Hello, everyone. This is sampar from the hustle and my first million if you're hearing this, I hope you've already heard an episode. You know, who I am. So I'm gonna get past that. So today we have a special episode. This one's for Trends members only but we do these things a bunch and we don't always announce them. But for this one I wanted to share it with you all and give a little bit of it for free. So you can listen to the first 20 30 minutes of it. And then after that you'll have to sign up for Trends to hear the rest. I know we are such a tease but there's a ton of
of value early on and that's what we're trying to give to you for free. So if you want to hear the rest go to Trends dotco and you could hear it. But today we have Ryan Hoover on the podcast and Ryan Hoover is a friend of mine because we used to live near each other in San Francisco and Ryan Hoover started this great company called Product hunt product hunt.com. It started as a project. I was actually within the day before it launched and it was a little side project. He had where people would post products on their website and I thought it was a horrible idea and it completely worked and
A huge hit and people love it. And the reason why I had him come on the podcast is because Ryan has seen probably products Hunt is probably four years old. Now, he's seen a ton of products launched off of product hunt. And now he has a venture capital firm that he runs it so he's got really really really good insight and Intel and to what he thinks is going to be popular when he thinks is going to blow up before most people even know that the particular company exists and he's got a good eye for things and so in this podcast we break down four different categories.
These that he thinks are going to explode and he gives examples of each company and explains why he thinks it's going to be big. So listen up here it is. Let's get to it.
So right now I'm talking to Ryan Hoover. It's 3 o'clock on February 4th. The leak of our deal went out yesterday about four o'clock. And so yeah, it was a little nutty we're going to do it on
Monday. They always get leaked. We had a leak of our series a product hunt back in the day and I was so scared because it was like the term sheet was signed but it wasn't done and sounds like yours has been done done though.
It closes Monday, but everything signed All right, so similar bow, but we're on the everything's fine. But who do you
Did it lead to your new single eat Euro league mine? No yours. That's a
good question. I never found out Alexia TechCrunch when she was there. She was the one that wrote about it in a we now become good friends and even the day before she publishes. She texted me asking for like a comment and then of course, I was like, I don't know what to say. I don't know though. I don't know who leaked it. If you're out there if you're listening to this podcast and you leaked it. Just let me know. I'm not gonna be mad. I'm just curious
wait so you wouldn't be mad if I when I find out I think I've got a little bit I get angry.
I would've been angry back then but now it's I was like what six?
Years ago time has passed so I'm
okay. So let me do like a short introduction but basically Ryan Hoover started this company called Product hunt which was a big deal. It still is a big deal since sold it to Angel list. Now. He has a fun but do call it the weekends which your funds in we can find. Yeah weekend fun. How big is it? Do you say?
Yeah. Yeah. We're in the second fun 10 million dollar fund
pretty great. Ryan's been in the space for a while and I have a funny story about you right now think I've ever said this to you in person, but maybe you've heard me talk about it about you, but basically so before I
And in my business and before Ryan start his business, I used to have this book club and Ryan came and spoke and I frankly I don't even know how we connected but you came in spoke about something just with ten of us. You were like leaving the club. I
think it was when I was doing startup Edition, maybe it maybe it was like through that that we got connected or maybe it was when I was writing the book hooked with near
I think that's what do it was hooked. It was hooked because we're talking about habits. The thing was supposed to go an hour long, but we serve beer and like some people just hang out and you are antsy your legs are shaping and I was like, who is that? Yeah.
You're like I was like what's going on? He's like, I'm sorry. I gotta run. I'm watching this thing tomorrow. And you said was it called product for it. At first
it was yeah
producthunt I owe your like I'm watching this thing tomorrow and you're you it does this thing and this thing in my head, it is an insult. I'm sorry, but in my head I was like this is not gonna work. What is he doing? This is so silly and from the beginning it took off and I was wrong about everything because I came up became a huge user. And so I was with you like 12 hours before we launched it and remember you're all
Yancey and stuff is pretty funny.
I remember being there but I forgot the sequence of events. I totally forgot about that but it was around that time. That was a fun chat. I remember being in like a really weird weird. I think I know it's really weird space.
So it was called the anti NBA with my book club and I knew a guy who ran a scavenger hunt business.
I've done that I did this
scavenger hunt the same one. Yeah, so you pop it he's paying them like a couple thousand dollars to like do a city scavenger hunt somehow. I became friends with them and he had this like office that was kind of like a bar pretty
Just play dirty and he would let me use it for book club. So there was like Skee-Ball machines and it was a dingy room and that's how we all met and I met a lot of people that way. So the reason I wanted to have you on it's because one I haven't talked to you in a while, they'll be changing text or Twitter stuff.
I hear your voice a lot though in my ears. So listen to our podcast all the time. So so I really like your that's awesome.
That's so cool. And if you feel great, but we wanted to have you on because with my job doing Trends in the hustle. I see a lot of really cool stuff that I think is
I see before it gets popular you do the same thing, but probably times like a hundred because I'm product you see what's going to get popular you probably have an idea of like was going to hit for not going to hit your investors. So you kind of do what I do but times a hundred and so that's why I wanted to have you on to talk about cool stuff that you're seeing and why you think it's cool and cool right has a list of like 20 different stuff that he wants to talk about.
Well, we don't need to talk about all of it leading up to this. I was actually thinking like what topics are interesting to talk about so I felt like this was actually an opportunity for me to like reflect on certain themes anyway, so
But yeah excited to
chat with your fun what has been some of the most success or not. Even your phone you personally but of all your investments into private companies, what are some of the most successful ones
if I was to choose like a category fintech is been the most successful from both a revenue generation, but also from like a markup perspective we're investors in in a few companies deals one of them which is like remote payroll. The Insight was that there's this compliance issue and challenge. A lot of people have when hiring remotely across different countries and deal is basically this it's like Gusto but for
Contractors, so that's one where investors in pipe Harry Hurst company. I've known pipe since the skirt days when he was working in that company, which is doing some really interesting things around kind of debt financing. They won't call it that exactly but it's in that space because it kind of Reinventing the category and some respect and then we're also investors in Main Street, which is like the value prop is free money, which is great for startups
and they're doing great. They advertise with us and I think it went really well because the basically what Main Street does it goes through your QuickBooks. I think it goes through something and finds out where you have over.
I paid in taxes so you can get tax rebate
but some of that it's a lot of except what's crazy is a lot of startups and companies including like myself up until till now don't realize that you can actually a government grants and incentives per engineer higher and you know, things like that and one people don't know about it too. It's a pain in the ass to actually apply for in three. You didn't have to wait for the government to send you money like several months in the future. So they basically you plug in your QuickBooks or or your payroll and it just like automate the entire process for you. They take a small sliver of that money. And so it's like literally free money which is like
Crazy cell but yeah, they're growing really
fast. So one thing on the podcast that I've talked about a lot and I think I've over simplified it a bit but job boards and on your list of things that you want to talk about you have this thing called vertical job market places. So I'll read off actually the right up that Ryan said to me so we saw a massive shift and how millions of people millions of work people so actually why don't you just I think you jotted it down. There's some typos. I want you have to just read what you have.
Yeah. I didn't even read my own writing
about the over.
Over the overarching theme here
even for my taking a step back. I am personally too many people hate their job and do something that they don't like maybe they make a little bit of money. Maybe they make very little money and ultimately I would love to see more people find a job that they that maximizes like both their skill set but also like does something that they enjoy and so we've seen this huge shift with regards to like the gig economy and that's enabled a lot of people to have a lot more flexibility whether you like Uber or not like uber has, you know, essentially employed millions of millions of people and giving them a lot more freedom.
And flexibility than they had before with, you know typical 95. And so I think this next big shift in some respect is is vertical job market places in different forms. There are general purpose job boards, and those have exist in those will continue to be valuable in many ways. But if you really build a company around like a very specific vertical you can ultimately serve both the supply and demand the talent and the people looking to hire that Talent much better than you would typically with like a horizontal drawing board saying I include a few examples, but I just find that category.
We interesting because I think it's really impactful for people but also potentially very lucrative.
So a great example of this one that I know a fair bit about because I researched it. It's not inside information is top Cal, you know top talent. So a lot of people do them because they got in trouble for the founder of kind of maybe lying to people but besides that I don't know about that. Yeah, if he didn't like something involving people shares he like didn't he lied about granny chairs? And so it was all over the news.
That's not important for what we're talking about, which is the business they claim to have scaled to like a hundred million dollars in revenue for their job and I think they are the perfect example of this,
right? Yeah, and they're for those that don't know correct me if I'm wrong. You probably know more about them. They're basically out sourced engineering Talent right is that they're primarily focused on right
now, yes, but it's very similar as Market or higher which we have listed here. So basically they have pre-vetted the it was just pre-vetted particular types of engineer now, they have pre-vetted Finance people pre-vetted.
Getting people and you pay let's say $200 an hour and they give half of that to the vetted person who you've interviewed An approved. So it's a little bit different but similar mechanics and they scale take a hundred million dollars in Revenue with close to no funding. It's a very lucrative business when I hear about some of these like freelance Marketplace has particularly at marketer higher, I think maybe that can work. They seem like really hard businesses to get right? Yeah it do you agree. I agree. I'm a marketer higher in
particular. I've met Chris toy the CEO while back
And we've been chatting and then advisable is also very similar company in the same space think based out of Europe the really difficult. I think the hard thing with these businesses often times is how do you avoid people going off platform? And then how do you also keep companies, you know retained. So one of the challenges is let's say you work with a marketer and you like them and either you work on them with them on a project basis. And so there's ultimately going to be turn in three to six months like no matter what or they try to like take them off platform and just work with them full-time. So that is a challenge. I am attracted to the the opportunity.
To like overcome those challenges though because I think marker higher in particular or marketing. Let's say in general. I think he's actually really good rule to be hiring for like on a contract or project basis for early stage companies because because a few reasons one is there's so many different channels that you could be acquiring users through and it's really as a small team. You really don't have experts who really understand like Tick Tock. I understand like maybe a CEO and understand Facebook advertising Instagram advertising in many ways. I think it's actually advantageous to hire like an expert who really understands us.
To come in not only do it but then teach you as a company and so I think from if I was building a new company, I need marketing help. I would certainly look to those platforms to like make progress rather than trying to hire like a generalist who's probably not going to be as good and might not be the right person for like where we actually figure out like what channel we want to focus on down the
road. I think that the first example you have pattern, I think that it looks like you're invested in it. I would put my money on pattern above marker higher or any other white-collar job, I would put
Turn over it. Yeah, then a white collar job, which is what spat.
Yeah, and I have so easy mentioned an investor and pattern MIT Wilson back when he was a he's actually asking for feedback on his YC application and I was like damn this company is like really compelling and and software good start and now I don't know if I can share numbers but like they've grown significantly in Revenue over the past year or so and basically what pattern is it's a Marketplace for hourly workers, they started off initially with a hospitality and an example here is let's say you're doing an
Then to need two bouncers, you need some wait staff. You need a few cooks. You need all these people to assemble at this particular time that have the right skills and need them to be reliable because like you don't want you know, one of the cooks not to show up on your event day. And so if you think about what the logistics challenges of like bringing all those people together is really challenging and so obviously software is a great way to do that. And so they built really smart ways to like assemble people to bring them here on the same at the same time to qualify and ultimately have a single of quality for these people versus
like just hiring people off Craigslist, you know is one kind of extreme. So yeah, they're doing great and it's also an industry that the tech world doesn't look as much because it's for like hourly workers and like warehousing Hospitality cleaning things that I think are less top of mind for a lot of entrepreneurs.
So yeah, they're great what when the founder pattern is talking to you or maybe just your own opinion. How big could that business get on a best-case middle case worst case scale?
Well, sir pattern isn't necessarily the only one like building in this space. So sometimes when
Look at Investments. We we obviously look like who else is doing this or has tried this that's helpful in getting some sort of contest understand. Okay. Well if another company has reached this kind of scale, we have some sort of like indication of is there a market for this sometimes often often like early first to Market players the ones who create markets or at least prove out markets exist. And so sometimes we look at
that point just look at like a old-school Staffing firm for nurses.
Yeah, and that's another way of doing it like look at different Industries. How many people are employed in the spaces do some math or
Unlike the value of those contracts. So there's a few different ways of doing it was a while ago when we made the Investments. I remember exactly like our thought process then these markets are just massive. I mean people are always looking to hire especially in that this industry. There's a lot of turnover. Typically we've actually spoken to some truck driving Marketplace and a staffing companies as well which are also massive. You know, that's my thing. Right?
No. Oh my God. Oh my next somebody's going to be in the trucking industry because I to my family's in that industry and I know
How high the turnover is for truckers? It's like crazy. Yeah. So with pattern could this be a multi-billion dollar company? Yeah.
Absolutely. I mean it's early in that like I can't say like they're going to be there at that tomorrow or next year but you know, the market size is massive for these type of things and this is also what we try to look at is it's hard sometimes to see like, how big is this Market? How big could this get sometimes especially when it's like really early and it's like potentially creating a new market like Clubhouse this a clubhouse in my mind. It's like talk radio and
eating and a little bit of Twitter and one and that market is massive, but in some ways they're also kind of defining a market. So it's not that clear like how big it is.
Really I consider myself not to be that smart and when I'm trying to like figure something out, I'm like what's like the linchpin what's like the one thing that matters to getting this right with the hustle? It was if I write good content, it'll be easier to get users for cheap. So basically my secret sauce is running good content, and then my second Secret Sauce is acquiring users for product for it. Maybe I'm guessing maybe it
I've got to convince lots of people to post their stuff on here every day. I don't know if that's the
truth for us. It was yeah something I think about too is like what is the big risk in this company? And I also make an assumption that everyone has tried everything and so either something has to change whether it's like a consumer Behavior shift or technology shift in that founder of that team also has to have some sort of like unique ability to like solve for the biggest problem with risk. So with producthunt product is the community piece. It's not hard to build product from a technical perspective. The product design is important.
Important but fundamentally, it's all in how you build community in the beginning. And then once you build that and establish that brand and that that that flywheel with the community then then it can work and grow but that was the big risk
ultimately with these vertical job market places. What's the big risk? They're like, what's the thing that you have to solve and then all the other things you have to solve are much easier. Is it convincing employers to hire? These people is it being able to properly vet them is they're like What's the hard
part? I think there are nuances depending on which industry but
I mean in those marketplaces you basically have usually two different parties you have people who are hiring and people who want to be hired. I tend to try to think about which is the harder side of the market and try to solve for that first. And so without giving information about like how pattern accomplish it they were able to find that balance and get both talent that seemed to be kind of quality and also demand at the same time and then like balance that and scale that as they grew but that's how we tend to think about it because Marketplace model is the risk of these is when people focus on the easy side of the market and ultimately
Only need both to work. But if you focus on the easy side, you never get the hard side and you like delay the hard side in the sense. Then you're almost like delaying failure is kind of how I see it with likes a marketer higher advisable or others like that. My assumption is actually that it's a talent is the harder thing to get because I think if you get high quality Talent companies will come especially when they're looking for people who can help the distribution which is such a hard thing right now. So I tried to think through those Dynamics and like which side is harder and how is the company either? How are they doing it now?
How are they positioned to like take advantage that I'll use one example AngelList which I have obviously close connection with Angel list is unique in its job market place and that it doesn't pay for talent unlike a lot of other platforms. It just has essentially free Talent. They people sign up they create profiles and it's very unique in these to these markets and when you have to pay for talent you start to run into really hard challenges with tax versus ltvs and like all these other like variables which can get thrown out of whack at Facebook changes their algorithm or another
Heather comes in for as much money in the space. So I tend to try to invest in companies that are not reliant on paid advertising or paid acquisition in those types of
places. That's exactly why I'm asking this I forget the framework or something that he uses where he's like is this a technical challenge or a marketing challenge? Like which one is this going to be and a lot of times it's like a marketing challenge. So for example, if I'm wanting to be pattern and I want to appeal to the nursing industry and create like a vertical job market place for nursing try partner with a Facebook.
Unity that has a ton of nurses there and I should I start building audience all around nurse and then once I and I could easily go and get hospitals to say well if you're if you're qualified we would take a picture it's like boom. All I got to do is get the nurses that or is it like, oh no nurses are desperate. They're gonna go anywhere that's work it so I have to work my ass off and get make sure that the hot I gotta go hospital first hospital first. It's almost like we're my when I'm the reason I'm asking this is on like where do I have to focus on assuming this is a marketing problem. Where do I have to focus on building an audience in order to sell this so I can
Have a really cheap cat or is this something like marketing higher, which is a white collar job. Do I have to come up with some type of really good test or some type of really good?
Pattern recognition that I could spot the winners from the losers and then I can put my bright on them and hire them out. You know what I mean?
Yeah, I mean and then a lot of this comes down to like optimizing funnels when you get some sort of scale to where it's like, okay, how do I find good people qualify good people keep them around. I'm a big fan big proponent of community-driven like communities Urban strategies where maybe you don't even know the product is exactly but starting off with the community and building something for them or building an audience of some sort is super valuable because it will give you two things like one. It'll give you an audience for
Watch the thing and to it'll hopefully give you a lot of insight into like how you can build a great product for those
people people probably ask you all the time. Can you explain to me how to build community? I don't think I'm as good as you at it but we do load. Okay job when people ask me I'm like, I don't know how to teach you how to do this. I really don't know. Do you think you could teach someone to do this? Maybe you
teach anyone to do anything? It's just some people might pick it up more naturally or just be more organic. I don't know. I think I've never taught anyone and I think a lot of community building wasn't I never wrote like read anything?
About community building so it was sort of intuitive for me probably for yourself as well. That's maybe why it's hard to like teach. Yeah, but I think there's some like things that you can understand I think to get your well first, I think it's important like Define what community is because a lot of people think like, oh my audience my Twitter followers are my community and that's Community. Like
I hate when people say
that yeah, it's in no disrespect to them. Sometimes people just don't understand actually what community is and part of the reason is because Community is such a cool thing right now. So every throws that label on it, I mean for me,
Community is a few things. It's one I think by definition a community requires people in that Community to interact with each other. It really isn't a community unless they're interacting in some form or another to communities really about a sense of belonging of some sort. And so if you go like an example is like church and religion is like the ultimate Community you go to, you know, Sunday service and you have this fellowship and you have this belonging and you have you know symbols and your home that represent your faith and all those things and so like a sense of belonging it might be represented.
Maybe in a start-up is like schwag if someone's wearing the hustle schwag or Trend schwag like that clearly means they're like into you there into the community. They're there in some ways putting their identity. So shading their identity with your brand and your community. The third piece is a technically actually isn't required to be like, I would say part of the community definition, but I think it's really important to think through is like what utility are these people getting out of this? So if they're just kind of like into it to be part of these people interact with these people they're ultimately has to be some sort of utility or value that they're getting and so with
Friends, it's like you would be able to Define this better than I but like in my estimation. It's people who are really curious people who want to start companies people who are already building companies people who want to know what's like next like that's utility that's super valuable for
them. My definition of community is not nearly as thorough what I always tell people I'm like, you probably have an audience and if you don't know if it's an audience or Community stop creating content for about three weeks and tell me does it grow or does it die if it goes down and there's less interaction then?
Then you have an audience if it keeps on going as if you're not even there. That's a community. Yeah, that's how you know the difference. Yeah, I think that's still make
content and also touches on like why committees are so powerful. So in audience is great to get an audience just pure audience business is fantastic. However, that requires you to keep building stuff keep creating content and once you stop, you know, go on vacation and it stops but a community like with products and I don't post a private really at all, like in terms of like posting new products. I don't have to intend actually intentionally. Don't do it all that often
you
The work there anymore either?
Yeah, technically. I'm not a CEO anymore. They're so not my problem anymore. But yeah, I mean the communities are powerful because they scale and they allow you to reach new people and I like to like create I put air quotes for those that aren't watching or looking at me, but if actually like scale to other communities other people you personally won't be able to create content for
to wrap up this vertical job market plays bit which other Industries do you think are interesting to you? Like where should the next pattern or marketing higher? Where should the next industry be? You said Trucking a lot of people listen to the podcast make fun of me because I always
Say that so I agree with you. Is there anything else what's it? All about oil rig up rig up is doing something like this for oil for Oil Workers. Yeah. And is there any other you
know, I'll be honest. I haven't thought deeply enough to have a good answer for that. But one thing that I think is interesting if we were to like say I want to build a you know vertical job market place, but I'm not sure where I think one thing to do is just like which industry is going through the biggest shifts and which industry will benefit the most from technology and software and there's a bunch still that haven't been really reshaped.
Through software today. So yeah, I don't know specifically what Market to go after but that's kind of what I would think
of I was thinking about this a lot about this topic and I think about it all the time and I'm like, what is the value equal like one of the variables that combined equal value and it's like hourly pay of the worker X number of workers times quantity. Like how often they get a new job. And so I'm like, all right Oil Workers, like there's a fair bit of them. They make $50 an hour and they're always get new jobs. Oh, that's a
big one like truck drivers their pay is low, but there's like millions of them and they get new jobs all the time. So that's interesting and you know our name like I've been doing like that a coil or like marketers like not that many of them but you pay them like a hundred thousand dollars a year and they do probably two jobs a year. Okay, the math works out like that's all I've been thinking about like the is this interesting or not. Do you agree with that? I
think it's useful. I think another variable is switch Market has really low trust. So meaning right now if you were to hire someone and there really isn't a great way to trust or have some sort of verification.
This person's like abilities. I think that's also a really interesting place because theoretically you could start building trust essentially through a Marketplace and and that also lends itself to potentially higher retention. If this person is Talent is relying on your this marketplace where they built an identity and this may be reputation of some sort. They to that that also helps them like, you know, get more jobs or get more money. I think that's another variable. That's that's worth
exploring. Let's talk about this no code thing and no code at this point is almost like a joke, right? Like everyone says feeling so dizzy.
Like it's like calling it was like, you know saying cloud like a few years ago. Like, you know, it's a very Buzzy word, but I actually remember you were talking about this for a long time
kind of lines actually with product his journey because the theory of product hunt was well, this is sort of in retrospect at the time was just like I love products. I want to share product friends and that was the only thought in my head, but after the first three or four months, I realized holy shit. Like
all right, that's the end of the episode. Sorry to cut it short. Sorry to be a tease.
At ease I know hopefully you got a lot of value. So if you want to hear the rest go to Trends dotco, if you don't want to sign up that's cool, too. We're going to keep you in this podcast and that's free. But check it out Trends dotco and you can click podcast and you could hear the rest of the episode as well as a whole Archive of more episodes just like this most of which we haven't announced but there's a lot on there see
