[Alex3917]

> What on earth would you need funding for when you do a site like Product Hunt?

Because even though there are 300,000 - 500,000 new consumer products launched in the U.S. each year, 99% are generic commodities like a new kind of 2% milk or whatever. The number of new products that are actually interesting is very small, which means that there is a very high cost of discovering and reaching out to enough of these product makers to make the site viable.

C.f. why I shut down my previous startup: https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/-Gk8HmiRSZ-mrUxE0rH3SQ/deadpoo...

It's definitely possible to do something successful in this space, but not as a bootstrapped startup. The AngelList acquisition makes perfect sense, because they can share the cost of leadgen while creating the opportunity to meet a wide range of founders' needs. There is a big opportunity here if someone is able to come in and execute a rollup and IPO, but those are extremely tricky to pull off.

[philipodonnell]

While true, I don't know that is the role that Product Hunt is actually playing. The curated nature means that highly placed products were defined more by what VCs and those connected to VCs wanted to feature, which (naturally) tended to be things they invested in or wanted to do the founder a favor instead of things that were "actually interesting".

Once you have categories called 'Slack', 'Amazon' and 'Netflix' as maybe half the current top products do, you've sort of given up your claim to being primarily focused on helping startups.

[double0jimb0]

Because even though there are 300,000 - 500,000 new consumer products launched in the U.S. each year, 99% are generic commodities like a new kind of 2% milk or whatever. The number of new products that are actually interesting is very small, which means that there is a very high cost of discovering and reaching out to enough of these product makers to make the site viable.

and from your letter:

The typical budget of a new specialty food product is 30k - 100k per year total, and almost all of that is allocated for manufacturing/distribution/development/salaries, so the marketing budget at these companies is basically zero.

You've got some unstated/hidden assumptions that I am trying to illuminate.

Why do you believe the actually selling and distribution method of a new product doesn't fall into the list of "critical things founders need to know how to do to have a successful business" and instead can be outsourced?

You built a "selling" product for founders who don't know how "to sell" in the first place, I don't think there should be surprise that it failed. Just my .02

[Alex3917]

It wasn't a sales product, we were hosting events to connect startups with bloggers, and also building scaleable promotion tools.

The issue with the food space is that most new products start out at their local farmers market, then get into Whole Foods, and then maybe attend the Fancy Food Show. And that's it for a long time. Trying to displace any of those channels is basically impossible. Building an additional channel is possible, but in addition to needing an exceedingly good cost/benefit ratio, you also need a very large source of targeted inexpensive leads.