The idea for Product Hunt surfaced when Hoover realized how much time he was spending talking about new tech products and gadgets with friends. A lot of people would ask him what he thought of new things on TechCrunch, Hacker News, Reddit, and Twitter. There seemed to be many places to go to find this type of information — too many places. “What there wasn’t was one platform-agnostic destination for all of it,” he says.
He started thinking through prospective competitors for this type of platform. "I looked at things like Kickstarter, but that site was limited to products running crowdfunding campaigns, and others had other limitations. I wanted some sort of curation — a way to find all of the cool new things that the startup community would find interesting. There was no one place for these types of conversations."
Initially, Product Hunt was shaped by what it wasn’t. It wasn’t part of a broader tech community. It wasn’t too technical. It wasn’t too consumer. It wasn’t overrun by commentary or fragmented across multiple sites. It was one, clear, simple list that would allow people to skim through or dig deeper as they wished. It was a niche that many might have overlooked. But Hoover was able to explain why this niche was compelling for busy people who wanted to get all the information they needed in one place.
