Ryan Hoover founded Product Hunt, but it didn't begin as a website. Having recently left his position as Director of Product at PlayHaven, he was exploring his next move while maintaining side projects, including a blog about product design and startups. He was talking with friends and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley about new products "have you seen that new product that just launched?" and couldn't find a place online to discuss it.
The MVP was a mailing list, not a product. In November 2013, Hoover started an email list called Linkydink, inviting friends to curate links to new products together every day, subscribers got an email with the day's best new products. This was deliberately "doing things that don't scale": the tool didn't even support comments or upvotes, and curation was entirely manual Hoover personally reviewed submissions and grew the list by individually inviting contributors.
Why start this way? The email format was low-friction and familiar for both Hoover and participants, and crucially it let him validate the concept without writing a single line of code a big deal since he wasn't a technical founder.
Seeding the first community. He built his first ~170 subscribers not by broadcasting, but by personally recruiting engaged people who would actually submit products and respond quality over quantity from day one.
