You Say Elitist, I Say Embedded: Product Hunt’s Bonding Capital
http://www.producthunt.com/faq
http://recode.net/2015/06/18/product-hunt-the-startup-kingmaker-faces-charges-of-elitism/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-17/why-startups-want-this-28-year-old-to-really-like-them
Beginning as an email list in 2013, the San Francesco based company Product Hunt has grown into the startup that is catapulting other startups’ to fame. Its aim is to “surface[s] the best new products, every day,” curating a list of new and exciting products for people to discover and grade as users vote products up or down. This has a proved an effective way to popularize new products and Product Hunt has helped create initial growth booms for many companies. But even with everyone clamoring to receive a Product Hunt seal of approval, the company still has its critics.
The major criticism is with the company’s curation process. Currently, the ability to submit a product for consideration is on invite basis only. Moreover, the ability to directly post a product to the main page is limited to a subset of people that Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover personally invites so while every user in the community has the ability to vote on a product, it is this “inner circle” that gets to choose what people vote on. The result is that the most popular and successful products are often those that appeal to people who are very similar to Hoover and his colleagues aka: Silicon Valley Millennials. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. Product Hunt currently has three main categories: tech, games, and books. It also has a “Collections” section where community members put together something akin to a Pinterest board of products that have titles such as ‘Great Books for Entrepreneurs’, ‘Hit the Road (Racing Games)’, and ‘TV Apps for Cord-Cutters’. Scrolling through any of the categories or Collections, one can tell right away who the target audience is. If you’re selling extra flexible catheters with easy application tips then you’re probably not looking to be promoted on Product Hunt, but if your company creates apps that help calculate whether it’s more economical for a company to buy an internal tool or build it yourself, maybe this is the place for you.
Product Hunt’s aim is to make people aware of new products, not guarantee the success of every up voted product on its homepage, and it has accomplished this goal if you consider that it “directs 3.5 million unique referrals per month to other sites.” But I think its real strength lies in the embeddedness of its network’s edges. Hoover has already created a close network by allowing only his professional and personal contacts the ability to submit products directly and most visibly. Furthermore, because Product Hunt members can be followed on twitter, this puts the actions of the entire community on display to all its tight-knit and like-minded members. It is likely that members know of each other or at least share the same norms and viewpoints embedding them within the network. If two individuals are connected by an embedded edge, then this makes it easier for them to trust one another AND have confidence in the integrity of transactions between them (Networks, Crowds, and Markets, 66) and Coleman argues the benefits of triadic closure and embedded edges enable enforcement of norms and help protect the integrity of transactions (68); therefore, users are more likely to trust a recommendation from another Product Hunt user. Finally, because the community has certain established expectations a misguided endorsement by a member has potential for reprimanding. Writer Carmel DeAmicis of Re/code unearths this community ability to self-check in an interview with Product Hunt user Jeff Morris who says “When people ask me to post [their app], I’m thinking, ‘Do I want my friends and network to see that I’m endorsing this product?’” In these ways, the Product Hunt network ensures that while not every product makes its company big bucks, the ones that do will have a solid customer base that genuinely wants and will use the product.
So is the Product Hunt community self-indulgent and -perpetuating in its product referrals? Probably. But is it also curating products that its members find relevant and interesting? Yes. As Product Hunt continues to build and expand it will be interesting to see whether or not they decide to continue building this embedded network or if they open up and start creating local bridges. If the latter, will population effects eventually kick in and result in information cascades that turn the site into a general yet effective product review site? Or will too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the broth?