If social media is all about what’s happening in the world right now, then Product Hunt is a platform that shows us what’s coming next. One glance at the site’s homepage gives a glimpse into Silicon Valley’s id — 3-D-printed jewelry, smart kitchen devices, and a Drake-only version of Google. Launched as a newsletter in 2014 by a former product manager named Ryan Hoover, the Reddit-style forum is simply a list of products submitted by the companies' founders and then ranked by users’ votes. But it's quickly become a dynamic, influential community devoted to figuring out just which tech gadgets and services we’ll all be lusting after next.
Last year, Product Hunt featured more than 11,000 items, ranging from Instagram’s Hyperlapse to Hive, a free, unlimited cloud-storage service — and 23 million unique visitors showed up to gawk at them. The site strikes such a chord in part because obsessing about tech products has become more mainstream as the churn and growth of the tech industry have made it harder to parse what’s going on. Before he created Product Hunt, Hoover says, “I didn't know of an online destination for this discovery and discussion.” A CliffsNotes version of the market itself, the site provides an instant sense of being as in-the-know as any venture capitalist.
Unlike gadget sites driven by editors and ads, Product Hunt is all about the engagement of its users, who are often entrepreneurs themselves. The site is particularly beneficial for founders, who effectively receive free feedback and market-testing. Popularity on the platform means potential high demand, and insider comments often provide insight. “What we're trying to do is help enable makers that build something people want,” says Hoover.
Take Meerkat, for example, the live-streaming video app that piggybacks off Twitter to allow users to become their own broadcasters. Early approval from Product Hunt’s expert community drove attention to the company, which has gone viral in recent weeks; Madonna even used it to debut a music video. Recently, HBO Now has climbed high on Product Hunt's list; an app for collecting cocktail recipes and a video-sharing platform are popular as well. But that's just what happened to be up. We asked Hoover to pick out seven products that have made it to the top of the list by inspiring the most up-votes on Product Hunt — a hint at what might be the must-have technology of tomorrow.
Magic
Magic is an aggregator of other services, an Uber for Ubers: Send a regular text message to the phone number 83489 with literally any request, and the company will do its best to serve your needs immediately, following up via on-demand platforms like Uber, Homejoy, and Mechanical Turk. “Magic is one example of many on-demand virtual-assistant services that use a combination of humans and machines to perform micro-tasks,” Hoover says. This company, however, takes the choosing out of the equation by figuring literally everything out for you. Of course, this trick is hard to pull off successfully. It’s “a bold claim that has yet to be proven as a scaleable business model,” he adds.
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