Comments on post “Product Hunt 3.0”
Marc Köhlbrugge
@marckohlbrugge · Founder of BetaList
Congrats on the re-launch! Glad to see the vertical feed is back.
I'd love to hear more about the thought process behind the personalised feed. Couple of questions for the team:
1. Early on you frequently referred to PH as a daily "leaderboard" of the best new products. I've always felt that presenting it as "these are the best products of today" was one of the key elements that set PH apart from all the other places we can discover products. – Personalising the feed removes that feeling though. The idea of a leaderboard is that everyone sees the same thing. Now that common experience will go away. Was this a concern when redesigning the homepage?
To use the water cooler metaphor, it seems like with the new design PH might become like the water cooler (the place to discuss something), while before PH was the subject discussed at the water cooler. ("Hey did you see the top product yesterday?", etc)
2. You've chosen to personalise the feed on a somewhat implicit interest graph. Your algorithm tries to figure out what I'd like to see. Contrast this to the idea of sub-reddits where the user explicitly defines her/his interests. Did you consider the latter approach? You do have multiple verticals (Tech / Games / etc) I can filter on, but these are different since they aren't interests (e.g. users aren't interested in "podcasts" or "books", these are simply media).
3. Have you split-tested engagement between the regular feed versus personalised feed? I'd love to hear the results if you're willing to share. Also curious to hear what type of engagement you're measuring (i.e. how do you define success?)
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Ryan Hoover
@rrhoover · Founder, Product Hunt
Hey, @marckohlbrugge! Fantastic questions.
1. You're right -- part of what makes Product Hunt special (and also platforms like the Billboard 100 or NYT's front page) is this "town hall" effect where everyone can refer and talk about the same thing. In this new feed, your friends' actions influence what you see but it's still largely driven by the overall community. We believe the best discovery experience is a combination of personalization and a global "leaderboard" so that PH continues to feel like a global watercooler with even greater relevancy.
2. Absolutely. Categories are types of media and not representative of actual interests. Soon we'll introduce hundreds (soon thousands) of Topics for that very use case. P.S. this is the first time I've shared this publicly.
3. We ran a beta test for about a month to get feedback but we haven't done any a/b testing yet. From a metrics perspective, our primary goal with this change is to increase post discoveries (the number of products, games, books, and podcasts people view) as a proxy for engagement and relevancy. If the new homepage works, we should expect people to explore more and return to the site more often.
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Marc Köhlbrugge
@marckohlbrugge · Founder of BetaList
@rrhoover Thanks for your response! Looking forward seeing the Topics in action. I think that will be a very powerful* way to personalise the feed. I can imagine an on-boarding flow where new users can specify their interests (with personalised recommendations based on their social graph) and immediately see a list of highly relevant products. Cool stuff!
( * we're beta-testing something similar at BetaList right now where users can follow 'markets' and receive a personalised newsletter with just the startups they are interested in )
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Ryan Hoover
@rrhoover · Founder, Product Hunt
@marckohlbrugge NICE! That makes a ton of sense for your users. BetaList becomes more of a competitive monitoring tool.
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Marc Köhlbrugge
@marckohlbrugge · Founder of BetaList
@rrhoover Absolutely. Right now the daily newsletter with 5 'random' startups is only interesting if you're a die-hard early adopter. However, imagine getting a weekly summary of just the new "Product Discovery" startups. Or as an investor being able to get notified of only fundraising startups in Europe in the education, health and/or payment markets. I expect this will open up our site to a much larger audience and I can imagine the same would be true for PH (to an even larger extend considering the product-focus has a wider appeal).
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