increase the success rate of startups.
@rrhoover I use search feature the most. Would like it to surface insightful comments/reviews aside from collections and stuff.
@rrhoover
Product Pins: Would like to have the ability to 'pin' a particular product/comment and make my own collections/boards along with an option to add notes that I may want to refer later on.
@rrhoover Alright, not joking: how about launching something like a hybrid of Twitter Realtime + FB groups with threads and hashtags? Pieces of the puzzle are already baked in in existing PH, you just need to have a dedicated space for such product.
@ramykhuffash I have a few friends that do this too. Do you meet in person? Any ideas on how this might work online among people that aren't physically nearby?
@rrhoover We actually meet online on a video call (and have a Slack group for chatting generally). I think what would be helpful in this space would be a facilitator. Interested people sign up with times that would work for them, and the facilitator would make groups of 4-6 based on goals, current progress towards goals, time zones etc. Essentially a match making service of sorts
It also counters the trend of joining huge Slack groups to find accountability and meet people with similar interests - they are impossible to keep up with
@rrhoover 3 different view possibilities on the homescreen of hunted products.
1) Simple view: (How it is now) (default).
2) Quick view: (with screenshots of all products under the description) for quicker browsing quality of a product.
3) Extended view: Like quickview but with first comment and hunters details for even better quality verification of the product.
Have a good Road Map session :)
@rrhoover I'd love to have a better way to explore and collaborate on collections (ie. suggest new products).
@rrhoover but in all seriousness, a way to do quick videos from makers on launch day to say something personal to everyone on PH. Perhaps it's just a Loom integration, perhaps it's something more.
@rrhoover something personalized from the makers / team that's launched on the day of. Could be historical footage of them working, day of when going through their launch cadence, etc When I do a launch next month, I'll have an example for you. I probably wouldn't watch stories of other makers outside of a launch context, but certainly from their product page.
@rrhoover Would seriously building a coding bootcamp or course on how to build a product from PH. You have the audience and it could be a great fit :-) from coding to marketing, so much PH could offer!
@rrhoover 1) Riffing on something @anildash shared on twitter this week, but a lot of product/business advice can prove unhelpful (or flat out wrong) if it doesn't share strongly aligned context. Would be cool to have some way to use a series of objective qualities (product type, stage, size, subject matter) with more qualitative goals in order to match founders/makers into smaller, highly-contextual cohorts who can lean on each other for support in a more ongoing way.
@anildash @shinyee_au great point. Whenever I share "advice" I add a giant asterisk as my experience or other factors (like market timing) may not be as relevant to the recipient and what they're trying to do.
@rrhoover one thing I experienced this past week was going back through all my old upvotes and "rediscovering" products that I had upvoted. I was searching for a product that I knew I upvoted a while back but was having trouble finding it. Along the way while scrolling I kept on opening up older products and checking them out again. I think there could be improvements around this organization of previously upvoted products, resurfacing older products, and searching/filtering products to find ones that I know I upvoted.
@kevinguebert related to this: we have this semi-hidden feature for time traveling through Product Hunt: http://producthunt.com/time-travel
@rrhoover many ways to implement this depending on roadmap, but some way of identifying/filtering out products that are no longer active when using search functionality. There’s an accumulation of dead links for past products, and I can only imagine this will become more of a problem as more time goes on. Could be user-sourced tagging as inactive which could be semi-automated via some monitoring of 404 links / defunct webpages.
@rrhoover products have different lifecycle stages, is not fair for a beta product be competing with 10 year old upgrades. We all know that every single iPhone is going to be product of the day, we don't need producthunt for that, as your name says, we are hunting for the next big thing :) so my suggestion is to have a beta product of the day, 1rst release product of the day. Another thing is a way to launch upgrades so the community could FOLLOW a product. This will allow to use your platform to engage with possible customers. Adding a change-log to the product would allow to notify the followers. Any of this would be great for ProductHunt. Jobs, events, ask is not the path I would go but I understand why you do it.
@igcorreia good thoughts. We've experimented with some of these ideas already but I believe our execution was off.
@rrhoover @igcorreia Totally agree. Plus, this should give more incentive for people to actually launch and support their product, not launch and sunset in like a month.
@rrhoover one thing I have in mind for a while now is that it would be great to somehow re-engage with the users who upvoted my product. This would be really useful to notify them about updates, new features. This could be an opt-in feature to avoid notifications spam.
This is how I imagine it:
- a maker launched on a product (version 1.0)
- users liked it, upvoted it
- after the upvote, there would be an option to subscribe to future updates related to that product
- when a maker rolls out a new feature, she/he can attach a changelog to the product
- this will trigger a notification to the users who subscribed to the updates
Maker goals could be involved in the process if the changelog is automatically generated by completing a goal that was connected to the product.
From makers perspective, it's great because they'll have the platform to reach their target audience without building their own database.
It's also great for the subscribers because they can follow the evolution of their loved products.
@feriforgacs good thinking! We actually tested a variation of this by surfacing a "subscribe to updates" button on the product page. We a/b tested 3 different variations but the engagement was very low. Less than 10% of the people that upvoted subscribed which resulted in too few a number for most makers to care.
I believe there's an opportunity to achieve the goal you're articulating but we need to be thoughtful in how we can achieve this without creating noise.
@feriforgacs @rrhoover one of the things you guys can do is ask makers to give periodic 2 liner updates to their products and include those updates on the mails that you send out.
It'll be super tough to segregate which updates go to whom but that can be built on the backend.
Or you could just create a "updates on products" page with "products you upvoted" as a filter.
@feriforgacs @rrhoover to me "subscribe to updates" seemed too vague and generic such that I thought it was going into an email list that would never get looked at ever again.
@feriforgacs @rrhoover I'm thinking "Join the Maker [Name/product]'s Updates/beta group (to get in on the ground floor!)" with a mouseover triggered "I want in/let me in!" might garner more attention. It's much more context rich, engaging, and exciting.
@feriforgacs @rrhoover @markypc3 I think maybe upvote and "follow" could be two different ways to engage with a product. The way you follow a user, following products as well will subscribe to updates and new product releases of that product on PH. Thoughts??
@rrhoover - It seems to me there is still a advantage or disadvantage arising from when one posts something on PH. What about a feature that would hold all posts in a queue and release them at the same time (midnight PT for example) - unless you specify a future launch date in which case midnight PT that day?
@tariktech interesting idea. Our biggest worry with that is people want to discover big product launches when they happen so it might be less ideal to hide those releases for several hours.
@rrhoover - great point! How about making an option for those that want to make sure they get full 24hr visibility across the globe for an item they post? That way you can have it both ways...
@rrhoover ⭐️ I think we need a space where makers can find their cofounder(s)!
>> For example let's say I have that app idea but I don't know how to code, I'm a marketing and promotion guy, I would love to have a space where to post my idea and see if anyone is interested in joining me to Make it
PH is one of the greatest and biggest community of technical and non-technical people in the world, I think that would be a great and useful improvement to have such a space on the site!
In my opinion, the actual Makers Chat (and co) is not enough for something like that we would need to have a board somewhere where people can post ideas or projects, browse thru past and new ones and get in touch if they want to 😇
@merrillhefdy appreciate that idea. I'm super curious to know how you might design something like this. I.e. If you were looking for a cofounder, what information would you want to know and how would you want to connect with them?
@rrhoover Have a look at findamaker.io it's actually where I met my cofounder and I discovered this site months ago on PH :)
You can see a board with a listing with partnership offers. People put there their ideas and what they are looking for (Tech guy or Marketing guy or X guy) for X equity or other options. Quite basic but efficient. It's like job offers but for partnerships between people with ideas and different skills. My guess is, emulate something like FindAMaker would do the job.
Many websites are trying to do that but PH has most likely already the biggest database for a space like that. And a lot of people are actually asking for it :-)
At some point I was trying to find an iOS dev cofounder and it took me months before we finally found each by pure chance on a small website. I am 100% confident if PH were doing the same thing it would have been way faster. I actually thought about this idea after seeing so many people on the Makers Chat saying they are looking for cofounders! But the way the Chat is designed at the moment doesn't easily let people connect with each other because it's almost impossible to look or find any old messages.
By the way, @rrhover thank you to you and your team for PH, I've been a user for 4 or 5 years and I'm still here every single day, this is the only community where I'm involved and it's not gonna change :) Hope to help at some point, especially for the French Makers community!
@rrhoover PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE give users the ability suggest or remove 'related products'
Most of the time the suggests are incomplete, or worse, totally inaccurate. And there is no way to suggest or downvote/flag incorrect related products etc.
@rrhoover @joshdance I'm thinking those types of cosmetic changes can be built as an extension once API is further developed. Just an assumption...
@joshdance good thinking. We haven't done this mainly to avoid people from spamming and self-promoting their own product in the recommendations. There are ways to combat that but requires a bit of thought.
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